Imagine

As we have noted a time or two before, one labors to imagine what politics might be like if the mainstream media treated Democrats like it treats Republicans. Timothy Groseclose invited us to try in his invaluable book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind — but the media ignored the book. The media treatment of Groseclose’s book vividly illustrates its thesis.

In a twist on Groseclose’s thought experiment, Victor Davis Hanson devotes a long column to imagining how the FBI investigation of candidate and President Trump might have gone down on the 2008 election in an alternate universe. I am referring to Dr. Hanson’s January 20 American Greatness column “Should the FBI run the country?” Although it is a fantasy, it is, shall we say, based on fact and it is some kind of a classic. Lee Smith subsequently reviewed some of the relevant facts in the Wall Street Journal column “What if the FBI had probed Obama” (accessible here on Outline).

It occurs to me that Dr. Hanson seems to have written columns like the one linked above every week while he worked on The Second World Wars, his most recent volume of military history. While we’re into the project of imagining, I would like to imagine an alternate universe in which Dr. Hanson won both the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary and the Pulitzer Prize for History in the same year.

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