Cockburn is saddened to hear of Chuck Norris’s death, aged 86. He was an action star of the 1980s, a top meme of the 2000s – and an outspoken political thinker for almost all his career.
Norris was a close ally of now-Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who he endorsed for president in the 2016 campaign. In a tribute, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Norris as “a great friend of Israel and a close personal friend.”
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Back in 1986, Norris costarred with Lee Marvin in The Delta Force, an action flick inspired by the Hezbollah hijacking of TWA Flight 847 a year earlier. While the movie was being filmed, Norris was interviewed by the Sun Sentinel and told a reporter that the US was becoming a “paper tiger” in the Middle East.
It’s some coincidence that President Trump employed that same turn of phrase right as we learned of Norris’s death.
“Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER!” the President wrote on Truth Social this morning, in his latest screed decrying the lack of foreign support for the US-Israeli campaign in Iran.
Earlier this week, Trump said the Islamic Republic was a “paper tiger,” too. “This is a paper tiger that we’re dealing with now,” he said Monday. “It wasn’t a paper tiger two weeks ago. It’s a paper tiger now.”
Given how the last 40 years have played out, it seems Norris was overcautious in his concern for the US’s “paper tiger” status. As for NATO and Iran…
On our radar
BIG BEAUTIFUL BARRON Barron Trump, the President’s youngest son, turns 19 today. Last night Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi described him as “ikemen” (Japanese slang for “hunk”).
ON GUARD The Pentagon is planning to keep the National Guard deployed in DC until 2029, according to ABC News.
THOSE KIDS A juvenile curfew will be in place in DC’s Navy Yard neighborhood from 8-11 p.m. ET this weekend after a string of criminal incidents.
Bitter orange
A special guest was spotted at Butterworth’s on Tuesday evening for their St. Patrick’s Day celebration: Ian Paisley Jr., the former Northern Irish MP. Paisley’s father, the Reverend Ian, was the unionist firebrand who opposed the Good Friday Agreement and refused to share power with republican parties for decades.
Paisley Jr. had a couple of pints with a British journalist, but didn’t appear all too enthused with the bar’s playlist, which largely comprised of Irish rebel songs. He headed for the exit as the speakers blared “Come Out Ye Black and Tans.” So much for “no surrender”…
Pace-saving exercise
You don’t need a bloated old sot like Cockburn to tell you this, but: runners are smug. If they’re not breezing past you on the sidewalk in their skin-tight Lycra, they’re posting their best efforts on social media, just to make you feel fat and languid. Cockburn does not run; he festers. But at least Cockburn has never given away the location of an aircraft carrier during a war.
The latest revelation from French newspaper Le Monde’s “Strava files” series is that a young naval officer logged his morning run last Friday – just over 7km in 35 minutes – on the running app Strava… from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Because the officer was doing laps of the deck aboard the Charles de Gaulle, a French aircraft carrier, which – as any user could see from the app – was located northwest of Cyprus. Zut alors!
May this be a lesson to you, mon ami: careless runs cost lives.
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