Normandy

Monday

The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, July 2024

The cunning of the Democrats’ lawfare On the right flank the aristocrats of the conservative intelligentsia dominated by the likes of Max Boot, David Frum, David French, Bill Kristol and George Will would rather compromise than soil their false pride; the haughty intellectual snobs are thus perfect targets for Alinsky’s “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules” — aristocratic intellectual elites that would rather die than support a judicial and policy juggernaut with bad table manners. As Victor Davis Hanson observed, Marquess of Queensberry Republicans would rather lose nobly than win ugly. — Adler Pfingsten Will Cherelle Parker become the next ‘America’s mayor’ in Philadelphia?

letters

Thursday

Ella Johnson

Joe Biden’s D-Day performance is evidence of his mental unfitness

President Joe Biden spoke in Normandy on the eightieth anniversary of D-Day Thursday — and only slightly made a fool of himself. As he entered the event, it looked as if he entirely missed where he was supposed to sit, but played it off with a nice salute to a veteran. In the middle of a rousing speech, he talked about how many Russians died in Ukraine... for mysterious reasons. He did a bit of a squat in an invisible chair as the speaker Lloyd J. Austin III was introduced. The debacle ended with Dr. Jill Biden leading Joe away as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, nimbly ran to greet D-Day veterans. And we can’t forget Biden’s subtle double fist pump after the jets flew over the ceremony.

d-day

Monday

Roger Kimball

This Memorial Day, reflect on your freedom

Last summer, I spent some time in and about Port-en-Bessin-Huppain in Normandy. The little fishing village and its surrounding towns on the English Channel (“La Manche,” “the sleeve” en français) is delightfully picturesque in that rugged, elemental way that proceeds from the collision of tempestuous sea and commanding headland. Expansive fields of corn and other crops ripened fast, orderly in their serried, midsummer ranks. Orange-red poppies punctuated the grassy, flower-strewn verge and complicated the landscape, heavy with age and history. Poppies are for remembrance — and there’s a lot to remember in these parts.

d-day memorial day

Wednesday

Timothy Jacobson

On D-Day at eighty

Traveling to Normandy fourteen years ago, we encountered a rare guide. He was a middle-aged Frenchman native to the neighborhood. I do not recall how long he had been at it, but he had learned something important about the guide business that was evident the day he shepherded us, and another American woman and her teenaged daughter, about the places made famous before any of us were born. He knew when to show, when to tell and when to relate something from his own experience that would enlighten ours. He took things in a certain order, which was not the order I would have guessed. First we stopped at the German cemetery at La Cambe, where 21,200 of the some-80,000 German soldiers who died in Normandy are interred. I remember few other visitors.

Normandy