Soviets

The United States cannot afford a 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. president

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a book about religion called Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion). As a contribution to the understanding of religion, it is, like much of Freud’s work, both banal and outrageous. But it occurs to me that its catchy title as well as its main thesis — religion, Freud wrote, was invented to fulfill “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” — has a certain pertinence to the large-scale entertainment now being offered to the public by Democrats eager to salvage the reputation of President Joe Biden.

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Was JFK any ‘good’ as a president?

How should we assess the value of a US president? In the case of John F. Kennedy, who died sixty years ago, the box denoting youthful vigor clearly gets a checkmark. Kennedy was just forty-six at the time of his assassination, which makes him younger than Hunter Biden is now. The box denoting the “vision thing” gets checked as well, if only because Kennedy saw the potential for beating the Soviets in the race to put a man on the moon, famously declaring, “We choose to do this, not because [it is] easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” Also to be considered is the collective trauma of the events of November 22, 1963.

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