"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
This ‘sophisticated’ critique of Bush, however, says more about his critics than it does about him. Indeed, European derision of presidents with thick accents and unprepossessing demeanours has a long history. Abraham Lincoln was a backwoods lawyer from nowhere, derided internationally for his homespun suits and his moral fervour. But Lincoln abolished slavery, united the States and founded the modern Republican party. Harry Truman was a conservative, small-town Democrat following in the large footsteps of a born communicator, FDR. But no president ever made more momentous decisions for his country and the world, dropping the A-bomb on Japan, relieving the besieged Berlin by air, launching the Marshall Plan and sending troops to Korea…
The sophisticates’ forgetfulness of history is dangerous. When there is no Lincoln, Truman, Reagan or Bush, who is there? There is Bill Clinton and the European Union. An attitude of supine indifference, glossed as multilateralism, was the fertile seedbed of Osama bin Laden and led directly, through outrages of escalating daring, to September 11. And the claim that in the absence of a strong America the EU can mount an effective response to genocide was, surely, for ever disgraced on the killing fields of Srebrenica. Let those two events stand as testament to the outlook of the liberal Left, and shame the deluded fans of Michael Moore.