Having previously demonstrated that members of the right-wing tend to struggle with numbers (see Iraq Study Group report on IED attacks for more details) and spelling (see the Right Brothers spelling of Political Consultant James Carville’s name), CNN Headline News Commentator Glenn Beck seems to be bent on illustrating how little the right knows about history as well.
On Thursday’s show Beck said, "Perhaps not coincidentally, today is December 7th. It is the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, an attack that finally woke this country up to the fact that we could no longer avoid war. So with that in mind, the real story today is that appeasing our enemies in Iran and Syria and compromising our demands in hopes of peace will end the same, exact way it did 65 years ago."
Where to start? The lesson that Beck says the US only learned at Pearl Harbor had arguably been taught several times before. The British taught this lesson in a manner which precipitated the War of 1812. More than a century later US lives would be lost when the British vessel Lusitania was sunk by torpedoes fired from a German U-boat. So to say that the US only learned this lesson when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor is clearly inaccurate.
As for appeasement, that was more a British position than an American one. It was Neville Chamberlain (soon to be replaced by Winston Churchill) who came away from a conference with Adolf Hitler proclaiming "peace in our time."
It was the leadership of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that lead the United States into that war, just as Democrat Woodrow Wilson had led the United States into War in 1917.
In fact, Democrats as a whole have been much more ready to take their place on the world stage than have Republicans. Dwight D. Eisenhower may have begun sending troops to Vietnam, but it was under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that US intervention in Southeast Asia escalated. In fact, it fell to another Republican, Richard M. Nixon to withdraw the troops.
Later on, Democrat Bill Clinton would send US troops into Haiti and the Balkans and presided over most of the US’s troubled actions in Somalia.
So the right-wing objection that Democrats historically are defeatist is demonstrably not true.
Numbers, spelling and now history. Remember, these are the guys who brought us No Child Left Behind.