Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, remarks how unusual it is for a president to have politicised such a national catastrophe: “No other president—Lincoln in the civil war, FDR in world war two, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the cold war—faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances, failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonised the Democrats.”Well, Dr. Wilentz, that's because Lincoln, FDR, and JFK were liberals. So far, we've been unbelievably lucky to have been under liberal administrations when the Civil War, WW1, WW2, and the Cuban Missile Crisis hit. Our conservative leaders - Reagan, Nixon, Hoover, Coolidge, McKinley - all happened to come along at times in history when they couldn't botch a crisis response for political purposes. They were free to slander liberals as "anti-American" without endangering national unity at a critical moment.
But our luck couldn't hold out forever. The dice finally landed on snake eyes, and we got a conservative president and a major security crisis at the same time. And the result is a lot uglier than what happened when JFK, FDR, Wilson, and Lincoln were at the helm. Uglier in a perfectly predictable way.
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