Responding to John (My favorite pastime)

Figured I'd respond to John's comment about my earlier post regarding Victor Davis Hanson in open Blog form.=)

1) First, I note that the author of the survey has a book out entitled "Eve's Seed: Biology, The Sexes, and the Course of Human History." Now in and of itself, this logically says nothing about the merit of the survey conducted. But the fact that the author relies on a prism of Gender struggles in his analysis of history is probably a good indicator that he wasn't a fan of George W. Bush to begin with.

2)The survey is admittedly informal and unscientific. There's a word for that kind of poll in Methodology of Sampling. What is it? Hmm...Oh that's right: Worthless. It's akin to beginning your sample report by saying "I can't prove any of this nor can I provide evidence that I'm not lying."

3)The survey makes no indication about the specialties of the historians surveyed. While it might be interesting in an academic sense to note that a Historian specializing in Aboriginal Dance techniques of the latter 18th century, for example, considers Bush a failure, it doesn't really have any value towards an intelligent, objective analysis of his Presidency as it relates to the war on terror.

4)All historians are not created equal, nor does the popularity of an idea have any relation to its legitimacy, so who cares if the survey really is accurate. Afterall, the majority of physicists likely considered Einstein wrong when he released the first of his papers in the early 20th century. (My comparison here is not to Bush is Einstein. It's to say that Victor Davis Hanson is one of the great intellectuals in our country and probably the foremort military historian; therefore, i'm comfortable with agreeing with him even if most historians don't.)

5)I'm willing to wager money that his study was a poll of historians who belong to Universities. Not that it needs mentioning, but University professors are overwhelmingly liberal. Ironically, California as an example employs Liberals in 8 out of 10 faculty positions. (8/10 sounds familiar. I forget why...)

6)The author would be shot in any Academic conference for including this passage: "(Moreover, it seems likely that at least eight of those who said it is a success were being sarcastic, since seven said Bush’s presidency is only the best since Clinton’s and one named Millard Fillmore.)"

7)Did I mention that Victor Davis Hanson is probably smarter than all those 416 historians combined?

Anyway, must get back to work before I get fired.

[Update: Corrected my generally poor writing in the post]