Historian, Meet History

posted at 8:21 pm on May 22, 2009 by Slublog
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The Washington Post has a good story today about yesterday’s dueling speeches on national security. The close timing of the speeches was unusual, so the reporters interviewed a historian, who had the following to say:

“I think it is unprecedented in the modern era,” said Peniel Joseph, a historian at Brandeis University. “We’ve seen outgoing administrations that did not get along with the new administration, but we have never seen the vice president of an outgoing administration lambasting the new administration like this.”

What’s puzzling about this quote is not just what Joseph said, but that the reporters just let it go unchallenged despite significant evidence to the contrary.

I’ve quoted this speech before. Al Gore Hulks out on the Bush administration in May of 2004:

George Bush promised to change the tone in Washington. And indeed he did. As many as 37 prisoners may have been murdered while in captivity, though the numbers are difficult to rely upon because in many cases involving violent death, there were no autopsies.

How dare they blame their misdeeds on enlisted personnel from a Reserve unit in upstate New York. President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush.

How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison.

That certainly seems to qualify as ‘lambasting’ to me. Perhaps Joseph was trying to say that no vice president in the modern era has criticized a sitting president so shortly after the new guy took power.

Well…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Al Gore used Earth Day to unleash his harshest criticism of President Bush since losing the White House to him, saying the administration’s environmental policies serve “special interests instead of public interests.”

“America is only as healthy as the air our children breathe, the water they drink and the earth they will inherit,” Gore told about 200 Vanderbilt University students and environmental activists Monday.

“But instead of embracing the bipartisan national consensus to improve our environment, the Bush administration has chosen to serve the special interests instead of the public interests and to subsidize the obsolete, failed approaches of the past instead of the exciting new solutions of the future.”

Isolated incident? Maybe Al Gore was having a bad day?

Not so much.

Far more damaging is the administration’s attack on fundamental constitutional rights that we ought to have and do have as American citizens. The very idea that an American citizen can be imprisoned without recourse to judicial process or remedies, and that this can be done on the sole say-so of the president of the United States or those acting in his name, is beyond the pale and un-American and it ought to be stopped.

I hope Professor Joseph was misquoted, because Gore wasn’t all that shy about “lambasting” the new administration once he was out of office. One would think a historian would be more cognizant of recent history, and that two reporters would be unwilling to run such a bold claim without running a simple web search.

One would think.

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