Word: heros
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...slightest doubt that if, say, John Edwards were the Democratic front runner, the issue would be considered an irrelevance. Indeed, during the months when Howard Dean was the front runner, it never came up. It comes up now only because the Democrats have providentially made John Kerry, war hero, their presumptive nominee...
Democratic Senator Max Cleland, another genuine war hero, was defeated in Georgia after he and other Senate Democrats had held up the establishment of the Homeland Security Department because of union rules. Democrats bitterly complained that Cleland's patriotism had been questioned. But it was not a matter of patriotism; it was a matter of seriousness: when crazed jihadists are flying airplanes into American buildings, the usual rules--including union rules--are suspended...
...hero he is. But a man of so many pirouettes hardly inspires confidence as a resolute President. That should not surprise us. The very idea that national service, even heroic service, necessarily correlates with great presidential leadership is simply irrational. By that logic, Douglas MacArthur would have made a great President. By that logic, Ulysses S. Grant was a great President. (It's not just an American phenomenon: the most decorated veteran in Israel's history, Ehud Barak, was a disastrous Prime Minister.) Even more impressive is the fact that two of the greatest war Presidents in American history--Abraham...
...waste and carnage and injustice of what he calls "Nixon's war." All true, except for one inconvenient fact. The man who got us into Vietnam--committing what is arguably the most egregious presidential misjudgment of the 20th century--was not Nixon. It was Kerry's political hero, John F. Kennedy: Ivy League, U.S. Navy, decorated officer whose wartime valor propelled him to Massachusetts Senator and then Democratic candidate for President of the United States. Sound familiar? So much for biography...
This makes one appreciate Hugo Whittier, the narrator and quasi-hero of Kate Christensen's remarkable novel The Epicure's Lament (Doubleday; 351 pages), all the more. At 40, Hugo is a lazy, handsome, brilliant, bitter, unscrupulous trust-fund dilettante who--having failed miserably as a drug dealer, gigolo and writer--is rattling around his ancestral mansion in upstate New York, waiting to die. Hugo is a coldhearted bastard, or he likes to think he is, and he spews hilariously venomous bile on anyone who comes within range. He is also a snob, a genuine sophisticate who sits around musing...