Shorter VDH: We're winning the Iraq War. We're really, really, really winning. We've been winning all along. But pulling out the US troops after all this victory never crosses my mind. And Democrats are poo-poo-heads.
Key quote:
Through all this, the U.S. military has fought a successful war first against Saddam Hussein, then ex-Baathists and now Islamic jihadists, battling beheaders, car bombers, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombers and assassins.
Of course, before the invasion, we weren't being attacked by all these Iraqis. And the Islamic jihadists had an Iraqi presence only in the part controlled by the Kurds and protected from Saddam by the Anglo-American free-fly zone in the north. Crossing the Rubicon: The die is cast — or why it ought to be National Review Online 10/28/05.
Shorter VDH: War is good. Americans should cheer for the Iraq War because we're getting absolutely no benefit from it. Because war is good. Heck, war is so good maybe we should do Iran and Syria, too. And war critics are poo-poo-heads.
Steve Gilliard thinks Hanson makes a funny with his "Crossing the Rubicon" column (at the moment, that permalink doesn't work, so you can go the blog and scroll down.)
Hanson is an idiot who should stick to classics, which he teaches at some state college in California. His ideas about modern warfare and military policy would be comic if people didn't die behind them.
Meet Libby's Brain.
This idiot thinks people cares who runs Iraq. They don't. And they aren't sending their kids to help the process.
Key quote:
In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.
Chickens lay more eggs than kangaroos, too. That's because one is a bird and the other is a mammal. The Marine Corps is an assault force used in invasions and active combat. UN peacekeeping forces are sent into sensitive but resonably stable situations to act as, uh, peacekeepers.
Shorter VDH: Quit your whining. It's only a couple of thousand Americans dead. Wimps. Wusses. And reporters are poo-poo-heads.
Key quote:
Americans have become mostly suburban, at great distance from the bloodletting and routine mayhem on the farms of our ancestors.
Yep, those were part of the daily chores on the farm: milk the cow, feed the horses, shed a little blood and cause some mayhem. What is he thinking? Did he just see some TV special about the Hatfields and the McCoys or something?
That "2,000 Dead" column has attracted some attention to our man Vic out there in Left Blogostan.
Nitpicker gives him credit for once having written decent histories. As far as his books on the classical world go, I know that the value of his contributions are disputed. But, leaving that aside, Nitpicker writes: The Soul of Victor Davis Hanson 10/27/05
What was brilliant about Hanson’s writing was that he showed readers how the so-called "butterfly effect" worked historically. An acquaintance of mine - who, like Hanson, has spent some time teaching in a military academy’s history department - lamented V.D.H.'s lost focus to me in a recent e-mail, writing that "what is sad these days is how much (Hanson) has lost one of his early insights, namely, that he unintended and unexpected consequences often have greater historical impact over the longer run." This is being generous, actually. I think what is sad is that Hanson has decided to continue to serve as the Bushies' academic Aquarius at the expense of any semblance of intellectual integrity. I hope that, whatever he has gained from his foray into Republican advocacy, it was worth the cost of his credibility and scholarly reputation.
Nitpicker also has some good things to say about the deeply embedded Republican notion that The Media undercut our flawless generals in the Vietnam War and now again in the Iraq War. Those flawless generals have been positioning themselves for months now to shift the blame to somebody else for their own failures, and for the general disaster than the Iraq War is - which can't be blamed entirely on the generals, of course.
James Wolcott (Victor Davis Hanson Has a Hissy 11/29/05) employs subtle literary language to comment on VDH's "2,000 Dead" piece: "[Cheney] you, Victor Dave."
I'll give a bit more context from Wolcott's response:
This will no doubt pass the limit of accepted debate, but allow me to part with the following sentiment: [Cheney] you, Victor Dave. The limits of accepted debate have already been trampled into mud and splinters by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin, and the Swift Boaters, among others, about whose rhetorical extremes you've never made a peep. Moreover, this conflating of Howard Dean Democrats with Islamofascist hate speech is McCarthyism at its most unrefined. Truth is, Democrats have been remarkably watery and ineffectual when it comes to the Iraq war, as Arianna has lamented (and when a Greek goddess laments, it's like thunder from the mountaintop).
Hanson's use of the phrase "the limits of accepted debate" - he probably meant acceptable debate - has the authoritarian ring we've become used to on The O'Reilly Factor and other Fox news shows, where the word "treason" is thrown at every sharp note of dissent.
Shorter VDH: Who cares if Saddam's trial is fair or not? Look! Over there! Evil foreigners committing atrocities! And doing other bad stuff! America makes all good things possible. Human rights groups only criticize poor, picked-on America. And the Europeans are poo-poo-heads.
Key quote - and a classic of how to pack mounds of hackery into a short sentence:
Of course, global warming is a real problem, especially in Arctic regions.
Arctic regions. Where glaciers are melting more than they used to. Which puts more water into the oceans. Which raises the water level. Which affects every coastal city in the world. Good one, Vic.
