Historical Perspective

This is a keeper. Via Wizbang!:

A certain troll rolled out the lie so popular with the Left, that 'America is in the worst mess it has ever seen'. That moronic claim was quickly and efectively rebutted by a reader who signed himself "Mark L", a response so effective that I think it deserves its own column. Mark's response is as follows:

"Worst mess that it has ever been in? What is the horizon for your claim? This country was born in a big mess. It was something called the American Revolution. It made what is now going on in Iraq look like a walk in the park.

I don't think we are in a worse mess than we were in in 1814, when, due to foolish decisions by our legislature and executive branches of government we got ourselves involved in a war that ended up with our nation's capitol being burned and large segments of Maine being occupied by a foreign power.

Certainly it is not in the worst mess it has been in since, say . . . 1863. We were in the middle of a war that divided the country and killed hundreds of thousands of American.
We are not in the worst mess we have ever been in since 1918-19. Then an influenza epidemic killed tens of thousands of Americans, combined with a sharp deep recession.

Nor are we are not in the worst mess we have been in since 1929-39. Then we were experiencing a depression so big that up to 25% of all Americans were unemployed. It was made worse by bungling government intervention. People born in that era or who grew up in that era were smaller on average than their parents or children because they did not get enough to eat due to the Depression.

And I don't think we are in the worst mess we have ever been in since December 1941. Then we were pitched, half-prepared, into a war for our survival. A war we could have lost.

Nor do I think we are in the worst mess we have ever been in since 1961 when we almost blundered into a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

For that matter, we are hardly worse off than we were in the 1970s when the first oil shock, wage and price controls, and Keynsian economics led to staglaflation - a wicked brew of no economic growth combined with high inflation.

Certainly it is not in the worst mess it has ever been in since 1980. We had high unemployment and double digit inflation.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were pretty good, largely due to Reaganomics, despite a recession in 1991. Throughout the 1990s we had continuous and escalating terrorist attacks against the United States that culminated in the WTC attack in 2001. (We have not had any in this country since then, though.

I guess it is safe to say that we are in the worst mess we have ever been in since . . . well 2001.
If someone graduated from high school in that year, lacking any knowledge of what went on before, I guess they could conclude that in 2008 we are in the worst mess that this country has ever been in, but there is no other credible way of making that claim."