Partisanship, Then and Now

by Victor Davis Hanson - February 8th, 2010 - National Review Online

One of the stranger behaviors of the ever-stranger Obama administration is its sudden adoption of the "wounded fawn" posture.

No opposition was more stridently critical of a sitting president than was the anti-Bush Left. Barack Obama, as candidate and president, could not start a speech without saying "Bush did it." And have we forgotten the 2006–08 canonization of Michael Moore, the silence about the Nazi slurs, the award-winning assassination docudramas, the Knopf novel about killing George Bush, the "General Betray Us" ad, Al Gore's vein-bulging "brownshirts"outburst, and on and on?

But suddenly, pundits and politicians have embraced a new gospel about conciliation and the need to restrain harsh discourse — which is fine, but many of these advocates for a gentler, kinder dialogue were bomb-throwers just a few years ago.

One of the most articulate of the current group of outstanding writers is Victor Davis Hanson. I love to read a man who can accurately quote useful knowledge provided by geniuses of 2500 years ago, as he does with Thucydides in this article.