The Callotomized Pundit

Victor Davis Hanson is confounding: He's a writer who knows an awful lot about military history and apparently nothing about why people don't want to send more troops into Iraq. He didn't used to remind me of the Stanislaw Lem character whose left brain and right brain weren't communicating, but now he does. Witness this graf in his latest grunt about "the present anti-war movement (if it is that)," probably the stupidest thing you'll hear anyone say about Iraq this year. I realize it is January 4.

We have gone from Hezbollah and Dr. Zawahiri referencing Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky to excurses on impeachment from deep thinkers like Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann to Halliburton plots to "no blood for oil" to "the world's greatest terrorist" to novels and movies dreaming of assassinating the President to George Soros's Nazi allusions and now to the ultimate trivialization of the anti-war crowd-that the war is a monumental uncool drag, a has-been distraction from more important things like fighting with Rosie or bucking up a naughty beauty queen or staged "you're fired" poses.

Goo goo ga joob!

If you crack out your Captain Midnight ring and massage this prose, it sounds like Hanson is saying "the people who criticize the progress of the war are deranged hippies." Well, fantastic. This may be true on Earth-2, where the Coalition of the Willing won the war by dumping crudely translated Bill Kristol pamphlets that convinced the Iraqis of the West's essential correctness. On this Earth, however, the war was poorly planned and executed and experts ranging from Jim Baker to John Murtha are arguing, convincingly, that an increased American presence won't solve the problem and all that's left to try is extracting American troops. The neoconservative response to that is… well, it's Hanson's drivel. Truly pathetic.