Login
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
The places where they were raised and to which they traveled formed the Founding Fathers’ geographic orientation, which influenced their view of the nation and what the country could become, according to Michael Barone.
While George Washington had “a map that goes north by northwest,” Thomas Jefferson “saw the country from [the] perspective of the West,” says Barone, a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and a co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics” since its first edition in 1972.
In his new book “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” Barone explains how the differing “mental maps” of Founders such as Washington, Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton were sometimes in opposition, but together formed our great nation.
Barone joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the little-known facts about the Founding Fathers he uncovered while researching the new book.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Understanding the Founding Fathers’ ‘Mental Maps’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Article tags
Observances were held in Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of the "Great Escape," in which 76 prisoners tunneled out of a Nazi POW camp.
The post Pictures: Poland Commemorates 80th Anniversary of ‘Great Escape’ from Nazi POW Camp appeared first on Breitbart.
Joe Biden turning against Israel puts Scott “in mind of the time when England stood alone against a genocidal maniac.” That was the time when Hitler’s National Socialist regime was allied with Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They signed their Pact on August 23, 1939, and Stalin began handing Jews directly to the Gestapo. In September, 1939, both powers invaded Poland, effectively starting World War II.
In November, 1939, Stalin invaded Finland and in April of 1940 Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway. On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The genocidal maniac then turned his sights on England, standing alone during the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The American Communists, then collaborating with the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, picketed the White House to keep America out of the conflict, and fomented strikes in defense industries.
In the Battle of Britain (July 10, 1940 – October 31, 1940), England got some help from unofficial sources. Fliers from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia, Belgium, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even the USA, threw in with the Royal Air Force. As the Imperial War Museum explains:
Germany’s failure to defeat the RAF and secure control of the skies over southern England made invasion all but impossible. British victory in the Battle of Britain was decisive, but ultimately defensive in nature – in avoiding defeat, Britain secured one of its most significant victories of the Second World War. It was able to stay in the war and lived to fight another day.
In the style of John Lennon, “imagine” if the American president had been sending millions of dollars in cash to the Nazi regime. Imagine if the American president told Churchill to back off his military campaigns. Imagine if the American president and prominent senators had called for an election to remove Winston Churchill, and so on. Had such moves taken place, England might not have lived on to fight another day. The parallels are lost on Joe Biden, who in a 2020 debate said “Hitler invaded Europe,” like something from the drunk at the end of the bar.
As Scott notes, Biden and his brain trust “support the survival of Hamas,” genocidal maniacs pushing for a second Holocaust. The History of Jihad author Robert Spencer has thoughts on what this might mean for America:
What do Biden regime apparatchiks think will happen if Hamas defeats Israel and survives this war? Do they think that the jihadis will be so overflowing with gratitude to the U.S. that they won’t ever strike Americans or U.S. interests? They’re in for a rude surprise.
Article tags
Article tags
I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars, among other things. We learned something about grammar, rhetoric, Rome, and English in the process. In English we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and (I think) Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March.
I was a member of the St. Paul Academy High School Bowl team during my junior and senior years. By unanimous consent Chuck Berde was captain of the team. Chuck went on to get M.D./Ph.D. degrees from Stanford and more or less invent the medical specialty of pediatric pain relief. Chuck is Senior Associate in Perioperative Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Boston Children’s and Professor of Anesthesia (Pediatrics) at Harvard Medical School. In high school Chuck was also a good athlete and musician who somehow found time to play in a rock band with Steve Greenberg. Steve went on to write and produce “Funkytown,” the record that reached number 1 on charts around the world in 1980.
John Fitzpatrick and Jim Vose were the other members of the team. John is the Director Emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jim is a retired Minneapolis attorney. We were all friends. Below is a photo of us in our final appearance on the High School Bowl program. University of Minnesota Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies Robert Sonkowsky was the High School Bowl referee. He had to cool things down in case fights broke out. That is Professor Sonkowsky with his hand on my shoulder. I would like to say I was so much older then, but will leave it to Bob Dylan at this point.
In our last go-round during our senior year we won three weeks in a row and retired undefeated. In the third week we faced off against Hopkins High School. Chuck was good at everything, but he excelled in math and science. One of the questions our last week required knowledge of several scientific numbers and the performance of arithmetic operations on them to produce another number. What famous event occurred in that year? Without missing a beat, and I mean instantly, Chuck answered: “The assassination of Julius Caesar.”
Via InstaPundit, I learn that Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. I concur with Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion that March 14 should therefore be a holiday:
Marx performed the difficult feat of being wrong about everything. Most people are right about some things and wrong about others; the law of averages sets in. But if you are an ideologue, like Marx, and if your ideology is stupid, you can be wrong across the board. Marx’s historical analyses were either recycled conventional wisdom or wildly off the mark. He knew nothing about economics, which is why his labor theory of value–the lynchpin of his entire philosophy–is absurd. (Even Marx recognized that; he never finished the key section of Capital, leaving that inglorious task to Engels.) And he pontificated endlessly about workers and the means of production, without even once, as far as is known, setting foot in a factory.
Marx survives in historical memory for two reasons. First, hardly anyone has actually read Capital or his lesser works. Even a person of moderate intelligence could hardly do so without recognizing their foolishness. Second, Marx’s philosophy has served as a pretext for sadists to seize control of governments around the globe. Which is exactly what Marx intended.
Marx was a bad man, equally so in his private and public lives. He should be remembered only as an exemplar of how much damage a single-minded and hate-filled man can do.
As Steve notes, Joe Biden can’t even handle his cue cards and calls to dump the Delaware Democrat are surging by the day. That recalls events from the summer of 1972, another crucial election year.
The incumbent president was Richard Nixon, hated by the left for his role in exposing Stalinist spy Alger Hiss (see Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case). In 1972, the Soviet Union still controlled Eastern Europe under the Brezhnev Doctrine. For the American left, defense of the USSR was the primary task and in 1972 they had the candidate they wanted.
After WWII, George McGovern opposed President Truman’s “aggressive anti-Soviet policy,” which he considered “dangerous.” In 1948 McGovern supported Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, a front for the Communist Party. In 1972, McGovern’s position on “arms control” was essentially the same as the Soviets. America is to blame for the Cold War, McGovern believed, so the Soviets must arm and America must limit.
Nixon retained vice president Spiro Agnew, former governor of Maryland. McGovern picked Sen. Thomas Eagleton, a Harvard law grad and devout Catholic who opposed abortion and the war in Vietnam. McGovern backed Eagleton “1000 percent,” but then came an anonymous call.
On three occasions during the 1960s, Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and undergone electroshock treatment. After only 18 days, McGovern dumped Eagleton for Eunice Kennedy’s husband Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. Nixon bagged 60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern’s 37.5 and in the electoral college Nixon topped McGovern 520-17. The South Dakota Democrat carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
“McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon,” notes Victor Davis Hanson, “but the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.”
In 2024, with chaos on every hand, Democrats seek to dump the addled Biden. As this plays out, Kamala Harris proves capable of rivaling Biden in sheer incoherence. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens.
Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. In his sleep; so, like Lenin, Mao and Castro, and unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Ceausescu, he never paid a price for his crimes. The Victims of Communism remember:
Stalin died on this day in 1953.
He left behind a legacy of terror, famine, and mass murder.
Remember the victims. pic.twitter.com/HUBBYUZMwh
— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) March 5, 2024
Stalin ranks second only to Mao among history’s worst mass murderers. Those who knew him best understood how evil he was: his wife committed suicide and his daughter defected to America. Stalin’s malignant legacy lives on, as Russia has never fully emerged from his dark shadow. It is unfortunate that he wasn’t strung up like Mussolini or shot like Ceausescu. At this point, all we can do is revile him.
Lifelong Democrat Jeane J. Kirkpatrick came to the attention of former Democrat Ronald Reagan though her 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” As America’s future UN ambassador contended:
The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects.
The pattern is familiar enough: an established autocracy with a record of friendship with the U.S. is attacked by insurgents, some of whose leaders have long ties to the Communist movement, and most of whose arms are of Soviet, Chinese, or Czechoslovak origin. The “Marxist” presence is ignored and/or minimized by American officials and by the elite media on the ground that U.S. sup- port for the dictator gives the rebels little choice but to seek aid “elsewhere.”
Our “commitment to the promotion of constructive change worldwide” (Brzezinski’s words) has been vouchsafed in every conceivable context. But there is a problem. The conceivable contexts turn out to be mainly those in which non-Communist autocracies are under pressure from revolutionary guerrillas. Since Moscow is the aggressive, expansionist power today, it is more often than not insurgents, encouraged and armed by the Soviet Union, who challenge the status quo. The American commitment to “change” in the abstract ends up by aligning us tacitly with Soviet clients and irresponsible extremists like the Ayatollah Khomeini or, in the end, Yasir Arafat.
So far, assisting “change” has not led the Carter administration to undertake the destabilization of a Communist country. The principles of self-determination and nonintervention are thus both selectively applied.
Carter’s doctrine of national interest and modernization encourages support for all change that takes place in the name of “the people,” regardless of its “superficial” Marxist or anti-American content.
Surely it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the present governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos are much more repressive than those of the despised previous rulers; that the government of the People’s Republic of China is more repressive than that of Taiwan, that North Korea is more repressive than South Korea, and so forth.
Groups which define themselves as enemies should be treated as enemies. The United States is not in fact a racist, colonial power, it does not practice genocide, it does not threaten world peace with expansionist activities. . . . We have also moved further, faster, in eliminating domestic racism than any multiracial society in the world or in history.
No more is it necessary or appropriate to support vocal enemies of the United States because they invoke the rhetoric of popular liberation. It is not even necessary or appropriate for our leaders to forswear unilaterally the use of military force to counter military force. Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.
That probably got by Sen. Joe Biden. As Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) noted in 2010, the Delaware Democrat “makes few references to books and learned influences.” In 2024, to paraphrase ambassador Kirkpatrick, the failure of the Biden administration is now clear even to its architects.
Vaunce News