Sam Cooke must have been singing about VD Hanson, the “neocon court historian,” whose ignorance about World War Two seeps to the surface, where Pat Buchanan skims it off and sends it to the sewage disposal plant.

When Bush says he’ll be “vindicated by history,” he must think Hanson will be running the Ministry of Truth. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Jena (where Marx would later get his doctorate), Schiller tells his budding history students to “fill in the blanks” so history can have “meaning” (i.e., make it up). Karl Marx did just that, and it’s Hanson’s gig, too.

Pat tells Hanson to go back to teaching undergrads about Thucydides. Having done that myself, I can assure VD that he’ll be in good company: they won’t read the book either.