Becoming the Enemy

Via Carpetbagger (aka Steve Benen at TPM), I just read some absurdist porn by NRO's Victor Davis Hanson which most assuredly only made me dumber for having read it. A shorter version of this piece reads: America must be allowed to behave like the immoral blood-thirsty monsters we're attacking or we might be taken over by immoral blood-thirsty monsters. It looks to me like some of them are already here.

One of my favorite parts is when he laments that Democratic presidents are always given a free-hand by the Left to wage war, referencing Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. But in the same paragraph goes on to say: "World War I, Korea, and Vietnam were all controversial in their time."

And those wars cover every Democratic president he listed besides FDR and Clinton. And seeing as how I have one of those brains that remembers things, I remember the war in Kosovo and remember it being opposed by Republicans, as well as many liberal peaceniks. And one of the reasons the GOP opposed the war (besides outright partisanship) was because Clinton insisted on fighting the war humanely; according to rules which Hanson decries liberals for wanting. And let's not forget that Vietnam didn't really get going until LBJ took it over, and it burned him so badly that he decided to not seek re-election. So basically, Hanson is crying foul because Dems supported one Democratic president in a war that almost everyone agrees was entirely necessary. Fucking hypocrites!

(Unmentioned in this is that quite a few peaceniks complain about many of the tactics used in WWII, including the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, as well as the internment of Japanese-American. So in that regard, it could easily be stated that no Dem president has received a free-passes from the Left. But again, that would require a check with reality, which is in clear violation of several of NRO's by-laws.)

Oh, and while reading the piece, I failed to see any real connection between some of the various arguments he was making. And then I re-read the title line: The Burdens of General Petraeus. And now I get it. Hanson's realized that Petraeus has failed in his mission to make the surge work, and now is wanting to once again blame liberal Democrats for this predictable failure. We'd be able to win, if only the hypocritical partisan liberals would allow us to do what was necessary to win. These are sad, sad people we're dealing with.