HANSON PREDICTS

Posted at 7:22 a.m. ET

We're not much for predictions around here, but Victor Davis Hanson has written a witty column about what to expect next July, once The One has been in power for a time.  Ah, the progress.  Ah, the goodness.  Ah, the purification of our moral soul:

By July, we will come to feel that 2009 will be one of the most upbeat years in our history, as what used to be the news media begins to get behind America and report on all the mysteriously wonderful things that are suddenly taking place.

We celebrate.  We give thanks.

All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism.

What a guy, this Barack.  Does it all in six months.

Indeed, almost supernaturally crises will be solved with the departure of the hated Bush: no more flooding streets from cracked water mains that were a result of a President's neglect of infrastructure, and no more spontaneous crashes of Mississippi River bridges due to diversions of critical federal aid from cash-strapped states to Iraq. And when the temperatures rise or drop, the wind howls, the clouds burst forth or go away, the snow melts or piles up, it will be, well, nature that caused the havoc, not the current occupant of the White House who failed to sign Kyoto.

See, we told you.  It was all BUSH.  Anderson Cooper says so.

Some military action abroad could be necessary--and necessarily reported on as measured and reluctant, rather than cowboyish and gratuitous. European whining will be a result of miscommunications or the Euros' unfair caricatures of Americans, not Bush's alienation of allies...

...If an administration official quits, goes on 60 Minutes, and writes a nasty tell-all book about Obama's insensitivity and his government's directionless ennui, he will be a heretic, a whiner, a turncoat, not a truth teller or brave maverick who blew the whistle in need of a bestseller hyped from NPR to the New York Times.

What a world this will be.  I can't wait for perfection.  I want to take notes.

So all that will change for now will be the sudden absence of shrill complaints that we live in an America without a Constitution. Static, same-old, same-old government policy will, of course, be said to have altered radically ("hoped and changed"), but it will also be refashioned in the media as "sober" and "judicious", as the administration moves "in circumspect fashion" to probe and explore "complex" and often "paradoxical" matters of national security that "indeed at the end of the day have no easy answers."

We have to remember, in July, to check back and see how much of Hanson's column comes true.  I'll bet it will be a great deal.

"Diversity" and "progressive" themes will replace Bush's hokey old-time patriotism, as we return to a more nuanced and sophisticated love of country that at last "came home."

To Harvard, to Yale, to Georgetown.

Jimmy Carter will once again be weird old jet-setting Jimmy Carter, a meddler, a spoiler, a PR junkie on the verge of senility rather than the principled Nobel laureate of the Carter Center.

Let us hope for that one.

Those inside the big house change, the commandments on the barn wall subtly are crossed out and updated, but the farm for us animals stays about the same.

Amen.

December 29, 2008.