It’s History Day on Calpundit:

For some reason, every generation loses the ability to appreciate the emotional impact of events from the previous generation. They become merely words in history books, and the players seem somehow like misguided little children making silly mistakes that, really, are sort of obvious in hindsight, aren’t they?

Hey, we’re not even paying attention to the words of various revered Greatest Generation types who are still alive and fully appreciate the emotional impact of events of their generation. The videogame cowboys who think to prove their manhood by saying things like “glass ‘em” apparently believe these men don’t have a clue about war and geopolitics. After all, they only lived through a worldwide depression, a war of survival that took the lives of about 50 million people and then ran the world during the following 40 years of nuclear standoff known as the cold war. Surely, they could not possibly have anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il.

As Kevin Drum says, “these two are not the first thuggish dictators we have had to face.” Try Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler on for size.

How ironic it is that the Republican baby boomers, most of whom “supported” the Viet Nam war but were awfully busy and didn’t have time to actually participate, would find in their middle years that the elders and the Generals whose favor they so unctuously sought in their youth are now openly contemptuous of their adolescent bloodlust. Because the fact is that many of the elder statesmen who lived through the bloody 20th century are not very impressed with the bellicose prattle emanating from the President and many of his advisors.

I don’t consider him to be a liberal pushover, but Andy Rooney was on Donohue last night and pulled absolutely no punches in his criticism of the Bush administrations foreign policy. (No transcript available.) Studs Terkel is downright