Eek...

Reading Chris Bray's latest post (a worthwhile and vigorous revisit to the theme of rhetorically diminishing our enemies to mere savages), I clicked through to one of Victor Davis Hanson's pieces (I don't like Hanson; Bray doesn't like Hanson: VDH is a hack who's turned a classical education and testosterone poisoning into a "career" in right-wing punditry) and found the following alleged sentence:

Many of our challenges, then, are not the war in Iraq per se, but the entire paradox of postmodern war in general in a globally televised world.

A rough translation, for the euphemistically impaired: We didn't fuck up, so much as the situation is fucked up. He then continues his panglossian -- we live in the best of all possible worlds, by the good grace of our Dear Leader, despite all evidence to the contrary -- revisionism, even going so far as to note without irony that "Nothing in this war is much different from those of the past" without ever considering the value of learning from past mistakes before making them again. The difference between Hanson and Ferguson is erudition, not theme: both think that we are on God's own mysterious path and all will work out if we only have faith in the goodness of our hearts no matter what kind of dirty shit -- slavery, imperialism, whatever -- we have to do on the way.