Dana Mathewson

The Drive-By media would have you believe that the only reason we're still here as a country is because they, with the help of their friends in the Democrat Party (or is it the other way around?) worked tirelessly to thwart the machinations of the Evil Donald Trump, and we should be everlastingly grateful to them -- or something like that.

However, one of the country's truly wise men, retired professor Victor Davis Hanson, in an article in Jewish World Review, tells us how it REALLY was.

Actually, 2018 was a pretty good year

The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock market gyrations, the melodramas of the Robert Mueller investigation and the musical-chair tenures of officials in the Trump administration.

The government is still shut down. Talk of impeachment by the newly Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is in the air. Seemingly every day there are sensational breakthroughs, scandals and bombshells that race through social media and the Internet -- only to be forgotten by the next day.

In truth, aside from the Washington hysterias, 2018 was a most successful year for Americans.

He takes some time to detail our oil production, which in 2018 returned the U.S. to the position of the world's top producer of petroleum, making us no longer beholden to corrupt Middle East states.

And he talks about our burgeoning economy, with the related drop in unemployment.

For me, the best parts are here:

Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.

After withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, the U.S. exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.

North Korea and the U.S. did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.

Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.

The United States -- and increasingly most of the world -- is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions and mercantilism of the Chinese government.

The Middle East is still chaotic, but it is a mess that is now far less important to the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Energy-wise, America is not dependent on oil imports from corrupt Gulf monarchies or hostile Islamic states. Strategy-wise, the new fault lines are not Arab and Islamic cultures versus Israel or the United States. Instead, it is internecine strife within the Islamic world, mostly with Iran and its Shiite satellites opposing the Sunni Arab monarchies and more moderate Middle Eastern regimes.

The entire article is here, and highly recommended, as is everything by Hanson: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0119/hanson010319.php3

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