Free-Floating Dumb: Victor Davis Hanson Grapples with Reality by KTK

The ever-wrong but ever-certain Victor Davis Hanson of NRO unburdens himself of some kind of gibberish that he apparently thinks is thinking, this time about pirates.

First, he complains that US citizens are going to stage an uprising if “American naval power either cannot or will not punish the miscreants”. He says this while a small flotilla of naval vessels is surrounding the single lifeboat on which the single American hostage is being held, and actively working for his release.

There is a bizarre trend among winger war buffs – particularly self-styled “military theorists” who have never been in the service – to assume that the mere mention of US military power guarantees that other nations or individuals will immediately do our bidding. Thus, it’s Obama’s fault that he “allowed” North Korea to launch a satellite they disapproved of, because God knows the first Korean War worked out so well for us. And now the very idea of making any effort to rescue a hostage without getting him killed is some sort of sign of weakness, because it’s just obvious that you can simply choose that outcome and make it so if you have a big enough boat. (I’m sure it was obvious to the French Navy a few days ago, too, until they killed one of their hostages trying to rescue him from the same pirates.)

Second, of course, there’s the mandatory advocacy of yet another land invasion (wasn’t it these same wingers who were screaming about Clinton’s previous military operations against Muslim warlords in the very same country?). He insists it must include – his words – “disproportionate” destruction. War itself, and its attendant excesses, isn’t enough. Now they’re openly advocating deliberate war crimes. Used to be they had the decency to pretend those were accidental.

But then it gets weird:

3) In academic circles the last two decades, pirates have been romanticized in a variety of contexts—as in pirates being contrarian individualists, admirable anarchists, Marxist redistributionists, sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing, transgendered libertines, and Lotus-eater-like sensualists, rather than as murderous criminals. Who knows, maybe such esoteric theorizing has filtered down to the U.S. State Department.

Pirates aren’t contrarian individualists?

The rest is just nuts: the recent scholarship on piracy is that they were independent democrats – they elected their own officers – and fugitives from starvation or injustice who had to take to piracy as their only way to make a living: in other words, anything but anarchists. In many cases, pirates also served as privateers under government authority. America’s greatest home-grown pirate, Jean Lafitte, did so and was instrumental in saving New Orleans in the battle that (later) made Andrew Jackson President; Jackson explicitly commended him in his report. (Lafitte’s patriotism didn’t last, but still . . .) They could hardly be Marxists, since the heyday of piracy long predated Marx himself (and it’s rather a stretch to imagine pirates making much of a case for collective ownership of the means of production – the operated on a strict capitalist basis among themselves, and in many cases made more money from smuggling than they did from stealing). As for the rest, I can’t tell what’s going on, but it appears Hanson is seriously under the impression that the movie Pirates of the Caribbean was real.

At any rate, I’m confident nobody in the State Department is this crazy. Maybe he’s thinking of the Bush State Department, which presided over exactly the same problem while articles on Somali piracy filled the press for years and years, and did nothing about it, but I doubt even that. That piracy still exists 10 weeks into the Obama presidency is frustrating, but unlikely to be the result of the administration’s belief that the Somali pirates are “sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing, transgendered libertines, and Lotus-eater-like sensualists”. Actually, I don’t really think anyone thinks that, though again Hanson seems to be serious in believing it’s a real problem.

4) The Obamists better be careful in their serial apologetics, “Bush did it” throat-clearing, and caving to European, Russia, Turkish, etc. agendas. Slowly, but clearly we are establishing a new atmosphere in which the old unpredictability, military preparedness, and deterrence will be lost, replaced by a touchy-feely sort of seminar discussion, laced with atonement, reaction. And then the two-bit pirates who boast “We are not afraid of the Americans” will be the least of our problems.

I have no idea what this even means. But I do note this entire hallucinatory screed, and its unhinged last paragraph, were posted less than an hour one day before the press reported that the American hostage had freed himself (again) and the US Navy SEALS had responded by killing all the pirates still in the lifeboat, while the one the Navy was negotiating with (see above for Hanson’s objection to this) was taken prisoner.

I presume that will merely give Hanson something else to complain about.

UPDATE: It was only after looking a second time that I noticed that the four numbered paragraphs of Hanson’s post are introduced as “Three thoughts about the pirates”. Why does anyone take this clown more serioiusly than he takes himself?

UPDATE: It was only after looking a third time, prompted by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, that I realized I had misread the dateline on Hanson’s blog post. It was posted yesterday afternoon, not today. Still, pretty good timing, self-humiliation-wise.