And I assume that this means that the NASA briefing in response to the Aldridge report, which was supposed to occur on that day, will be postponed until Monday?
[Update]
A couple commenters aren’t reading my post carefully. I’m not referring to the Aldridge Report release, which is scheduled for Thursday. I’m referring to the NASA response to it, which was scheduled for Friday. Follow the link.
David Brooks has an excellent op-ed in the NYT on partisanship. It’s as balanced a piece as you’ll find anywhere, and it’s backed by real data. This is a pet interest of mine, as it’s a pervasive cognitive phenomenon. People create a model of the world and then select data which reinforces it. Man is a rational animal only occasionally.
Here’s a very moving eulogy from a prodigal daughter.
I don’t know whether the loss is easier or harder if a parent is famous; maybe it’s neither. My father belonged to the country. I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him. America was the important child in the family, the one who got the most attention. It’s strange, but now I find comfort in sharing him with an entire nation. There is some solace in knowing that others were also mystified by him; his elusiveness was endearing, but puzzling. He left all of us with the same question: who was he? People ask me to unravel him for them, as if I have secrets I haven’t shared. But I have none, nothing that you don’t already know. He was a man guided by internal faith. He knew our time on this earth is brief, yet he cared deeply about making his time here count. He was comfortable in his own skin. A disarmingly sunny man, he remained partially in shadow; no one ever saw all of him. It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more.
Andrew, I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but apparently you were channeling Mark Steyn last night.
Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That
I may have further thoughts on the passing of the Great Communicator later today, particularly in the context of the somber anniversary in northwest France, but for now go check out these roundups of other blog commentary from Tim Blair and Laughing Wolf.
I’m going to channel Mickey Kaus here, and note that this is a good deal for him. It lets him look classy, while minimizing his exposure to the American public for a few days, which should boost his poll ratings.
And in seriousness, his statement today was classy (surprisingly, to me). I didn’t expect him to say anything unclassy, but I thought he might avoid comment, or have minimal comment, so as not to upset his Bush (and Reagan) hating base.
I finally got to see Troy (the movie) tonight. My wife had already seen it and she was unimpressed. She particularly disliked Achilles, because he’s a selfish, arrogant jerk. Just like in the book. She hasn’t read the Iliad, so she didn’t know what to expect. Over the last 2800 years or so we’ve become a lot less tolerant of flaws in our heros. We demand that great deeds be accomplished by men incapable of error. This cuts two ways, both on the part of the hagiographer who plasters over the gaping flaws in a man’s character, and in the critic who points them out as if this in some way diminishes the greatness of the deed. We look to the Greeks as the founders of our civilization, and their clear-eyed view of human failings should be revived. Heroes are heroic because they do great things, not because they are without failings. By acknowledging this simple fact we are better able to see the greatness in others, and the potential for greatness in ourselves.
The world just lost a man who will be remembered by history long after most of us are dust. I disagreed with much of what he did, but no amount of kvetching on my part can take away from his legacy, which is no less than to liberate the world from totalitarian communism. The Soviet Union is dead, and Ronald Reagan killed it. The rest is details.
By my count, we now have four living ex-Presidents–Ford, Carter, Bush I, and Clinton. Before President Reagan’s demise today, we had five, and I believe that’s the most that we’ve ever had. It seems unlikely that we’d have ever had more than that in our nation’s history, given the lengths of terms and the ages at which presidents normally become president, but does anyone know for sure?
Of course, if one wanted to be macabre, one could start a pool on who will be the next to go, and if it will occur before the current president joins their ranks (which of course depends a lot on what happens in November…).