Soccer Dad

TGIVDH

Two reasons I enjoy Fridays are Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson at, respectively, The Washington Post and the National Review Online. This past Friday was another top notch VDH column. (Krauthammer was very good too.) I know that VDH makes the same arguments over and over again. But he makes those arguments so well and elegantly, each week it still feels new. If there's been a better summary of the past few years in a single paragraph, I don't think I've seen it, but here's what he wrote last week in "How Far We’ve Come":

Yet despite them all, and after this bloody month of November, here we are now on the eve of elections — the most unlikely of all events in the last half-century of civilization. Just think of it: In place of the past Hussein mass murdering and the present ogres of Fallujah, we are to witness an effort to jump-start democracy in the heart of the caliphate of old, right between the world's worst two governments in Syria and Iran, amid treacherous folk like the Saudis, Jordanians, and al Jazeera cheering the insurgents on. How did we come this far and get so close, when the unprincipled such as Jacques Chirac shunned the once-wounded democrat Allawi and sent his plane instead to fetch the murderer Arafat — a profiteer in the guise of a 'leader' who hand-in-glove with Saddam Hussein made France billions in Iraq and then lectured about morality to those who slammed the cash register drawer on his stealthy hands. How could we ever contemplate the chance of elections when the Saudis, the Syrians, and the Iranians sent millions of dollars and thousands of jihadists to stop it all — lest the virus of freedom spread?