“We haven’t had another 9/11, we freed 50 million people, we’ve set up democracies in the most unlikely places”
From Hugh Hewitt’s radio interview of the redoubtable military historian Victor Davis Hanson:
VDH: We haven’t had another 9/11, we freed 50 million people, we’ve set up democracies in the most unlikely places following the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and I don’t see anything incompetent about that. And to use the words dangerously incompetent, and then to have the exact same words mimicked, it’s almost as if we’ve got some kind of group speak going on. And it doesn’t match reality.
HH: And to refer to the action of the NSA to conduct surveillance of al Qaeda contacting their agents in the United States as criminal behavior, it’s reckless political behavior. It’s over the edge political behavior.
VDH: It is.
HH: The sort that marked the end of the Roman Republic. Now I’m not…
VDH: It is, and it’s ahistorical, Hugh, because … not just the Roman Republic, but this is a country where Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus. Andrew Johnson did it in the entire state of Tennessee. We intured people in World War I and World War II. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy used things, all things that we regretted later, and we haven’t even approached that, even though in this particular war, unlike those in the past, we’ve lost 20 acres in downtown Manhattan from stealthy attacks, which are more likely to be the exact things we have to watch for, than a conventional, transparent enemy. And we haven’t done any of that, and yet this country has almost become unhinged in a way that our ancestors, getting back to this house, were not unhinged about.
HH: Now when you say unhinged, are you speaking of the elite media? Or are you speaking of the hard left, or both, or something broader?
VDH: I think I’m talking about a tripartite nexus of the people in the Senate like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the rhetoric they use, and talking about people in the elite media, and I’m talking about the fringe, the Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan left that uses language like Bush is the greatest terrorist. The Harry Belafonte people that have no constituency, but they seem to have the ear of the media, and their views resonate, and we hear about them, even though they’re unhinged. They’re not credible or serious thinkers at all.
I just love Professor Hanson. Alas, there’s only one of him.
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