“To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, the miracle of development.”

Winston Churchill explaining why he approved use of the atomic bomb before it had even been successfully tested, quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [again, sadly, she does not footnote this or any quotation]

“Troops departing from Japan in the heady days of December 1941 were given a booklet to enlighten them as to the nature of their enemies: ‘Westerners – being very superior people, very effeminate and very cowardly – have an intense dislike of fighting in the rain or the mist or at night. Night in particular (although it is excellent for dancing), they cannot conceive to be a proper time for war. In this, if we seize upon it, lies our great opportunity.’”

Quoted by Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [she does not footnote this or any quotation].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I point out that Mark Carney’s slick verbiage is stunningly unreliable, not because he lies on purpose but because his colossal Donald-Trump-like self-regard bends reality for him in real time in very Trumpian fashion.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that NATO meeting in Turkey instead of expelling it indicats a collapse of faith in the Western civilization NATO was created to protect.

“the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

George Washington’s 1789 Inaugural Address [https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it would help us clean up political discourse as well as understand the Middle East if friends and foes alike could set aside head-banging and acknowledge what Trump has characteristically gotten very right, and characteristically gotten badly wrong, on Iran.

“The president [Ronald Reagan], apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when they commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he’s telling the truth.”

Dave Barry Greatest Hits [re Iran-Contra mostly].

In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.