by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Days of Rage<\/strong><\/p>\n In times to come, the period between the failed campaign of John Kerry and the Democratic control of the Congress, coupled with the beginning of the successful surge, should be known as \u201cThe Insane Years.\u201d This was the era in which Guantanamo was a gulag, renditions were the stuff of Hollywood movies, and Bush and Cheney were deemed veritable war criminals. Was it all a dream, those nightmare years of 2004-7?<\/p>\n I recall all that only because Oprah\u00a0was just quoted<\/a>\u00a0as calling for more civility to be shown President Obama (\u201ceven if you\u2019re not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect\u201d), echoing the president\u2019s own post-Tucson insistence on a new amity between opponents. Bill Maher recently expressed outrage over the uncivil tone shown Barack Obama in Bill O\u2019Reilly\u2019s Super-Bowl Day interview. I think such concern for deference and conciliation is altogether fine and good; but, again, do we recall the crazy years of not so long ago?<\/p>\n This was the period in which Michael Moore called for US defeat in Iraq and dubbed the Islamists who were killing our own soldiers \u201cMinutemen.\u201d Indeed, in April 2004, he wrote on his website: \u201cThe Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not \u2018insurgents\u2019 or \u2018terrorists\u2019 or \u2018The Enemy.\u2019 They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow \u2014 and they will win\u2026.I oppose the UN or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle\u2026the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe \u2014 just maybe \u2014 God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.\u201d I think in the old days such sentiments of calling for the deaths of one\u2019s countrymen were called \u201ctreasonous.\u201d Yet, such ranting in and of itself was not surprising given Moore\u2019s ideology and crassness. But what was inexplicable was the Democratic Party\u2019s reaction to his mythodrama,\u00a0Fahrenheit 9\/11<\/em>, and his royal presence at the Democratic convention of 2004, when all of the above was well known.<\/p>\n Oprah and Bill Maher, of course, were quiet when Nicholson Baker wrote the novel\u00a0Checkpoint\u00a0<\/em>in 2004, imagining the death of George Bush \u2014 a topic that was the theme of a docudrama by Gabriel Range that earned him a first prize at the Toronto Film Festival. Wait. In fact, Bill Maher did say something a little more outrageous than Bill O\u2019Reilly\u2019s apparent rudeness (\u201cvery disrespectful\u201d) shown President Obama. In early 2007, he said of an apparent assassination attempt against Vice President Cheney: \u201cBut I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn\u2019t be dying needlessly tomorrow. \u2026 I\u2019m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That\u2019s a fact.\u201d<\/p>\n The Age of No Civility<\/strong><\/p>\n Such a weird era that was, when British liberals wrote letters to those in Ohio, beseeching Americans to vote against George Bush in the key battleground state. I recall an op-ed, widely circulated in 2004, in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0by one Charles Brooker, with the infamous line, \u201cJohn Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. \u2014 where are you\u00a0now that we need you?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Did Oprah deplore that climate of violence? Was that \u201cvery disrespectful\u201d?<\/p>\n John Glenn (\u201cthe old Hitler business\u201d), Al Gore (\u201cdigital brownshirts\u201d), and Senator Robert Byrd\u00a0all evoked brownshirts<\/a>\u00a0and Nazis, in\u00a0George Soros fashion<\/a>, to demonize the president of the United States. Do we even remember how Cindy Sheehan and her rantings, often virulently anti-Semitic, were found useful by the Democratic Party? Hollywood made in those years a succession of money-losing, poorly scripted propaganda films on Iraq. Do we recall some of them (and why did the genre die after January 2009?) \u2014 In\u00a0The Valley of Elah<\/em>,\u00a0Rendition<\/em>,\u00a0Lions for Lambs<\/em>,\u00a0Redacted<\/em>? Do we recall the legion of those who clamored to go into Iraq and in that era suddenly were blaming others for spoiling their three-week victory and not finding arsenals of WMD \u2014 as if the Congress had not voted for twenty-three reasons to authorize the war?<\/p>\n My god, I do remember 2007, when the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0gave a discount<\/a>\u00a0to MoveOn.org for the\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>\u00a0\u201cGeneral Betray Us\u201d<\/a>\u00a0advertisement. Hillary that day suggested the general\u2019s testimony required a suspicion of disbelief. Barack Obama assured us the surge had failed, and Joe Biden lectured Petraeus on trisecting Iraq \u2014 in the days before Iraq became, in Biden\u2019s words, \u201cour greatest achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n