Jeffrey Sachs has attacked distinguished military historian Victor Davis Hanson as an "extremist" who "has done more harm to the American people" than any other commentator.
Sachs, a Columbia prof and income redistributionist supreme, launched his surprising verbal assault in commenting on Hanson's National Review Online column, "The Obamites' About-Face." Hanson there makes the case that out of political pragmatism, Obama has flip-flopped on everything from "the environment, radical Islam, taxes, stimulus, the economy, national security" to foreign policy.
View video after the jump.
Watch Sachs, author of Common Wealth [what's yours is everybody's] attack Hanson's putative perniciousness.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I'm trying to figure out though, and Dr. Sachs asked this of you Charles [Blow], who is Barack Obama at this point? What does he stand for? And Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review, writes this about The Obamaites About-Face:
"For his political survival, Obama now accepts that his faith-based ideas about the environment, radical Islam, taxes, stimulus, the economy, national security, and foreign policy are not supported by any evidence in the real world . . . The wonder is not that politicians change as politics dictate, but that the most vehement leftism now accepts nonchalantly what it not long ago so ardently demonized."
And Hanson goes through all of the things: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax cuts, the stimulative wonders of tax cuts in general, Gitmo, NSA, tripling the number of troops in Afghanistan. We talked about [Obama saying] "we celebrate wealth," Eric Holder quoted in ABC saying "some religions produce more terrorists than others." These people are sounding an awful lot like George W. Bush these days . . . [Obama] has shifted dramatically on issues of terror, on Gitmo, on taxes, on celebrating wealth: I think that's undeniable.
JEFFREY SACHS: Anything that Hanson says I'm likely to disagree with, cause no commentator has done more harm to the American people actually than that guy who led us into all these disastrous wars. But aside from that --
SCARBOROUGH: My God! That is serious.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: OK, then!
SACHS: No, that is real. Because this is an extremist. So quoting him doesn't really make the point.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: And I will put Victor Hanson --
SACHS: Sorry, that's a side point, but that man -- that guy's done a lot of damage.
SCARBOROUGH: I will put Victor Davis Hanson to the side, you obviously, you guys aren't on each other's mailing lists, Christmas card lists.
SACHS: That guy got us into more wars, and more militarism, than anybody.
