I believed Vladimir Putin when he told President Trump that the Russians did not attempt to influence the 2016 election.  I also believed Michael Corleone when he told Kay Adams that he didn’t have Connie’s husband killed.

Comment on Peggy Noonan's Column of 8/17/2017

Peggy is conflating the role of history with the role of government.

The function of history is to preserve, explore, analyze and explain the past with the varnish off and with the aim of determining the truth in the context of the past for the present and the future.

Monuments erected by governments and public and quasi-public institutions do not preserve the past; rather they lionize the past as an example for the present and the future.  What business does government have in lionizing people who rejected the peaceable transition of the Federal government mandated by the Constitution to establish a regime that existed for the primary  purpose of protecting racial-based slavery?

History is not your plaything.

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson

At the outset of his Presidency, Eisenhower was cautiously optimistic that he could rely on the Joint Chiefs to play a major role in national security affairs, from participating in crisis management to meeting the ' 'long haul" needs of the Cold War by developing a defense posture that would not cripple the economy. But by the end of his administration, he had practically given up using the JCS for those purposes. Increasingly, he turned elsewhere for politico-military advice and assistance that the JCS should have rendered. One side effect was to nudge the administration toward covert operations and the use of surrogates, recruited and organized by the CIA, in lieu of regular military forces and military planners. Though the chiefs had some notable successes (e.g., Lebanon), they were too few and far between to alter the overall picture. Far more typical were the fractious debates that accompanied the Joint Chiefs' deliberations on the guided missile program and related issues like nuclear targeting. The reforms of 1953 and 1958 notwithstanding, there was more dissatisfaction with the Joint Chiefs' performance by the end of the Eisenhower administration than at any time to that point in their history.

Council of War, Steven L. Rearden

"Leave the gun.  Take the cannoli."

Peter Clemenza, played by Richard S. Castellano in The Godfather.

For fifteen years Lanny and his old friend had been watching the experiment in the Soviet Union and arguing about it. Johannes, taking the negative, had delighted himself by collecting ironical stories, to be repeated to the credulous Lanny, and over Lanny's shoulder to Johannes's two misguided sons. One such story had to do with two German business men, one of whom was going to make a trip into the proletarian paradise, and promised his friend to write a full account of what he found there. "But," objected the friend, "you won't dare to write the truth if it's unfavorable." The other replied: "We'll fix it this way. I'll write you everything is fine, and if I write it in black ink it's true, and if in red ink the opposite is true." So he went, and in due course his friend received a letter in black ink, detailing the wonders of the proletarian paradise. "Everybody is happy, everybody is free, the markets are full of food, the shops well stocked with goods—in fact there is only one thing I cannot find, and that is red ink." 

Dragon's Teeth, Upton Sinclair 1942

"I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast."  W.C. Fields

"A billion, here a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."
Attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen

Northern Delaware experienced widespread thunder showers this morning.  I recall years ago walking outside at night during a thunder snowstorm in a small town in New Hampshire.  No lightning was visible, and the claps of thunder sounded like sandbags dropping onto a carpeted floor of a well stocked linen closet upstairs in a house across the street.

A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender, “Do you play music here?”  The bartender replies, “We play both types: Country and Western.”

"The setting-up of a small planning department to devise general policies for the new Ministry [of Economic Warfare] was an interesting experiment, but it was, no doubt, foreign to the British administrative genius, and in November 1939 its head could only say, 'no one knows what the Plans Department does, but whatever it does is done with efficiency and dispatch.'"

W.N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade

Having visited the Really Big Law Firm to prepare a motion for a permanent restraining order, a White Whale walked into a bar just off Times Square called Father Mapple’s and ordered a Singapore Sling.  After serving the drink, the bartender said, “Well, shipmate, we don’t see many White Whales in this place,” and the White Whale replied, “At prices like these, you won’t see many more.”  At the other end of the bar a gaunt man in a black frock coat surreptitiously reached for a harpoon.

"We in France are soldiers and we are citizens. Our citizenship is another occasion for pride! For the poor it consists in supporting and maintaining the rich in their power and their idleness. At this task they must labor in the face of the majestic equality of the laws, which forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. This equality is one of the benefits of the Revolution. Why, that revolution was effected by madmen and idiots for the benefit of those who had acquired the wealth of the crown. It resulted in the enrichment of cunning peasants and money-lending bourgeois. In the name of equality it founded the empire of wealth. It delivered France to those moneyed classes who have been devouring her for a century. Now they are our lords and masters."

Anatole France, The Red Lily