VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama administration needs to abandon its Petraeus obsession:

In politically driven moods, the ancient Romans often wiped from history all mention of a prior hero or celebrity. They called such erasures damnatio memoriae.

The Soviet Union likewise airbrushed away, or “Trotskyized,” all the images of any past kingpin who became politically incorrect.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with doing the same to retired Gen. David Petraeus.

Read the whole thing.

As Bill McGurn noted in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, “Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq.” Petraeus was the man who made that possible until Obama unilaterally chose to throw that all away as part of his reelection bid, as Dexter Filkins of the leftist New Yorker noted in 2014, thus giving rise to ISIS. No wonder Obama wants him punished in his last year in office.