A Year Like None Other It usually takes decades to fit in all the tragicomedy of 2008.

National Review ^ | Victor Davis Hanson

[malkee]

The three great stories of 2008 were the financial meltdown, the turn-about in Iraq, and the Chicago Way. All of them conveyed a certain sense of the surreal — whether the vaporization of the nation’s 401(k)s in a few hours, or Harvard Law School graduate Barney Frank asking Harvard Law School graduate Franklin Rains of the soon-to-be bankrupt Fannie Mae whether he felt under-regulated, ~snip~

Quite suitably we end the war year with an Egyptian-based Iraqi journalist trying to hit the president of the United States with his two shoes — being canonized by the Arab Street and not-sot-secretly appreciated by the American Left (far more interested in the Miranda rights of the assailant than the breach of security that allowed not one, but two projectiles to target their president). The irony was not just that, had he tried that with Saddam Hussein he would have been brush shredded in the basement, but that such a self-described crusading journalist would not even dare such theater in Mubarak’s authoritarian Egypt. It was more of the same old, same old from the blame ‘em Middle East: “We hate you for doing business with our oppressive dictators; and we also hate you for losing blood and treasure to liberate us from our oppressive dictators and fostering democracy, and we also just hate you since so many of you seem to want us to hate you.”

The year 2008 also reintroduced us to Bill Ayers, Hot Rod Blagojevich, Rahm Emanuel, Father Pfleger, Tony Rezko, the Right Rev. Wright and the rest of the Chicago Pals. What was so uncanny about them all was not just that they were proverbial spokes to Barack Obama’s hub, but that each revealed how the Chicago Way proved so interdisciplinary in nature

[malkee]

Time to look back before we look ahead.

[buccaneer81]

Historians studying the next American civil war will cite 2008 as the lighting of the fuse.

[Christian4Bush]

bump for later reading

[neverdem]

Bump & a Ping

Happy New Year!

[rocktyke]

Greed and excess gave way to panic, as the primordial emotions broke free from their thin veneer of culture. Without a blink, we went back to 1929 — the only difference being that the baby-boomer generation blames everyone but themselves, under oath and amid clicking cameras, rather than privately and quietly jumping out the window.

My generation, ... sigh.

" ... we also just hate you since so many of you seem to want us to hate you.”

A true leftist/jihadi mind meld ... they seem to hate the same things.

" ...the Chicago Way proved so interdisciplinary in nature."

Sweet.

I have admired Hanson's writing and his books since I discovered them during the "An Autumn of War". columns he wrote at NRO in 2001. He seems to have abandoned his Democrat roots since he gradually learned just how wretched the left actually is. He has also honed his polemical skills into a fine Steynian stiletto.

[BBell]

"This year turned out to be the Roaring 20s, the bleak 1930s, and the Sixties — all rolled into one."

And what will next year bring? 1938? Peace in our time?