Hanson's heartfelt concern about the state of our political discourse.

Hanson:

Now Congressman Stark accuses President Bush of enjoying the deaths of our soldiers in Iraq; this follows Harry Reid’s letter trying to intimidate and silence Rush Limbaugh. And, of course, we witnessed a litany of insanity voiced by Sens. Kerry, Durbin, and Kennedy about Iraq and our soldiers, who were libeled as everything from terrorists to Saddamites to Nazis by those three. Congressman Murtha pronounced Marines guilty of war-crimes before they were tried. Sen. Obama asserted our troops killed innocent civilians, while Sen. Reid and Clinton essentially called Gen. Petraeus a fabricator (“suspension of belief”).

When we factor in the “Betray-us” ad, the Hollywood antics, and the university embarrassments, whether denying Larry Summers a right to speak at UC Davis or welcoming in Ahmadinejad at Columbia, one is forced to ask, “What happened to liberal thinking and the Democratic Party?” Why do dissent and criticism almost immediately devolve into elemental rage, whether Durbin screaming that our soldiers are Nazis or Moveon.org that their leader is a traitor? Why do deans, media heads, and politicians show such bad taste?

So true. I mean, when you have Glenn Beck making political hay over Californians' homes burning, Michelle Malkin and Mark Steyn publicly attacking a child as "fair game" over SCHIP, Rush Limbaugh calling soldiers who protest the war "phony" -- then scrubbing his transcripts -- then comparing a soldier who responded to his smear to a suicide bomber, Cliff May calling Hillary Clinton a "Vaginal American," Ann Coulter suggesting Jews are "imperfect" unless they convert, Bill O'Reilly expressing shock and surprise at the lack of vulgarity at an upscale black restaurant, Tucker Carlson linking the Obama campaign with the Khmer Rouge, Jean Schmidt calling John Murtha a coward on the House floor, Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot" at CPAC, Rush Limbaugh calling an Iraqi war vet who criticized the war a "staff puke"...

UPDATE

Actor212 points to this fantastic smackdown of Hanson at Media Matters:

If you are not familiar with him, Hanson, or "VDH" as he sometimes styles himself, is a historian of classical Greece, or at least he was a historian of that place and era. Now he is something different. Since 2001 he has laid claims to being a military and cultural historian for the ages, in addition to becoming a columnist for the National Review Online and other hyper-conservative outlets. Personally, I do not care what he writes in an op-ed, so long as he does not torture historical facts in order to validate his own pet theories. But Hanson does exactly that, and so, from my seat, he is the worst sort of polemicist: one who claims academic credentials as a neutral observer, but then insidiously inserts political interpretations of his own present-day biases into the historical record.

...

Hanson's dismissals of those who would correct the record he distorted are based upon two biases: "Campus liberals" would engage in culture wars, and "non-military historians" don't know about military history and are thus unqualified to speak on the topic at hand. Well, Victor, I am afraid that I'm not going to be so easy to dismiss. Although I teach at Georgetown now, I used to teach at West Point, and the topic I taught is the same that I have studied for 18 years, military history. It is one thing for you to brush off an inhabitant of, say, the history departments at Yale or the University of Wisconsin as knowing nothing of the military or military history. It is quite another to attempt the same with an Army Airborne Ranger who also happens to be an academic historian and who thinks that your personal signal work is a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces.