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Jewish World Review Jan. 2, 2014/ 1 Shevat, 5774 The year of the dud By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Lots of things that should have happened in 2013 did not. We were supposed to have long ago reached "peak oil" and an age of always-higher gas prices. Wind and solar power -- and a reduced lifestyle -- were our dismal future. But someone or something did not cooperate with gloomy government predictions. After all the failed subsidized green companies, the postponement of the Keystone Pipeline, the radical restrictions of new gas and oil leasing on federal lands, and the promises for radical climate-change legislation curtailing carbon energy use, Gas prices have been going down. Oil and natural gas production is going up. America may soon be the largest coal exporter in the world. There is little worry over any more Energy-intensive industries talk of relocating from Obamacare may take its place among Sasquatch, crop circles and the Loch Ness monster as one of the great hoaxes of all time. Before the 2012 election, Americans swallowed hook, line and sinker the con that they could all at once keep their existing health plans, keep their own doctors, keep their 25-year-olds on the family health plan, never be denied coverage for a costly pre-existing condition, sign up instantaneously on a website, buy insurance only after becoming seriously ill -- and yet save In 2013, the ruse was revealed. Voters learned that nothing is free, and that it's impossible to get more coverage for more people at less cost. Plans were cancelled, doctors were dropped, premiums soared, websites crashed. In 2013 the grievance industry also fizzled. For all the demands to change the supposedly insensitive name of the No one much bought
GLAAD, a gay and lesbian advocacy group, was no more convincing in its demands that With finger to the monetary wind, executives at A&E discovered that more viewers sided with free speech than with GLAAD's demands for censorship, so they flip-flopped to cash in with a Christmas marathon session of money-making "Duck Dynasty" reruns. Even the customary intervention of It should have been a banner year for the re-elected Why the sudden unpopularity of the mellifluous and charismatic Obama? He forgot the old rule that a president can mislead, misstate and misquote only so many times. And there were many, many times in 2013. Can we ever recall them all? The false red lines in Finally, all that rhetoric became an overload. The American people shrugged and the great second term began to fizzle in the year of the dud.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. Comment by clicking here.
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