Sophocles is believed to have written some 140 plays. We have seven essentially complete and intact. Just seven.

What is the likelihood we have the seven best from that 140-plus?

The VDH column reminds us of this --

"He who does not have 3,000 years at his fingertips is living hand-to-mouth."
~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every named incompetent in the article is culpable and every one should be brought up on treason charges.

It is almost always a mistake to support the overthrow of a stable government,such as those in Libya and Egypt, whether it be a good one or a bad one. The succeeding turmoil caters to the nut fringe that will seek to destroy us.

We have turned an Egypt from one which had reached a modus vivendi with Israel into one which we and Israel will soon come to regret.

Somehow we need to be saved from know nothings.

Having been raised on westerns and stories about WWII, I still cannot believe that we never even sent the cavalry for those brave people.

Don't expect any Pho Persons to understand this.

Victor Davis Hanson again demonstrates that applying the lessons of the classics and ancient history helps us to understand where people keep going wrong. Over time nothing changes except the faces of the players. Humanity stumbles into the same ruts every age.

It certainly wasn't that obscure youtube video (with 17 views three months after it was posted there), although the enemy appreciates being handed another pretext for murdering us, especially after being alerted by the cowards at the helm of this Administration. After the demises of Osama and Qaddafi, Obama's (and Hillary's) chest thumping rodomontade infuriated the bloodthirsty jihadi, leading to the latest attacks on Americans and the embassies and colsulates that are American overseas property. Brennan's "gutsy call" meme just hangs there like an obscenity, not only untrue but laughable. If ever a president and his team lacked testicular fortitude, now's that time.

Not only that--the worst aspect of aftermath of the SEAL team's dispatching of Osama is Obama's undisciplined immediate publicity orgy before the intelligence scooped up in Abbottabad could be acted upon. Who knows how much more of the al-Qa'eda organization, including Dr. al-Zawahiri, could have been neutralized had the president just kept his mouth shut for a few weeks?

Overmatched by strategic and human affairs, Obama is not a chess player, not even a poker player, but a vainglorious bluffing blowhard who just had his hand called by the once again growing remnants of Al Qaeda, whom he assured us were about to shrink to insignificance. Instead, he's the one who's shrinking.

As VDH so tellingly writes, "Nothing, after all, is quite so dangerous as talking loudly while carrying a small stick."

consulate

Hanson is our contemporary reigning classicist. He expounds current events through the long eye of history. All for the benefit of hoi polloi.

#9: Sorry this comes so late, but full marks for using hoi polloi correctly!