Jay Leno's Mash-Up Interview With Palin

Letterman's Old Man McCain Jokes

Hugh Downs - Why Obama will lose.

It's time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting
theelection results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated.
Seriously and convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the
forces of reaction, not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays
over the national cable system. He will lose for one reason above all,
one that has been overlooked in any analysis that I've yet seen.
Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake. I'm using the term in
its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screwup, but
someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating
incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a "fool with energ y", as
the Russian proverb puts it. ("A fool is a terrible thing to have
around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare".)

Barack Obama is a flake, and the American people have begun to see it.
The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are
impossible to either understand or explain. These are not the errors
of the poor dope who can't grasp the essentials of a situation, or the
neurotic who ruins things out of compulsion, or the man suffering
chronic bad luck.

The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right
angles to the ordinary world.20It's as if he's the product of a totally
different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are
slightly but distinctly at variance to ours. When given a choice
between left and right, the flake goes up -- if not through the 8th
dimension. And although there's plenty of rationalization, there's
never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile, people stop
asking.

Obama's rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio
Alger story -- young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the
American polity, a member of once-despised minority, works his way by
slow degrees to within arm's length of the presidency itself. That's
all well and good -- we need national myths of exactly that type.

But what has been overlooked is the string of faux pas marking each
step of Obama's journey, a series of strange, inexplicable actions,
actions bizarre enough to require some effort at explanation, through
such efforts have rarely been offered. It's as if the new Horatio made
it to the top by stepping into every last manhole and open trapdoor in
his path. And we, the onlookers, the voters who are being asked to put
this man in the White House, are supposed to take this as the normal
career path for a successful chief executive.

What are these incidents? I'm sure many of you are way ahead of me,
but let's go to the videotape.

Here's a young man who graduated from Columbia with high marks, with a
choice of position
s anywhere in the country. He comes from a state
generally held to be a close match to Paradise. One, furthermore, that
can be characterized as the most successful multiracial society in the
world, with harmonious relations not only between whites and blacks,
but also Japanese-Americans and native Hawaiians as well. To top it
off, a state controlled in large part by a smoothly-functioning
Democratic machine. So where does he choose to go?

To Chicago. One of the windiest, coldest, most brutal cities in the
country. One that is also infinitely corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is
not. One that remains one of the most racist large cities in the U.S.
(Cicero, Al Capone's old stomping grounds, a suburb that is
effectively part of the city, is completely segregated to this day.)
It would be nice to learn which of these aspects most attracted young
Obama to the city. But if you'd asked at the beginning of the
campaign, you'd still be waiting.

And what does he do when he reaches the city? Why, he joins a cult.
Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church has been turned inside out
since the videotaped sermons appeared early this year, without anyone
ever quite explaining exactly what Obama was thinking of when he
joined up in the first place. Street cred, so it's claimed. But there
are a plethora of black churches that would have provided him that
without the taint of demented racism that Wright's church offered.

Obama apparently had to swear an oath
of belief in "black liberation
theology" when he joined the church. (It is the little touches of that
sort that make it a "cult", and not simply a "church".) Did the
thought of his caree r ever cross his mind? Didn't he realize that
church would inevitably cause him trouble somewhere down the line?
That he'd be required to repudiate it and its ideas eventually? We can
ask -- but we won't get an answer.

Back at school, Obama got himself named editor of the Harvard Law
Review. This is a signal achievement, no question about it. The kind
of thing that would be mentioned about a person for the rest of his
life, as has been the case with Obama. But then... he writes nothing
for the journal.

Now, let's get this straight: here we have one of the leading
university law journals in the country, one widely cited and read.
Entire careers in legal analysis and scholarship have been founded on
appearances in the Review, including some that have led to the highest
courts in the country. Yet here's an individual who, as editor, could
easily place his own work in the journal -- standard practice, nothing
at all wrong with it. But he fails to do so. And the explanation?
There's none that I've heard. We can go even farther than that, to say
that there is no explanation that makes the least rational sense.

We follow Obama down to Springfield, where as a state legislator, he
voted "present" over 120 times. What this means, as far as I've
been
able to discover, is that he voted "present" nearly as much as he
voted "yes" or "no".

Now, statehouses work very simply: a member approaches his colleagues
and asks them them to vote for his bill. Some comply, some do not.
Some ask, "Is it a good bill?" and some don't. Either way, they
customarily, except in unusu al circumstances, vote "yes' or "no". All
except for Barack Obama. And how did get away with it? How did mollify
his colleagues? How did he square himself with the party bosses? Echo
answereth not.

(A good slogan could be made of this: "You can't vote present in the
Oval Office." I hereby commend it to the McCain campaign.)

We turn eagerly to learn what his term in the U.S. Senate will reveal,
only to be disappointed. But it's not surprising, really. After all,
he was only there for 143 days.

And there lies one of the keys to Obama's rise. David Brooks pointed
out in a recent New York Times column that Obama spent too little time
in any of his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is
what saved him from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around
long enough for his errors and strange behavior to catch up with him.

But a presidential campaign is a different matter. A man running for
president is under the microscope, and can't duck anything, as many a
candidate has had reason to learn. If Obama is a flake in the classic
mode, now is when it would come out.=2
0And has it?

The case could be made. Here we have a campaign with everything going
for it -- the opposition party in a shambles, a seriously undervalued
president, the media in the candidate's pocket, the candidate himself
being worshiped as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the
results have compr ised little more than one fumble after another.

First came the Wright affair. Obama apparently thought he was above it
all -- a not-uncommon phenomenon with flakes -- and allowed the
revelations to take on a life of their own before bothering to
respond. Even then, his thoughtful and convincing explanation (that he
hadn't been listening for twenty years) did little to settle the
crisis, which instead guttered out on its own after nearly crippling
his campaign. Even months afterward it threatens to pop back up at any
time. The latest word is that Wright -- now a deadly enemy of his
onetime protÃ(c)gÃ(c) -- has written a book. I can't wait.

Obama learned his lesson, and confronted the next threat immediately,
tackling The New Yorker cover with the avidity of a man having
discovered zombies in the basement. A development that could have been
defused with a chuckle and a quip (the customary method is for the
politician to ask the cartoonist for the original) was allowed to
explode into a major issue. The campaign's relentless attacks on one
of the oldest liberal magazines extant merely perplexed the country at
large. After all, any Rep
ublican has had to endure far worse.

Almost simultaneously, the birth certificate saga was unfolding. On no
reasonable grounds, the campaign blew off requests for a copy of the
document, at last releasing it through one of the least reputable
sites on the Internet, and so badly copied that literally anything
could be read into it -- and was. I'm not one of those who believes
that Obama was actually born in Indonesia/Kenya/Moscow/the moon, but I
still have plenty in the way of questions, almost all of them arising
from how the matter was handled. Well played.

The latest pothole (or one of them, anyway) involves Jerome Corsi's
"The Obama Nation". Corsi has been given the full New Yorker
treatment, with the campaign hoping to avoid John Kerry's "error" in
not challenging Corsi's 2004 book, Unfit for Command. What Obama
missed was the fact that Kerry's major problem was not with Corsi but
with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who were disgusted with
Kerry's hypocrisy in running as an experienced military veteran, and
set out to take him down. Corsi's effort dovetailed with the veteran's
campaign and to a large extent was swept up with it. No such campaign
is in operation against Obama. The smart method of an swering Corsi
would have been to allow the media to handle it, instead of drawing
attention to the book and raising it to level of an issue. This
appears to be a real talent for the Obama campaign.

We could go on. The victory tou
r of Europe, and the speech in which
Obama declared himself "citizen of the world", a trope guaranteed to
focus the attention of Middle America. His inept handling of Hillary,
in which he wound up appearing frightened of the opponent he'd just
beaten. Allowing Hillary (and her husband there, what's-his-name) a
starring role in the Democratic convention is not a solution any sane
individual would be comfortable with -- much less a roll-call vote.
This threatens the near-certainty of turning the entire affair into
BillandHillarycon, with the nominee winding up as a footnote. But it's
all of a piece with the campaign Obama h as waged up until now.

We've never had a flake as president. We've had drunks, neurotics,
cripples, louts, and fools, but never a career screwup. (I except
Jimmy Carter, whose errors arose from sincere, misguided goodwill.)
And I don't think we're going to get one now. Another three months of
flailing, incompetence, and a collapsing image will do little to
assure voters concerned with terrorism, the oil crunch, a gyrating
economy, and a bellicose Russia. (Anyone doubting that Obama will go
exactly this route can consider the Saddleback church fiasco, which
unfolded as this piece was being wrapped up. Evidently, the campaign
goaded NBC news personality Andrea Mitchell into al l but accusing
John McCain of "cheating" by failing to take his place within the
"cone of silence" during Obama's part of the program. The grotesque
element here is that Oba
ma's people and much of the liberal
commentariat -- including Mitchell -- apparently believe that the
"cone of silence", a gag prop for the old Get Smart! comedy series,
actually exists and was in use at Sad dleback.)

Many of us have dealt with flakes at one time or another, often in
settings involving jobs and careers, and not uncommonly in positions
of some authority. We all know of the nephew, the fiancÃ(c), the
boyfriend, whose whims must be catered to, whose reputation must be
protected, who must be constantly worked around if anything at all is
to be accomplished, always at the cost of time, money, efficiency, and
personal stress.

In the fullness of time, we will inevitably see such a figure in the
White House. But not this year, and not this candidate. Such acts of
national flakery occur only when there's no real alternative. In this
election, an alternative exists. Whatever his shortcomings, nobody
ever called John McCain a flake.

Sarah Palin's Videologs (Obvious Satire)

Victor Davis Hanson BEATS UP on Pat Buchanan

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2008/06/victor-davis-hanson-beats-up-on-pat.html

Pat Buchanan is a racist, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and worse than all that he gives conservatism a bad name. In 1991 William Buckley wrote a long essay called "In Search of Anti-Semitism" for National Review magazine. In it, he took on two fellow conservatives: Joseph Sobran, who had been an editor at National Review, and Pat Buchanan, whose columns and remarks about Jews and the Middle East had taken on a nasty edge. Buckley said he found it "impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it…"

So I truly enjoy when someone takes Buchanan on, especially when that person mercilessly exploits Buchanan's inferior intellect and "interesting" recollection of historical fact. Victor Davis Hanson does the job so well below::

Reply to Patrick J. Buchanan
Pseudo-Historian, Very Real Dissimulator
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com

Patrick J. Buchanan got upset that I wrote a column about the World War II revisionists, especially his book, and that of Nicholson Baker’s on the allied “crimes” of bombing German cities. I produce his column by paragraph and then comment in brackets.

In attacking my book “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” Victor Davis Hanson, the court historian of the neoconservatives, charges me with “rewriting … facts” and showing “ingratitude” to American and British soldiers who fought World Wars I and II.

[In dealing with Mr. Buchanan, one must accept at the beginning two caveats. First, as is his style, he will always resort to ad hominem attacks in lieu of an argument. Thus note at the very beginning his sneering “court historian of the neoconservatives.”
Second, Buchanan unfortunately is neither a reliable journalist nor an historian, and thus simply cannot be trusted to report accurately what is written. He says I charge him with “rewriting… facts” (note those convenient three dots). I did not charge him with rewriting facts, but simply advancing a thesis contrary to them: “Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another.” (emphasis added)
And I didn’t just criticize Buchanan’s book, but in a brief 750 word newspaper column lumped it together with the novelist Nicholson Baker’s (Human Smoke) equally critical attack on the allies in World War II — both as signs of the sorry state of historical revisionism that has sprung up in the climate of the Iraq war.
Writing a book whose theme is that the allies, and especially the British, unwisely and unduly pressured Hitler, and therefore were culpable for much of the carnage of World War II, again, does not “rewrite… facts”, but simply ignores them. And, yes, it does indeed serve to lessen the enormous sacrifices that American and British soldiers endured to stop a monstrosity like National Socialism, whose doctrine of racial hatred and territorial expansion logically led to a German government attacking by 1940 most of its neighbors, to the east, west, north and south, and eventually, in industrial fashion, murdering 6 million Jews.
Much of Hitler’s madness was outlined well in advance in Mein Kampf. By the late 1930s his harsh treatment of the Jews was a harbinger of things to come, once his own power was consolidated and Germany free from outside objection.]

Both charges are false, and transparently so.

Hanson cites not a single fact I got wrong and ignores the fact that the book is dedicated to my mother’s four brothers who fought in World War II. Moreover, the book begins by celebrating the greatness of the British nation and heroism of its soldier-sons.

[Within a 350-word critique devoted to the theme of his book, I cited his misreading of the Versailles Treaty (see below), and his special pleading that serves to exculpate Hitler’s Nazi government. Again, the thesis of Buchanan’s’ book is not based on facts, but can only be advanced by contradicting them. And it has a disturbing habit of mechanically at times praising those who are his natural targets—or supposedly naive victims—of the book, as if that allows him to further denigrate their wisdom and sacrifice.]

Did Hanson even read it?

[Unfortunately I did read it, and was appalled by his absence of logic—hence the column.]

The focus of “The Unnecessary War” is on the colossal blunders by British statesmen that reduced Britain from the greatest empire since Rome into an island dependency of the United States in three decades. It is a cautionary tale, written for America, which is treading the same path Britain trod in the early 20th century.

[This is as ludicrous as it is disingenuous. By 1939 the British Empire was in financial straits, its global economic position long displaced by the industrial power and growing population of the United States, and its empire an increasing economic drain. Its so-called decline had begun at the end of the nineteenth century, and was confirmed, not created, by World War II. Despite the cast-off and occasional warning about Hitler’s cruelty, the book accepts that there was nothing intrinsic within National Socialism as practiced under Hitler that would necessarily have led to war, and indeed a number of legitimate grievances that would justify Hitler’s own preemptive wars.]

Hanson agrees the Versailles Treaty of 1919 was “flawed,” but says Germany had it coming, for the harsh peace the Germans imposed on France in 1871 and Russia in 1918.
Certainly, the amputation of Alsace-Lorraine by Bismarck’s Germany was a blunder that engendered French hatred and a passion for revenge. But does Teutonic stupidity in 1871 justify British stupidity in 1919?

[Again, Buchanan misleads. I wrote that Versailles was less harsh than the treaties imposed on the defeated by Germany — and less harsh than what Germany had planned for the allies. 1871 was not a matter of “Teutonic stupidity”, but the logical result of German aggression and carefully thought-out punishment.]

Is that what history teaches, Hanson?

[Again, Buchanan is not truthful. I argued the problem was not Versailles, but the inability or the unwillingness of the allies to promote and foster German postwar democracy, occupy the country and thereby remind the German people that they had not been “stabbed in the back” in foreign territory, but militarily defeated on the battlefield and in full retreat when their generals sued for peace. That would have had a powerful effect in reminding the German people that neither Jews nor socialists had caused their defeat, but the madness of invading France, and the futility of fighting Russia, France, Britain, Italy, and the United States all at once.]

In 1918, Germany accepted an armistice on Wilson’s 14 Points, laid down her arms and surrendered her High Seas Fleet.
Yet, once disarmed, Germany was subjected to a starvation blockade, denied the right to fish in the Baltic Sea, and saw all her colonies and private property therein confiscated by British, French and Japanese imperialists, in naked violation of Wilson’s 14 Points.
Germans, Austrians and Hungarians by the millions were then consigned to Belgium, France, Italy, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Lithuania, in violation of the principle of self-determination.
Germany was sliced in half, dismembered, disarmed, saddled with unpayable debt and forced, under threat of further starvation and invasion, to confess she alone was morally responsible for the war and all its devastation — which was a lie, and the Allies knew it.

[France, Britain, and Italy did not accept the 14 Points, and thus it was never an official allied position. Germany knew that when it discovered that Wilson could not speak for the allies, given the late entry of the United States into an ongoing allied effort. Germany lost two large slices of territory, about 13 percent of it European landmass, land once annexed from France by its invasion of 1870, and areas in what would become Poland that had been annexed by Prussia during the aggrandizement and long unification of the Germany. Much, though not all, of the returned territory had been won through coercion by imperial Germany in a series of wars, and was given back following plebiscites. As I wrote, the treaty was “flawed” by our modern sensibilities, but by the standards of the times, far less punitive than what Germany herself customarily demanded from the defeated. France did not invade Germany in 1870, 1914, or 1940, but by May 1940 found itself for the third time in seventy years with a German army advancing on Paris.]

Where was Hitler born?
“At Versailles,” replied Lady Astor.

[Buchanan’s citation of the quip of the aristocratic hostess Nancy Witcher Langhorne as an authority on Versailles is revealing and gives his game away — a woman known for her virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Hitler appeasement, and close correspondence with another kindred soul in Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Her slurs about Czechoslovakian refugees, prejudice toward Catholics, lunatic pronouncements on slavery and blacks, and reprehensible slanders of British soldiers proved her to be unhinged — but apparently earns a citation of wisdom from Buchanan.]

As for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Germany imposed on Russia in 1918, is Hanson aware that the prison house of nations for which he wails, which was forced to disgorge Finland, the Baltic republics, Poland, Ukraine and the Caucasus, was ruled by Bolsheviks?
Was it a war crime for the Kaiser to break up Lenin’s evil empire?

[This is surreal and reveals Buchanan’s lack of even a simple grasp of history. Lenin had been in power for a little over a few weeks when negotiations with Germany began in November and December 1917 — and only a few months when the treaty was signed in March 1918. His “evil empire” was in fact the centuries-long imperial Russia of the Tsars. Yes, imperial Germany did want Russia to “disgorge” land — so that it in turn might gorge upon them. That’s why the Kaiser seized much of the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Belarus. Many on Buchanan’s list of free states “disgorged” in fact in the last year of the war came under sway of the German empire as virtual dependencies.
In short, Germany demanded and until defeated got its hands on a great deal of Russian territory, ninety percent of her coal, and much of Russian industry — a greed that severely hampered its efforts to transfer manpower and material to the Western front in 1918. Note that Buchanan omits my mention of Germany’s plans for Western Europe in the event of its victory, which we know from post-World War II archives would have made the Versailles treaty tame in comparison.]

Two years after Brest-Litovsk, Churchill himself was urging Britain to revise Versailles, bring Germany into the Allied fold and intervene in Russia’s civil war — against Lenin and Trotsky.

[Now Buchanan is praising the Churchill he serially damns as the fool who had prompted World War II. What Churchill was trying to do was exactly what I stated in my essay — incorporate Germany into the family of Western nations — something impossible not because of Versailles, but because a defeated German army in November 1918 retreated from foreign territory and reentered the fatherland, promulgating the myth that it had never been beaten, when in fact it was within days of annihilation by an advancing allied army that included over a million American soldiers.]

As for my thesis that the British war guarantee to Poland of March 31, 1939, was the “Fatal Blunder” that guaranteed World War II and brought down the British Empire, Hanson is mocking:
“Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.”
First, Hanson should get his prime ministers straight. It was Neville Chamberlain who issued the war guarantee to Poland after the collapse of his Munich accord. Churchill was not even in the Cabinet.

[Buchanan, again, cannot honestly reproduce quoted material. Pace Buchanan, note that I did not write “Prime Minister” Churchill — and for precisely the reason that he was not Prime Minister in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. But the very reason that the British turned to the “imperialist” Churchill in extremis in May 1940 was because he was on record in the British Parliament and in public life since 1932 for restoring British military preparedness, and, from at least 1936, enlightening British naïve rightists about the sinister nature of Hitler’s National Socialism. Yet Churchill is the veritable villain of Buchanan’s book, not the maniacal Hitler.]

Second, Hansen implies that I portray Hitler as a misunderstood victim. This is mendacious. Hitler’s foul crimes are fully related.

[(a) Hanson, not Hansen. (b) Hitler’s crimes are mentioned in the customary Buchanan disclaimer fashion; but if they were “fully related,” they would make it impossible to empathize with a psychopath whose polices ended logically in the Holocaust.]

Third, was it moral, Hanson, for Britain to promise the Poles military aid they could not and did not deliver, thus steeling Polish resolve to resist Hitler and guaranteeing Poland’s annihilation?

[Now this is a strange contortion. The Poles were already steeled since they had known first hand German aggrandizement since 1914, had seen what Hitler had done in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and knew well the futility of appeasement. A militarily weak Britain and morally bankrupt France are to be faulted for not attacking in the West in September 1939, but applauded for at least declaring war on Hitler and finally apprising him that his aggression would no longer be treated with rhetoric but now with armed resistance. ]

Was it wise, Hanson, for Britain to declare a world war on the strongest nation in Europe over a town, Danzig, where the British prime minister thought Germany had the stronger claim?

[This is ludicrous. Danzig was a mere “town”? In fact, Britain declared war because for years Hitler had serially violated all of its WWI and international agreements, dismembered Czechoslovakia, and revealed the true nature of Nazi global aggrandizement as outlined years before in Mein Kampf.]

What were the consequences for Poland of trusting in Britain?
Crucifixion on a Nazi-Soviet cross, the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer corps, Treblinka and Auschwitz, annihilation of the Home Army, millions of brave Polish dead, half a century of Bolshevik terror.

[This is reprehensible. Now British military weakness is blamed for Auschwitz, rather than the innate sinister nature of Nazism? Does Buchanan believe that had Britain not tried to stop Hitler, the death camps would have never occurred? Does he know of the prewar Nazi precursors to the Final Solution, the geneses of which were clear from Germany’s own treatment of its chronically ill and mentally disturbed?]

And how did Churchill honor Britain’s commitment to Poland?
During trips to Moscow, Churchill bullied the Polish prime minister into ceding to Stalin that half of his country Stalin had gotten from his devil’s pact with Hitler, and yielded to Stalin’s demand for annexation of the Baltic republics and Bolshevik rule of a dozen nations of Eastern and Central Europe.

[Churchill distrusted Stalin, but by 1943 understood that a weak British Empire had no leverage at all against Stalin’s 400 divisions. Again in hindsight Churchill can be made to look illiberal, but given the realities of the times, there was no one more suspicious of the ally Stalin, or more sympathetic to the Poles.]

Was it worth 50 million dead, Hanson, so Stalin, whose victims, as of Sept. 1, 1939, were 1,000 times Hitler’s, could occupy not only Poland, for which Britain went to war, but all of Christian Europe to the Elbe?

[How odd that the allies are indirectly blamed for the Holocaust, as if its seeds were not innate to Nazism. Most credit Stalin with the atrocious crime of killing 20-30 million of his own, versus Hitler’s 6 million. How that translates in “1,000 times” I am not sure — except by the misleading qualifier “by Sept.1 1939.” But here Buchanan engages in hindsight. In 1939, Britain knew of no other means — not political, not diplomatic, not economic — of stopping Hitler from absorbing all of Europe, an agenda of aggression clear from 1936 onward.]

Churchill was right when he told FDR in December 1941 it was “The Unnecessary War” and right again in 1948, when he wrote that, in Stalin, the world now faced “even worse perils” than those of Hitler.

[This is disingenuous. The aggregate of Churchill’s writings make it clear that he felt the war had been unnecessary only on the grounds that he felt, rightly I think, that it could have been prevented by standing up to a then weak Hitler in 1936, which would have humiliated the Nazis and perhaps even led to a change of government or at least a sort of containment of Nazism. And note Churchill’s choice of word “perils.” Churchill did not think, as implied by Buchanan, that Hitler was any less evil than Stalin, only that the Red Army and the resources of the Soviet Union gave it the potential to become far more dangerous than a much smaller Nazi empire.
Both World War II and the Cold War were necessary. And while the Soviet government was a vile and evil entity, millions of Red Army soldiers were not communists, but brave patriots who did much to stop the Wehrmacht, and, yes, by their efforts did save allied lives. Again, they fought for a horrendous government, but the motivation for many was not global communism or Comrade Stalin who had butchered millions of their families and friends, but to rid German soldiers from the soil of Mother Russia.]

So, what had it all been for?

[World War II — forced upon, not the fault of, the allies — was worth it. It ended fascism and Nazism, liberated thousands from death camps and starvation in forced labor compounds, led to a new democratic Europe, prevented the extinction of European Jewry, and reformed a once serially bellicose Germany that had attacked France three times in 70 years. Today’s Europe and Japan are proof of our grandfathers’ achievement.]

Historian Hanson should go back to tutoring undergrads about the Peloponnesian War and the Syracuse Expedition.

[I guess Mr. Buchanan believes that working as a political operative in Richard Nixon’s White House is better training for history than formal study of classical languages and history. I think his ancient Greek citation is a vague reference to my support for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to foster constitutional government in Iraq. But once more, Buchanan reveals his ignorance of history. The Syracuse expedition, as he calls it, was a case of a democratic Athens attacking a larger and democratic Syracuse and its Sicilian allies at a time when its adversary Sparta was not beaten. When I last looked the United States had not expanded its war on radical Islam by invading democratic India.
And the last time I had any notice of Buchanan himself was when his American Conservative“Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor” ) to review A War Like No Other, and wrote an incoherent rant about Iraq rather than the book in question.
I stand by everything I wrote about Patrick J. Buchanan’s book, and find his latest effort further confirmation of his delusional views about both past and present.] magazine asked the so-called “War Nerd” (who once “daydreamed” of burning down my vineyard [which in fact later mysteriously experienced a roadside brushfire], cf. his