This Memorable Day: Bush is a divisive wartime figure. So were Lincoln, Churchill and Roosevelt.

Wall Street Journal ^ | November 2, 2004 | VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

[OESY]

In singular moments in our history, the security of the United States hinged on a single presidential election.... Today's vote determines how the United States finishes the present war against terrorists, and, indeed, whether we continue to defeat Islamic fascism....

John Kerry sees our struggle as an unending law enforcement problem, akin to gambling and prostitution. Thus the terrorist attacks of the 1990s were not deadly precursors to 9/11, but belong to a now nostalgic era of "nuisance." In contrast, George W. Bush envisioned September 11 as real war....

Most of Sen. Kerry's allegations about this war ring false or insincere because he shifts in tune to mercurial polls... and his lack of either a strategic understanding of the war or faith in the skill and resoluteness of the U.S. military....

In Sen. Kerry's world, brave folk such as Iraq's Prime Minister Allawi, the Poles, and the Australians are belittled as hollow and bought allies.... The explanation for Saddam's removal, in Teresa Heinz Kerry's words, is "blood for oil".... But after the invasion, petroleum prices soared....

True, much of the Kerry negativism derives from opportunism. Yet there is also a logic that explains the flip-flopping, rooted in deep-seeded doubts about both the utility and morality of using American military power....

Mr. Kerry, as a soldier and a senator, conducted freelance negotiations with both the communist North Vietnamese and Sandinistas. His opposition to the 1991 Gulf War might have ensured a Saddam Hussein sitting on 30% of the world's oil, replete with nukes, and lording over what was left of Kuwait, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. His recent embrace of a "global test" as the proper requisite of American military action was not novel, but reflected his 1994 remarks that American efforts to stop Serbian fascism....

[OESY]

Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford.

[wildcatf4f3]

Mr Hanson and I should get extra votes

[Puppage]

Yeah, well England gave Winston the boot after he almost single handedly saved their collective arses.

[tjwmason]

Yeah, well England gave Winston the boot after he almost single handedly saved their collective arses.

The point was this was the '45 election, the war was over (that is the war in Europe was over, and the war in the Far East was pretty much won), and having arrived at peace the people (in my opinion wrongly) decided that a nice bout of socialism would repair the ills of society. The difference is that America is still at war - we didn't get rid of Churchill in '43, we got rid of Chamberlain during the war.

[PeaRidge]

"The point was this was the '45 election, the war was over (that is the war in Europe was over, and the war in the Far East was pretty much won), and having arrived at peace the people (in my opinion wrongly) decided that a nice bout of socialism would repair the ills of society. The difference is that America is still at war - we didn't get rid of Churchill in '43, we got rid of Chamberlain during the war."

The bout of socialism is right. Seems as if the labor party recognized that the British population was primed for a big dose of "we have had it so rough that it is time for the government to take care of us" self pity, cured by government central planning, control, and hand outs. You probably remember that the labor party campaign posters were of elderly women looking as if they needed care. (Our modern day "do it for the children" guilt trip.)

The population fell in line and voted Churchill out, and the socialists in. You know the rest.......the government took over transportation, mining, utilities, and anything else it seem willing to control.

It took 40 years for the people to recognize their fate, and to take all the control back.

That did not happen here, but it looks as if this generation of kids would not know the difference between capitalism and fascism, or would even care.

[Churchillspirit]

Choosing Kerry over President Bush would be like replacing Churchill with Chamberlin after WW11 had started.

[tjwmason]

I think that the War had softened the blow. During the War we had pretty much turned into a command economy - this worked simply because it was a war - and so people thought that it could work (that it needed the emergency of Nazi's sitting 20 miles across the English Channel to work seemed to pass them by).

The patronising bureaucrats were quite astonishing, there were people saying quite opennly (and seriously) 'the man in Whitehall really does know better'. Not very long ago I watched a documentary which included interviews with people involved in the '45-'51 Labour gov't; speaking of food rationing (one of the sensible war-time emergency measures) they were talking about how much better people's diets were, and how those beastly Tories got rid of rationing as soon as they were back in power.

Though we have had Thatcher (I was born a couple of months after she came to power, and so she has always been a major influence on my thought), and the great economic liberalisation of the '80s and early-mid '90s; I still believe that there are many on the British left who would love to return to the days of government officials deciding what food one would buy &c.

[PeaRidge]

Yes, I am sure that there are many that would embrace the European continent flavor of socialism. Even though England slipped pretty far into liberal democratic socialism during the mid and late 1900's, Thatcher was able to snatch back the rational among your people and move them back toward capitalism.
I have seen one historical study on t.v. that points to the centralized planning of the British government that many thought was so efficient and beneficial to the economy and people. This came from the Cambridge group in the form of John Maynard Keynes, who ran the war material planning.
After the war, his concepts of central planning, and in effect socialism swept England.
If you have not seen it, the study is on cd and is available from PBS. The title is "Commanding Heights".
It is outstanding. It begins with Europe after WWI and spends a great deal of time explaining what was happening all over the world, and especially England, France, and the US. It centers on the conflicting economic ideas of Keynes vs. Frederich Von Hayek. It deals with Thatcher and Reagan in an outstanding manner.
Hope you take the time to get it. You will be way ahead in doing so.
Best regards from the US.

[GOPcapitalist]

The point was this was the '45 election, the war was over (that is the war in Europe was over, and the war in the Far East was pretty much won), and having arrived at peace the people (in my opinion wrongly) decided that a nice bout of socialism would repair the ills of society. The difference is that America is still at war - we didn't get rid of Churchill in '43, we got rid of Chamberlain during the war.

No. The difference is we already had a socialist in office a decade before the war started. He happened to be a socialist who was strong on the military, but a socialist nonetheless.