Historical Perspective

I'll just copy the whole thing from Instapundit (see blogroll at left). My leftie commenters sure aren't going to like this; I can hear their threnodies already.

MICHAEL BARONE:
Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth
and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration
that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.

George W. Bush has a better sense of history.

Read the whole thing. Back on September 11, I remarked that we could expect a lot of bad stuff to happen, and that things were likely to be that way for a while, because that's the historical norm. The 1990s were a
fool's paradise -- which I liked, too, but then I was one of those fools. That
things aren't like the 1990s now, other than economically, is a case of
returning to norms, not of an unusual deviation from them. That doesn't mean anything specific with regard to particular policy disputes, of course, but it does mean that people who are shocked and appalled that the situation isn't like the 1990s are missing the point.

posted at 10:44 AM by Glenn Reynolds