People rise and fall like buoys on the water.
A great puzzle for Stalin was why the British threw Winston Churchill out of office in 1945. The last meeting of the “Big Three” included Clement Attlee in place of the cigar-chomping Churchill, as well as Harry Truman in lieu of the deceased FDR. The British people felt that victory over Japan and the end of the war were in sight. They had had enough of their wartime prime minister and defeated Churchill’s conservatives by a landslide. They may have jumped the gun, but they were already looking to a post-war England and gave the task of running the country to Attlee. Churchill would again rise to be prime minister in 1951. When King George VI wanted to give Churchill a high honor known as the Order of the Garter, the then-former prime minister answered, “How can his Majesty give me the garter when the people just gave me the boot?” He received the same honor from the king’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth, nine years later.
Another puzzle is how well the U.S. combined forces are destroying Iran. Ostensibly, the Air Force and Navy have only been under Donald Trump 2.0 and his people for 15 months. How can the American forces be performing so well after 12 years of Obama and Biden? One would think that they would be rusty or unprepared. It would appear that the fighting ethos never died in the American forces. The change in leadership that includes Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine, and Admiral Brad Cooper has led to an incredibly successful bombing campaign and presently blockage of Iranian shipping around the Straits of Hormuz.
Great men and women are a product of their times. Had Donald Trump not broken the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris chain, the U.S. would already be a third-world basket case. Dwight Eisenhower was catapulted by General George C. Marshall over 400 more senior officers in order to lead the greatest amphibious landing in the modern era. There is an expression in the Talmud that God creates the medicine before the illness. At key points in history—including Elon Musk buying Twitter and breaking the Left’s stranglehold on information—people have stepped up to get the immediate job done. Their names are often written in the history books, though many remain unknown for their acts that changed the course of history.
While there are great leaders even today, we also have the opposite. Look at Senator John Thune (R-SD). He is a typical Washington barnacle. The provisions of the SAVE America Act are meant to guarantee fair and honest elections; they are in no way tilted to illegally help either party. Yet, he can’t be bothered to pass the legislation, though most agree that Republicans will benefit from having photo ID and citizenship confirmation. Why wouldn’t Thune work day and night to pass this key piece of legislation? Why does he periodically call a quorum in the Senate in order to prevent Donald Trump from making recess appointments, as all of his predecessors did (except for Biden—they did the same thing to him)? Because John Thune is the opposite of a hero, the antithesis of the man who rises to the occasion. He doesn’t care for the American people, MAGA, or Donald Trump. His allegiance is to the shady ways of Washington that guarantee that each member of Congress becomes a millionaire. He knows that fair elections mean more Donald Trumps and fewer John Thunes. He is a coward and a failure as a “leader” of the Senate. He hates Donald Trump’s nearly 80 million voters no less than do the wild-eyed lefty Democrats. He will be forgotten by history because he doesn’t have the spine or courage to do the brave act of making American elections fair and truly "of the People." He and many of his colleagues in the Senate deserve to be in the doghouse more than in the People’s House.
Thune is not alone in the pantheon of losers, failures, and cowards. Tony Fauci abused his position to destroy education, businesses, and the lives of American citizens. He could have been that reassuring voice that led America through and out of the pandemic. Instead, he forced masks and six-foot distancing that had zero basis in science as making a real difference in spreading the virus. As Bobby Kennedy, Jr. has pointed out, Fauci cleared out any and all possible conventional treatments for COVID like ivermectin, so that the mRNA vaccines could be foisted on the people on an expedited emergency basis. He was never honest with the American people about the side effects of these experimental drugs, and it would appear that not all of the data created by Pfizer and BioNTech were released prior to people being injected—often against their will—with drugs of unknown efficacy. He posed as the midget god “Science!” but he did more to harm real science than anyone before him.
Joining the Hall of Shame of small men are the elected leaders of Europe. Not one of them loves his country, people, or cultural history enough to stop the invasion of illegal aliens of an incompatible culture who have no interest in becoming good Brits, French, Dutch, or Germans. They have displayed weakness at every turn and can neither stop the tsunami of new arrivals nor even find the internal fortitude to eject alien criminals who have harmed citizens. Their people suffer from lost culture, diminishing personal safety, and disappearing public peace and quiet. They don’t have the courage to apologize to their citizens for their suffering from increased crime and disorder stemming from the arrival of people who do not want to become a part of the local culture. They were no-shows when the current Iran War started and laughed at Donald Trump when he warned them about relying on Russia for their natural gas needs. They don’t care about their citizens and would rather bow to the green gods than let their people have normal air conditioning and travel options. Europe wants to add “climate costs” to air travel and effectively reduce the number of people who can afford to fly. Evil, thy name is Macron, Starmer, etc.
Incredible wealth and peace are the breeding grounds for pusillanimous men, like the leaders of colleges and universities that did nothing while deranged leftists and Muslims demanded the mass murder of Israelis and Jews (“intifada revolution”). They hid with their million-dollar salaries and tenured sinecures behind claims of free speech, but if I go to their campuses and start calling black students the “N Word” or tell every fat student how ugly and repulsive he or she looks, I would be escorted off campus in record time. Wealth often allows “leaders” to punt on important decisions or eschew risk for the safety of their stock portfolio. Peace from foreign attack or invasion makes for laziness in protecting the border from people who have zero right to be in the United States. We are blessed with plenty and the flipside is a leaderless class that, for every Trump or Musk, there is a thousand risk-averse business and political leaders who won’t take the right path or advance the interest of the people if they may lose out by doing so. The massive fraud that appears to be everywhere in the U.S. is due to no need for balanced budgets and a lackadaisical view of the prudent use of public funds.
I could name a dozen generals from World War II, but maybe one from the present conflict. Great men are at the right place at the right time and rise to the occasion. They are few and today they are even rarer.