Indispensable Victor Davis Hanson watched the recent confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and is alarmed by what he saw, as should we all.
What in the world has happened to us?Posted by Alan at February 6, 2005 08:17 PMDemocratic idealism that once alone gave the nation its needed social safety net, civil rights legislation and environmental protection is becoming ossified and in danger of ensuring a permanent party of strident second-guessing and deductive furor at the loss of almost all political power.
A majority of the state legislatures and governorships is lost. The Senate is lost. The House is lost. The presidency is lost -- the Supreme Court almost.
The former idealists and reformers have become backward-looking. Thus for a sober documentarian Edward R. Murrow, we now get the conspiracist Michael Moore who praised the terrorists who kill voters in Iraq as "Minutemen." Instead of JFK's muscular idealism, we see Ted Kennedy hours before the historic elections in Iraq screaming to withdraw American troops.
And in place of a crusading Hubert Humphrey, we now endure Barbara Boxer endlessly on television not to apologize, but to recycle the boorishness of her earlier distortions against Condoleezza Rice.
Barbara Boxer's moment is a metaphor of our age, of the radical change from idealism to cynicism and worse.