Christopher Manion
The LRC Blog
October 30, 2008

VD Hanson longs to be teaching Thucydides again, and please forget his idiotic, murderous bombast of the past eight years. Just throw that down the Memory Hole, please. He didn’t really mean it.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

For today’s dismal state of the union, VD Blames Americans First. While he was cruising the high seas on luxury liners hectoring National Review readers, why, Americans spent themselves into debt! How dare they! Forget Bush’s three-trillion-dollar war. Why, “We, the people, ran up credit cards, borrowed for overpriced houses and drove gas-guzzling cars fueled by high-priced imported fuel.” (He apparently does not refer to the hundreds of taxpayer billions spent on fuel imported into Iraq to power the war, of course).

I know the neocons always blame everybody else, but this is ridiculous.

Say — by the way, what ever happened to their war?

War? What war?”

Professor Hanson would appreciate it if all those “defeatists,” “navel-gazers,” “traitors,” “anti-Semites,” and “radical leftists” who opposed his little war would just not mention it any more.

Hey, man, Iraq is just like Chicago! You know, Obama territory! The Cubs, the Bears, Grant Park … why, Baghdad’s just like Middle America:

“The war in Iraq is no longer even a war in a traditional sense. Four times as many Americans were murdered just in the city of Chicago at peace in July than all those Americans who were killed in Iraq at war in the same period. The cost of deploying American troops in Iraq is nearing the expense to station them elsewhere abroad. As Iraqis continue to take over additional provinces, the American presence will further shrink.”

Now, students, let’s discuss the Melian Dialogue, shall we?

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