The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.
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Some years ago, five or six years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I was asked to participate in a conference at Boston University’s marvelously named Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
The details of the conference are swaddled in the mists of times gone by, but I do remember that part of my talk was devoted to some thoughts about our tendency to deploy language to emasculate surprise. In particular, I dilated on the curious phrase “the foreseeable future.” With what cheery abandon we employ it! Yet what a nugget of unfounded optimism those three words embrace!
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Eighty years ago on June 6, 1944 the United States joined with Great Britain, the free French forces, and Canada to mount a bold invasion of the beachhead in Normandy, France as a last-ditch effort to gain a foothold in Europe against the conquering forces of Hitler’s Germany.
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Monday, a week ago, Holocaust Day was marked by solemn remembrances in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world. It was marked in the U.S., as has been customary, by a presidential address, where Biden said nothing that would garner more than perfunctory notice.
Turns out that that was by design. For Biden had already approved a decision that gives cheer to the shade of Hitler and all his modern wanna-be-s — embargoing any arms to Israel that would allow them to keep Hamas from surviving intact and reasserting its plan for death to Israel.
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Fox News’ Bret Baier, who, like Bill O’Reilly before him, has used his perch as a television personality to become a writer of history books (and, like O’Reilly, co-writes these history books with a “collaborator,” formerly known as a ghostwriter), writes on the Fox News website about the “parallels” between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the late U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Baier notes the parallels — both addressed a joint session of Congress during Christmastime even as their nation’s capitals were being bombed; both showed courage in leading their people against an aggressor nation; both were named Time’s Man of the Year; and both took defiant stands against more powerful enemies that were besieging their countries. But these parallels are all superficial. The stakes are far different. Churchill saved Western civilization. Zelenskyy is attempting to save Ukraine’s independence.
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After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
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Almost imperceptibly, as political discourse continues to be a discordant contest between haters and admirers of President Trump with no journalistic distinction between comment and reporting, there has been substantial progress toward an improved strategic environment for the United States and the West generally.
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