Many years ago during Bill Clinton's presidency, my teenage son was asked to give remarks at a baccalaureate service for his high school graduation. In his text, he quoted former President Theodore Roosevelt's famous "Citizenship in a Republic" speech from 1910 about a citizen's responsibility for action over mere words:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena...
Reviewing the prepared text, a female teacher told my son that wherever the word "man" came up, he should insert "and woman." This puzzled the teenager, who thought quotations were sacred.
I agreed. I left the decision to him, but pointed out that final senior grades were already turned in. He ended up using only Roosevelt's own words. I marked the incident down as academic silliness. But with passing time, I realized it was my first real exposure to the modern mental cancer of Woke.
It has metastasized seriously since. The second Trump administration, and especially Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, have labored valiantly in my opinion against serious opposition to excise this empty virtue signaling from our culture.
If you're like me, you've come across numerous such instances in recent times. They are puzzling and fly in the face of facts. Anyone could see with their own eyes that Joe Biden was not sharp as a tack, that Kamala Harris was not presidential caliber, that the lethal Afghan withdrawal was not a great success, and so many more.
Then just the other day, I came across a story about the unanimous progressive majority of the City Council in Ann Arbor, Michigan deciding that hundreds of Neighborhood Watch signs throughout that community's residential areas were biased and would make certain people on those streets feel excluded.
I said to myself now, who exactly would feel excluded and threatened by signs warning that neighbors on that residential street were watching out for each other?
You might have the same answer: people who don't want their actions watched. Which led to this week's short, but emphatic audio commentary, which you can hear by clicking on the flag here:
In this week's Sunday column I examined the welcome, but long overdue, housecleaning coming to Congress this fall.
A record number of members from both parties are retiring, giving up, moving on to more productive or satisfying employment, and even dying to get out of there.
As a whole, the job approval of Congress is just one tiny tick above an historic low while the disapproval rating has soared to a new high. You have to work at it to be so disliked,
In theory, this should flush some fresh blood into both the House of Representatives and Senate. Hopefully, that happens and it's not just a crowd of political performers who happen to be younger.
A lot depends on enough of us turning out to select the victorious newcomers. It's important. Because if Democrats overcome the slim majority margins of Republicans in both chambers, their plan is to gridlock President Trump's legislative agenda for every second of his final two years in the White House and, oh by the way, attempt to impeach him again and again.
The most recent audio commentary unsuccessfully attempted to predict the reception Donald Trump would receive at the first dinner of the White House Correspondents Association that he attended as the nation's chief executive. I did not foresee yet another attempted assassination.
Also last week, I posted another episode in the ongoing Malcolm's Memories series, including one of my most favorite adventures of all my writing years.
