Sunday Post

 

 
With enormous losses of life on all sides, Canadian troops still managed to route the foe at Amiens:

The Last Hundred Days began on August 8, 1918 with an all-out attack on German positions in Amiens. By day’s end, Canadian soldiers had obliterated German defences and advanced an incredible 13 kilometres. It was the most jaw-dropping allied victory ever seen in the First World War up to that point. For context, it had taken months of fighting and 500,000 dead to gain only eight kilometres of ground at Passchendaele. Up until this point, many First World War battles had followed a predictable pattern: A lengthy artillery barrage followed by fixed-bayonet human wave attacks across no-man’s-land. At Amiens, Canada rolled out a strategy that prioritized speed and unpredictability above all else: Tanks, motorized machine guns, cavalry, storm troopers and intricately timed artillery barrages all thrown at the enemy in a dizzying tidal wave of force. Erich Ludendorff, who by this time had become the effective military dictator of Germany, referred to August 8 as the “black day” of the German army. As the Canadian breakout continued relentlessly into the autumn, Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie would estimate that one quarter of all Germans on the Western Front were being shot at by Canadians. When German troops would sweep back into France in 1940, their new strategy of Blitzkrieg would be an eerily close carbon copy of the tactics that Canadians had used to evict them from France 21 years earlier.

Read the whole thing.



Obama made a mess he expects Trump to clean up:

Obama administration officials have drafted a letter acknowledging their responsibility for initiating U.S. involvement in Yemen’s destructive civil war and calling for the Trump administration to halt America’s role in the conflict.

Speaking of Trump:

President Donald Trump paid tribute to the "great warriors" who died in World War I as he visited a US cemetery in France, a day after drawing fire for cancelling a similar trip due to bad weather.

Speaking at Suresnes cemetery in the western Paris suburbs Trump hailed the "great warriors who gave everything for family, country, God and freedom".

Trump, who is in Paris to attend ceremonies marking the centenary of the end of the war, also paid tribute to the French and other Allied troops killed in "one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history".

Hailing the "American and French patriots" who served in the war, he said: "It is our duty to preserve the civilisation they defended and to protect the peace they so nobly gave their lives to secure one century ago."

The US leader was heavily criticised for cancelling a trip to Belleau Wood battlefield in northern France on Saturday due to the rain, with some critics accusing him of disrespecting America's war dead.

On Sunday, he braved the continuing wet weather to remember those who braved "rain, hail, snow, mud, poisonous gas, bullets and mortar" fire in pursuit of a "great, great victory".

There can be many things said about why Trump initially did not visit the cemetery where American war dead lay.

There are many things that could be said about Trump's initially not visiting the American war dead. I will be saying none of those things.  This is because people who criticise Trump would be railing against him for any reason. They wouldn't care to parse through or even articulate the reasons for their huffy opposition or anything against it.

One cannot skim through the news without some sort of obvious bias against Trump. Nothing he says or does makes anyone happy. It's the infantile contrarian nature of the post-modern First Worlder who clearly has nothing better to do than to criticise the man who bumped out the favoured choice of some for president, the sour, old hag with political, emotional and even physical baggage.

No leader should be above criticism but no leader should constantly subjected to it, either. When I call Justin Trudeau a useless douchebag who inherited his dad's office and has no accomplishments to his name, that is because he IS a useless douchebag who inherited his dad's office and has no accomplishments to his name. Feel free to disprove my assertion. Trump is not a perfect man and there are things for which he deserves criticism. But contrary nay-saying isn't criticism. It is the level of grade school insolence that cannot mimic just criticism if it tried. Were the conditions unsafe for landing a helicopter in France? Maybe. If Trump simply did not wish to be moistened by some drizzle, then he would deserve scorn, the same scorn that should be heaped on Barry for forgetting that his great uncle liberated a death camp and then used it as a political ploy.

However, if one enjoys being contrarian, I'm sure that kind of fact-finding and nuance has no place in the debate and ought not be mentioned if one doesn't want strangers banging on the door in the middle of the night.



Speaking of useless douchebags:

For someone who repeatedly claims it’s the Conservatives who will fight dirty in next year’s federal election, while he’s going to take the high road, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should look in the mirror.

Because these days, he’s sounding more and more like a sanctimonious twit. ...

Challenge his government’s decision to transfer the vicious murderer of eight-year-old Tori Stafford from a prison to an indigenous healing lodge, as the Conservatives, and in particular Lisa Raitt did on behalf of Tori’s outraged father, and, according to Trudeau, it’s because they’re “ambulance-chasing politicians”.

That was a day after Trudeau criticized “the politics of personal attacks” — saying he would take the high road in the next election. ...

(Sidebar: this "ambulance-chasing" and these easily escapable spas.)

Ditto when Global TV broke the story that Statistics Canada was after the banking information of 500,000 Canadians, when Trudeau dismissed opposition concerns about potential violations of confidentiality by going off on an irrelevant rant that Stephen Harper cancelled the long-form census.

That continued right up to the moment when the Trudeau government reversed course again, after the privacy commissioner said he hadn’t been informed by Statistics Canada of the scope of what it intended to do.

Now the project’s on hold pending review.

Question Trudeau’s carbon tax and either the prime minister or Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna will accuse you of not caring about saving the planet for your children.

Question his government’s “anti-Islamophobia” motion, and you’re a bigot.

Question federal policy on irregular/illegal border crossers and you’re a racist.

Trudeau doesn’t even have to be challenged on something before telling us about how morally superior he is.

For example when, out of the blue, he said immigrants who come to Canada care more about it than people who were born here, because natural-born Canadians take Canada for granted.

No one would have objected if Trudeau had said we’re all equal as Canadians no matter where we were born, or when we arrived in this country. But that wasn’t his message.

It was another example of Trudeau’s constant need to preen, to portray himself as morally superior not only to the opposition parties, but to Canadians who don’t share his views on political issues.

Again, if my conclusion that he is a useless douchebag with nothing to his credit other than division, financial ruin and sliminess is wrong, feel free to disprove that conclusion with evidence.




And now, "Dulce et Decorum Est".