If you have a lingering bad taste in your mind from last night’s disingenuous display (just to pick one example, Kerry said “judge me on my record,” then did not say one word about his 20 years of voting against every single military spending bill that ever crossed his desk), Victor Davis Hanson has a new column to clear your mental palate: If the Dead Could Talk.

For rare honesty in a dishonest age, I would prefer to return to the wisdom of those inscriptions on granite in our military resting places abroad than listen to the new global nonsense, which is as intellectually dishonest as it is dangerous in conveying the lie that ignorance, rather than evil, causes war — or that wars break out over craziness rather than the murderous intent of an aggressive party. I don’t think those asleep at St. Avold would like to hear that we fought the German Nazis and Japanese fascists the “wrong way” by relying too much on the Third and Seventh Armies, and too little on education, mutual understanding, and “getting the message out.”

Once, the Belgians in places like Wiltz and St. Vieth were not complaining about Americans “exporting democracy” — when Panzers were stopped in their countryside from renewing their murderous work. They did not believe that America needed quickly to join the League of Nations instead, or that the next election in Germany would bring them a better reprieve.

And the tens of thousands sleeping under their white marble crosses in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg from the Meuse-Argonne to Hamm would not agree that had we only been more reasonable and less bellicose we would have been more popular and liked. You see, they would not concede that millions followed Hitler because it was America’s fault in not offering the German people an alternative to barbarism. In fact, they didn’t much care why Germany hated America, only how to defeat it and then — but only then — to guide it on a new path away from its savage past.

Indeed, if our dead could rise out of their graves they would surely rebuke us for our present blasphemy — shaking their fingers and remonstrating that bin Laden and his followers, both active and passive, are no different from Hitler and the other evil killers of their own age, who deserve to be defeated, not reasoned with or apologized to, and not understood. The voices of our dead abroad murmur to us, the deaf, that a nation is liked not by being good and weak or bad and strong, but only by proving both principled and resolute.

Sleep in peace, you ten thousand of St. Avold, and let us pray that we, the smug beneficiaries of your ultimate sacrifice, may still wake up from our own slumber.