Re:
Victor
Davis Hanson on Dan Rather and Liberal
Hypocrisy from National Review Online.
In his entertaining polemic against the "sanctimonious Left," Victor Davis Hanson writes:
We have come a long way since the 1960s: The once-revolutionary pigs taking over the manor are now bloated and strutting on two legs as they feast on silver inside the farmhouse.LOL! My feelings exactly.
But in this post-911 age, we find a roughly parallel corruption in the center, which is where I place G.W. Bush (though lefties naturally put him on the right), that is more significant than the corruption on the left Hanson delights in skewering. Concerning the "amaturish forgery" that has recently been such an embarassment to CBS News, Hanson writes:
Worse than being duped, worse than cobbling together a highly politicized hit-piece during a war and in the waning days of an election, worse than the shady nature of the "unimpeachable" sources and the likely sordid origins of the story, and worse even than the pathetic nature of CBS's "expert" witnesses -- worse than all that was Rather's ten-day denial of reality, culminating in the surreal half-admission that the phony documents could not be verified as accurate.This passage reminds me of all the lies and distortions that were used to justify America's attack on Iraq, the main difference being that George W. Bush still denies reality and still pretends that the nonsense spewed by his administration prior to the invasion makes no difference: He was Right anyway. Forged documents about National Guard service don't have quite the geo-political significance as forged documents about yellowcake uranium.
The heading for Hanson's article is: "The Fall / A bankrupt generation is fading away." There may be more truth there than Hanson intended. Because there are two main factions I associate with my admittedly somewhat bankrupt generation. For much of the last 30 years of the 20th Century, the dominant faction in large areas of media, academia and government was the "60s liberals." During that period an alternative faction was developing and is now in power in Washington, D.C.: the "neo-conservatives."
These "neo-cons" are idealistic, visionary and intelligent. If you are a liberal, you will say, "No, they're not!" If you are a true conservative, you will say, "That's what makes them so dangerous!"
"Idealism" can be bad enough in the life of an individual: The young woman who "dreams of being a ballerina" finds herself crippled at age 30. "If you can dream it, you can do it" is a great slogan -- but at some point, you need to know when to give up.
Idealism can be dangerous on the job. Once I and a few co-workers talked about some project and came up with a few ideas and presented them to the boss, who said, "Sure!" Turned out to be a bad idea and my career suffered.
"Idealism" in the context of National Destiny may work in some situations, but it is antithetical to the spirit of conservatism. The neo-cons have been sitting for many years in their fell think tanks, concocting schemes for "benevolent global hegemony" and so on. Now they are in power and it is apparent to anyone not in a state of deep denial that their cool ideas, so skillfully sold to a generally uncritical public, have led us into truly perilous times.
I would cheer the fall of Dan Rather if it meant anything at all to me. I would cheer the impending fall of the neo-cons, if it were not for the fact that they might manage to take America down with them.
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