P.J. O’Rourke Response: Dear Yvonne, thank you for your blessing, and our blessings right back at you and your husband! Yes, alas, your question is rhetorical. Being “woke” seems to mean having the ability to sleep with your eyes wide open. But here’s hoping, anyway, that the cold bath that is real life will wake some wokesters up. Re: The Unseen Costs of the War on Terror
P.J. O’Rourke Response: Speaking of irony, Roy... the Greek root of the word, eiron , means “liar.” Which is a fancy, academic way of saying I was pulling your leg. I was just being a smartass about where this craze for “defunding” municipal services could go if it went too far. I happen to love my garbagemen like brothers. Everybody around us – even our nearest and dearest – tend to add garbage to our lives. Garbagemen take it away ! It’s
noble job and a hard one, and I’m always sure to put a case of premium beer tied in a bow on top of my garbage cans at Christmas. “I think I love you!” Today’s defund the sanitation was hilarious but sad at the same time, like those morons who have learned too quickly that if you defund the police, you had better already owned defensive weapons. I am happily married (more than a quarter of a century) to a man who also has a great sense of humor. May God bless you and yours and keep all safe and healthy and thank you for starting my day with an excellent bit of sarcasm. Will the “Woke” every truly wake up? (Rhetorical, darn it anyway. Sigh) – Yvonne B.
Kim, I take exception to your assertion that the U.S. lost soft power by what you describe as “its wavering support for NATO, leaving the Paris Climate Agreement, and ending funding for the World Health Organization.” I don’t call it “wavering support” for NATO for the U.S. to insist that its NATO partners actually start paying their fair share (what they had pledged to pay, but hadn’t for decades) and wondering aloud if NATO were worthwhile if the countries most directly affected didn’t want to fund it and expected us to. Leaving the Paris Climate Accords made sense. We were reducing carbon emissions at a greater rate than called for by the Accords. No other nation was meeting its goals. Why should we be
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American Consequences
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