Topic: Quality Punditry
From the holy city of Selma, California, Victor Davis Hanson muses on The New Defeatism:
. . . This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.
We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self- absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.. . . Our very success after September 11 -- perhaps because of the Patriot Act, the vigilance of domestic-security agencies, and the global reach of our military -- has prevented another catastrophe of mass murder, but also allowed us to become complacent, and thus once more cynical and near suicidal.
Posted by Tim
at 3:32 PM EDT
