D-Day Plus 61 Years
Today is the anniversary of the feat that I consider to be the greatest logistical achievement in the history of mankind, the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Michelle Malkin
points us to a few good posts. Rick Moran (aka our old buddy Superhawk) has a
terrific post on the day history balanced on the knife-edge. W. Thomas Smith (in an article published last year on this date) discusses why the Marines (mostly)
were not involved in the D-Day invasion. (No permalinks on that article; you may have to scroll down to "Hitting the Beach!")
Scott Johnson links to this
terrific article by David Gelernter which highlights a point I've thought about but not discussed here.
My political credo is simple and many people share it: I am against phonies. A cultural establishment that (on the whole) doesn't give a damn about World War II or its veterans thinks it can undo a half-century of indifference verging on contempt by repeating a silly phrase ("the greatest generation") like a magic spell while deploying fulsome praise like carpet bombing.
The campaign is especially intense among members of the 1960s generation who once chose to treat all present and former soldiers like dirt and are willing at long last to risk some friendly words about World War II veterans, now that most are safely underground and guaranteed not to talk back, enjoy their celebrity or start acting like they own the joint. A quick glance at the famous Hemingway B.S. detector shows the needle pegged at Maximum, where it's been all week, from Memorial Day through the D-Day anniversary run-up.Back in my left-wing, anti-war (Vietnam) days, people would often ask if there were any war worth fighting. I quickly latched on to WWII. Of course, it's literally true that it was a war worth fighting, but from the Left's standpoint, fighting Hitler was a good thing. He opposed communism, attacked the Soviet Union, and he discriminated (and worse) against minorities.
But as always with the Left, you praise something in order to bash something else. World War II was a club with which to bash Vietnam. If the big one was a good war, then Vietnam and Korea were bad wars.
Of course, as the Left got more sophisticated, they still managed to find things about WWII to despise America for; reading from right to left, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moaning about those "atrocities" was muted during the Vietnam era but picked up quickly once the war had ended, for the simple reason that the Left no longer needed a good war with which to bash Vietnam.
We can see a similar effect today. Suddenly the first Persian Gulf War and Afghanistan have become the "good wars" which are used to bash the Iraq War. Never mind that the American Left did not support either of these "good wars" when they were first proposed.
