The Nazz
02-03-2006, 20:53
I got into reading blogs about four years ago, which was sort of the early days. (For a sense of scale, my user number at Kos is in the 800's, and it's into the high 40,000's now--I've been at it a while). I love the way they take on the sancitified voices of the traditional media and call hacks on their bullshit--some more effectively than others. And it's one of those particularly effective moments I want to showcase right now.
There's this neo-con (not an insult--he self-identifies) named Victor Davis Hanson who occasionally writes for the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page (Opinion Journal). He had a column today which follows the current Republican line--that criticizing the war in Iraq is treason. Hanson wrote:
The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of Yorktown–or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa.At first glance, perhaps that's not a wholly unreasonable argument. Well, okay, it is, as it equates dissent with treason, but play along with me.
Hanson is supposedly a historian, which is imporant to this discussion. Why? Because he doesn't know his history. Now, without the blog system, only a rarefied few might have found this gaping hole in Hanson's argument, but thanks to folks like Alex at Martini Republic (http://www.martinirepublic.com/item/victor-davis-hanson-channels-sam-cooke-dont-know-much-about-history/), we see just how stupid Hanson is:
Got that? The gist is that is that if the “Greatest Generation” which fought World War II had continued to focus on the errors which led to the defeat at Pearl Harbor as our troops steamed towards Okinawa, we could never have succeeded in our war effort.
Similarly, critics who point out that Bush cherry-picked evidence to promote an unnecessary war to destroy WMDs Saddam didn’t have, and then handed over Iraq to a bunch of screw ups who botched the occupation and precipitated the tragic state of current Iraq, are aiding the enemy, will be responsible should Bush’s ill-conceived and incompetently executed PNAC venture fail.
A nifty argument, assuming there were any parallels between World War II and Iraq which rendered the latter more defensible, except for this: In between the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the time of the successful conclusion of the attack on Okinawa, the United States conducted no less than EIGHT separate investigations into the Pearl Harbor attack:
The Knox Investigation
Dec. 9-14, 1941.
The Roberts Commission
Dec. 18-January-23, 1941
The Hart Investigation
Feb. 12-June 15, 1944
The Army Pearl Harbor Board
Jul. 20-Oct. 20, 1944
The Navy Court of Inquiry
Jul. 24-Oct. 19, 1944.
The Clarke Investigation
Aug. 4-Sep 20, 1944
The Clausen Investigation
Jan. 24-Sep. 12, 1945
The Hewitt Inquiry
May 14-July 11, 1945
The invasion of Okinawa commenced on April 1, 1945. Planning operations commenced October, 1944.
Quite literally, when the ships began “steaming toward Okinawa,” in October 1944, there were at least 2 ongoing Congressional investigations of Pearl Harbor, of the six investigations that had been commenced during the war, five of which were authorized by and made reports to Congress.
By mid-March, nearly 1,300 ships had gathered from places all over the world for the invasion. By the time the invasion commenced, the 7th investigation of Pearl Harbor, conducted by Lt. Colonel Henry Clausen at the behest of the Secretary of War, had been underway for several months, and the 8th investigation was commenced after the invasion started but before the campaign finished.
The notion that, in a democracy, holding political and military leadership accountable for their errors or deceptions during wartime constitutes a form of abetting the enemy is puerile and contrary to fact. In the case of Pearl Harbor, there were nearly continuous investigations into the failures of command — including failures in Washington (see the Army Board report to Congress), from December 9, 1941 until the cessation of hostilities in August, 1945. Some were flawed, others were incomplete, but all were conducted during the gravest national crisis and threat of the last 140 years, and none were treasonous. Obviously, none prevented a nation as great as America from prevailing in the conflict.
When they're done right, blogs are an awful important tool in the new media. They keep the traditional media folks honest.
So which blogs do you read?
There's this neo-con (not an insult--he self-identifies) named Victor Davis Hanson who occasionally writes for the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page (Opinion Journal). He had a column today which follows the current Republican line--that criticizing the war in Iraq is treason. Hanson wrote:
The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of Yorktown–or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa.At first glance, perhaps that's not a wholly unreasonable argument. Well, okay, it is, as it equates dissent with treason, but play along with me.
Hanson is supposedly a historian, which is imporant to this discussion. Why? Because he doesn't know his history. Now, without the blog system, only a rarefied few might have found this gaping hole in Hanson's argument, but thanks to folks like Alex at Martini Republic (http://www.martinirepublic.com/item/victor-davis-hanson-channels-sam-cooke-dont-know-much-about-history/), we see just how stupid Hanson is:
Got that? The gist is that is that if the “Greatest Generation” which fought World War II had continued to focus on the errors which led to the defeat at Pearl Harbor as our troops steamed towards Okinawa, we could never have succeeded in our war effort.
Similarly, critics who point out that Bush cherry-picked evidence to promote an unnecessary war to destroy WMDs Saddam didn’t have, and then handed over Iraq to a bunch of screw ups who botched the occupation and precipitated the tragic state of current Iraq, are aiding the enemy, will be responsible should Bush’s ill-conceived and incompetently executed PNAC venture fail.
A nifty argument, assuming there were any parallels between World War II and Iraq which rendered the latter more defensible, except for this: In between the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the time of the successful conclusion of the attack on Okinawa, the United States conducted no less than EIGHT separate investigations into the Pearl Harbor attack:
The Knox Investigation
Dec. 9-14, 1941.
The Roberts Commission
Dec. 18-January-23, 1941
The Hart Investigation
Feb. 12-June 15, 1944
The Army Pearl Harbor Board
Jul. 20-Oct. 20, 1944
The Navy Court of Inquiry
Jul. 24-Oct. 19, 1944.
The Clarke Investigation
Aug. 4-Sep 20, 1944
The Clausen Investigation
Jan. 24-Sep. 12, 1945
The Hewitt Inquiry
May 14-July 11, 1945
The invasion of Okinawa commenced on April 1, 1945. Planning operations commenced October, 1944.
Quite literally, when the ships began “steaming toward Okinawa,” in October 1944, there were at least 2 ongoing Congressional investigations of Pearl Harbor, of the six investigations that had been commenced during the war, five of which were authorized by and made reports to Congress.
By mid-March, nearly 1,300 ships had gathered from places all over the world for the invasion. By the time the invasion commenced, the 7th investigation of Pearl Harbor, conducted by Lt. Colonel Henry Clausen at the behest of the Secretary of War, had been underway for several months, and the 8th investigation was commenced after the invasion started but before the campaign finished.
The notion that, in a democracy, holding political and military leadership accountable for their errors or deceptions during wartime constitutes a form of abetting the enemy is puerile and contrary to fact. In the case of Pearl Harbor, there were nearly continuous investigations into the failures of command — including failures in Washington (see the Army Board report to Congress), from December 9, 1941 until the cessation of hostilities in August, 1945. Some were flawed, others were incomplete, but all were conducted during the gravest national crisis and threat of the last 140 years, and none were treasonous. Obviously, none prevented a nation as great as America from prevailing in the conflict.
When they're done right, blogs are an awful important tool in the new media. They keep the traditional media folks honest.
So which blogs do you read?