This would be the Classics professor who was used by CHENEE in the run-up to the Iraq attack as his "guru". He provided the regime with historical examples and justifications for what they wanted to do. He believes in the pre-Xtian values of the Greeks, that society must be revitalized by aggression/preemptive-war. On the domestic front he coined the word "Mexifornia" and proposes a seal-off of the border, with 1950s assimilation of the immigrants who are here, everybody-modeling-selves-on-the-CLEAVERS. Funny how he's not a racist but his "Mexifornia" deal is just SO attractive to Skinheads and other racists. So he was cited by LIMBOsevic today for this column, in which he bemoans our lack of will to see the "success" of the Shrubbites and our talking about impeachment.
Full HANSON archive:
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp*******QUOTE*******
PlagueThe Plague of Success
The paradox of ever-increasing expectations.
.... Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.
Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby. ....
One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins. ....
Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem — murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. ....
Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances. ....
...That someone — mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the most trying of circumstances — accomplished all that is either unknown or forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal.
Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more — and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more.
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
********UNQUOTE*******
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