Have the Past 10 Years Been the Worst in U.S. History?

Sure, the past decade has brought us two intractable wars that have killed thousands of Americans and tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, the deadly 9/11 attacks and the worst economic meltdown in modern history.

But don't tell that to Fox News columnist Martin Sieff, the former Managing Editor of International Affairs, who took issue with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's recent speech to a "worshipful audience" on that subject at the annual Aspen Festival of Ideas in June.

Yes, the past decade was not, according to Sieff, "no great shakes," what with the wars, 9/11, and a "very bad but least not terminal Wall Street meltdown in September 2008," but the WORST decade in American history.

C'mon, wrote Sieff. Worse than the 1860s, when 650,000 Americans were killed on both sides in the Civil War – "the proportional equivalent of 6.5 million dying in war in five years?"

Worse than the 1950s, when "millions of terrified American children were drilled in hiding under their school desks as a supposed protection against thermonuclear war?"

Keep in mind, as terrible as the death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan are, they're 10 times under the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. And we haven't had race riots like we did under liberal Democrats Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968, have we? No one tried to turn back the "admirable" civil rights achievements of the 1960s and there haven't been mass graves dug in New York's Central Park to house the corpses of cholera victims like there were in the 1850s.

Do you think the past 10 years have been the worst in U.S. history?