The Great War’s Great Price

Rich Terrell

National Review

Revisiting the wreckage, on the centenary of the armistice

"There is no monument to the First World War on the National Mall. Along the two-mile carpet of memory we have created between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, we honor the Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Second World War, and the Korean War. But nothing there memorializes the other great American war of the 20th century, which we entered in April 1917 and saw to its conclusion the following November. This is peculiar, since no other modern war was waged by Americans with such outstandingly pristine expectations. It was, as President Woodrow Wilson intoned, to be “the war to end all wars,” the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” the war to establish a world order of “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” Measured against those slogans, no other 20th-century war produced such meager results, either, which is the principal reason Americans have chosen to forget World War I so completely.

"And not just on the National Mall. No American combatants produced memoirs of wartime as powerful as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) or Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920). Not even the most heralded of American fiction about the Great War, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), is a serious match for Erich Maria Remarque’s  (1928) All Quiet on the Western Front. The one anniversary the war acquired on the public calendar, Armistice Day, was homogenized into Veterans’ Day in 1954. And no wonder: Fully half of the 4.7 million American soldiers mobilized for the war never even made it to the scenes of combat in France before the armistice was declared." . . .

Florida's chronic electile dysfunction

How ironic that both cartoons added by TD are from Florida 2000.

President Trump warning that he will be "watching closely."

Newt Gingrich: As Democrats try to steal elections, their dishonesty threatens the very fabric of our country "The Democratic supervisor of elections for Broward County, Florida, Brenda Snipes, has a consistent record of breaking the law and trying to steal elections." . . .

Broward Elections Supervisor Mixed Good and Bad Provisional Ballots . . . "Snipes, who has previously been found guilty of violating Florida election law on two separate occasions, initially refused to disclose the number of mail-in absentee ballots that her office received but was ordered to do so on Friday night by a Florida judge. 

"As the polls closed on Tuesday night, Scott was leading incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson by more than 50,000 votes, but that margin has since narrowed to roughly 10,000 votes as Broward and Palm Beach County have continued to report absentee ballots.

"The lack of transparency has invited allegations of corruption by prominent Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and President Trump." . . .

Here we go: Rick Scott files third lawsuit to ‘IMPOUND’ Broward, Palm Beach voting equipment

The media can’t stop making ridiculous accusation of racism against Trump

Nakamura’s piece suffers from the same defects as Farhi’s. He ignores the fact that Trump told Ryan to sit down only after she persisted in interrupting his attempt to take a question from another reporter.

Power Line  "Members of the Washington Post’s large stable of Trump haters keep making fools of themselves in the attempt to paint President Trump as a racist. The latest effort, typical of the others but probably even sillier, comes from the Post’s media critic Paul Farhi.

"Farhi notes that Trump has “singled out three African American women who are journalists” for abuse ” just for asking him questions.” He then accuses Trump of “reserving special nastiness” for African-American women.

Ryan

"But, as anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention knows, Trump is an equal opportunity abuser of journalists (and anyone else) he believes are unfair to him. He’s indiscriminate. Indeed, at the same media event in which Trump allegedly “singled out African-American women” he went even harder after Jim Acosta, a non-black male.

"Let’s look at what went down between Trump and the three black journalists Farhi cites. One is Abby Phillip, formerly of the Post and now with CNN. She asked Trump whether he hoped Matt Whitaker, the newly appointed acting attorney general, would “rein in” the Mueller investigation.

"Trump responded, “What a stupid question.” He also noted what he considers Phillip’s propensity to ask stupid questions.

"Phillip’s question about Whitaker is, indeed, stupid. If Trump answered it affirmatively, he would be opening himself up to new accusations of obstructing justice.

"There’s no basis for concluding that Trump answered as he did because Phillip is black. Trump frequently denounces questions and questioners who ask questions that are stupid or that he doesn’t like. Phillip’s question fit both categories. And Trump didn’t attack her for “just asking a question.” Farhi is dishonest to make this claim." . . .

The second reporter Farhi cites is April Ryan. Ryan is an embarrassment. She runs a close second to Acosta in the anti-Trump obnoxiousness sweepstakes and seems eager to close the slight gap between the two.