David Broder seems to have a problem with history.

That is me being polite.

(HT: Hot Air Headlines) In the process of trying to ‘convince’ the President to not re-energize the Right by starting witch hunts over interrogation – and in the process of mischaracterizing a largely Democratic party-spawned complaint over AIG bonuses as ‘populist’ – David Broder quite accidentally said something foolish:

Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.

That’s not even in the top ten. I came up with the list below the fold in about five minutes, and I bet that someone with more than a heavy minor in history could do even better.

• Post Revolutionary-War Tory reprisals. 10% of the Loyalist population had to flee; 2% of the population overall. Let’s not even talk about how bad things got during the Revolution itself.
• Trail of Tears. This is where we start talking about things like ‘mass deaths’ when the topic of ‘dark times in American history’ comes up. I could get another ten entries from the Indian Wars in general, too.
• Mexican-American War. I’m not giving back California, but this is what an imperialistic war for resources looks like.
• Post-Reconstruction abandonment of African-Americans. Equal-opportunity betrayal there, alas.
• Nineteenth Century anti-labor reprisals. Definition of a high-danger job: “labor organizer of coal miners.” If I had lived back then, I’d rather would have risked getting black lung.
• Philippine Insurrection. You did know that we promised them independence when we conquered the place, yes?
• Public acceptance of the Ku Klux Klan, 1920s. Awkward, that.
  
• Bonus Riots. Bayonets and tear gas against unemployed war veterans.
• Abandonment of Eastern Europe, post World War II. I’m sure that it seemed a wonderful notion at the time.
• Abandonment of South Vietnam. No, I’m not going to forgive the Democrats for that one.
• Abandonment of Iraqi rebels, post Gulf War I. No, I’m not going to forgive George H. W. Bush for that one, either.

So now that we’ve had our review, David: would you please stop pandering to the prejudices and rationalizations of your liberal readers like this? You’re still ostensibly a conservative, which means that you’re still expected to demonstrate a knowledge of American history that exceeds that of a very bright fifth-grader.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.