For the Record

Historian Victor Davis Hanson: “[H]ad President Obama himself just listened to earlier guidance from Barack Obama, his opponents might have had no cause for either a government shutdown or another debt-ceiling crisis. In 2006, Obama rightly called for an end to the Bush administration’s intemperate deficit spending that had resulted in an annual deficit of $250 billion that year. Accordingly, Sen. Obama voted to shut down the government rather than automatically to extend the debt ceiling. … The next year, Obama voted ‘present’ rather than to approve another $160 billion in annual borrowing that would add to the debt. … In 2008, candidate Obama returned to the issue of profligate spending again. For most of 2008, candidate Obama also called for a kinder and gentler Washington politics. … Through a series of metaphors, similes and allusions [during the recent shutdown], Obama reduced his opposition to little more than ransom takers, house burners, defaulters, global economy crashers, nuclear bomb users, extremists, threateners, extortionists, hostage takers, plant burners and equipment breakers – who are apparently also untrustworthy and irresponsible.”