Patrick Kinna has died at 95 years old - RIP

If you're at all into history there is nothing quite like the obituaries in the London Telegraph and other English newspapers.

This is a good example. It's the obituary of Patrick Kinna, who was Winston Churchill's private secretary during World War II.

Here's a sample:
"Offered a lift by a general and two staff officers, Kinna sat in the front of the car, with a rifle between his knees which was pointing at the general's head. The general asked if the safety catch was on, and Kinna – who had received no arms training – replied that he had no idea. The car was stopped, and the general examined the weapon to find that the catch was not engaged and there was a live bullet up the spout. Kinna never forgot the dressing-down he received."

The story about what Churchill, naked, said to Franklin Roosevelt when the president surprised him is also great.

And there are others.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/5012929/Patrick-Kinna.html

Perspective

Looking forward to Barry O's inauguration and the expected crowds, the government has officially declared that Washington D.C. will be a disaster area on January 20th.

I think that's a little over the top, openly declaring it to be a disaster area I mean, even though I started thinking of D.C. as pretty much of a disaster area at about the time Lyndon Johnson won reelection when I was a sophomore in high school in 1964. I was pretty ill informed back then. As the years went by I became better informed. I did enough reading about American history to attain some perspective and realize how naive I was back in high school.

Now I know that Washington D.C. has been a disaster area since at least July 4th of 1826 when both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died and the corrupt rapscallions down there realized there were no more of the founders around to look over their shoulders. July 4, 1826; that was the date when they started losing all shame. Not that they had a heck of a lot of shame to lose, because they were the natural product of democracy. And American Democracy, like all democracies, was doomed from the start. The amazing thing is how long it's more or less lasted. Even more amazing is that it seems well enough established to have at least a a certain amount of limping life in it, thank God.

For Winston Churchill was right on the money on the subject. "It has been said," he famously pronounced, "that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

Which sort of gets me back to my point about officially declaring Washington to be a disaster area. It's much too late in history to take that step. And it's much too early in Barry Obama's contribution to history to make his inauguration seem like the reason for doing it.

Meanwhile, here's a pretty funny article by Robert Ferrigno of National Review that puts some perspective on the changeover from George Bush to Barack Obama.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWQ0YTk4YWY5ZDU5ZWE4ZGU1YTk0YWU3NzYyNzY4OTM=

A great letter about wrestling and the media

Jonah Goldberg at National Review's blog The Corner posted this letter from a reader which took me back even farther than the writer can remember. He talks about the World Wrestling Federation in the 1980's. I remember when me, Sam and Jas were watching Bobo Brazil wrestle the bad guys in the late 1950's. I don't know whether Sam and Jas realized that wrestling was phony back then, but I did. Just as I know the claims of fairness by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the New York Times are utterly phony.

Here's the letter for you wrestling fans:

"I’m 31, and when I was a kid the World Wrestling Federation would not admit that what it was doing was fake. We all knew Hulk Hogan and Jake the Snake were really just doing a big sweaty man-ballet, but they would never admit that fact. The media today is just like the WWF back then. They won’t admit that what they’re doing is phony, and that almost every supposedly non-partisan, registered independent host on the networks, CNN, and MSNBC is a liberal democrat. They, like the WWF in 80’s, will not admit that their obvious charade is phony."

Me again - I'm just re-reading that letter and realizing the writer was just being born when I was 31 years old. It's good to see a member of the younger generation is growing up smart. Or maybe this member of the younger generation is getting old enough to be smart.

There's an old political saying. I think it was Winston Churchill who used to say:
'A man who's a conservative at age 18 has no heart.
A man who's a liberal at age 30 has no head.'