To clarify: the title is excerpted from Act 1 of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. The full quote goes:
"Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile;
So ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes."
It's a warning against spending too much of your life in scholarly pursuits.
Day By Day
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Progressive Prognostications
Victor Davis Hanson is triumphal. His latest article for NRO mercilessly details the abysmal track record of Bush's critics regarding the course of events in Iraq. Read it here, it's devastating.
Not unless you already agree with his premises and ignore logic that should make an historian cringe. It's a polemic, a rant, a roundup of imagined slights and disputes from the perspective of someone who is declaring victory WAY too early.
You are right that it is too early to declare victory, but I think that the situation is vastly improved, and that the prophesies of doom have not been confirmed by what has happened so far. There is no way to know if this will continue in the future. Manhattan could be vaporized tomorrow. But so far, based on what we now know, Bush has been right far more often and to a much greater degree than his critics.
I don't know if Victor Davis Hanson cringed as he wrote that piece, but he certainly qualifies as an historian.
I know Hanson is an historian (though he is, of course, quite out of his field at this point), but he doesn't let that get in the way of his polemics. Any historian with a sense of proportion and, well, history would recognize the tentative and partial nature of our achievements thus far and the immense possibility of stagnation, backsliding or even utter and total disaster. It's just too soon to say anything except that the administration has been getting pretty lucky on what seemed like some long-shot bets. Can they beat the house?
3 comments:
Not unless you already agree with his premises and ignore logic that should make an historian cringe. It's a polemic, a rant, a roundup of imagined slights and disputes from the perspective of someone who is declaring victory WAY too early.
Dear Jonathan,
You are right that it is too early to declare victory, but I think that the situation is vastly improved, and that the prophesies of doom have not been confirmed by what has happened so far. There is no way to know if this will continue in the future. Manhattan could be vaporized tomorrow. But so far, based on what we now know, Bush has been right far more often and to a much greater degree than his critics.
I don't know if Victor Davis Hanson cringed as he wrote that piece, but he certainly qualifies as an historian.
I know Hanson is an historian (though he is, of course, quite out of his field at this point), but he doesn't let that get in the way of his polemics. Any historian with a sense of proportion and, well, history would recognize the tentative and partial nature of our achievements thus far and the immense possibility of stagnation, backsliding or even utter and total disaster. It's just too soon to say anything except that the administration has been getting pretty lucky on what seemed like some long-shot bets. Can they beat the house?
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