Newt Gingrich Seldom Misses A Chance To

I Think In Many Ways, The Spanish Civil War Was The First Battle Of World War Ii. After All, Where Else In The World At This Point Did You Have Americans In Uniform Who Were Being Bombed By Nazi Planes Four Years Before The U.s. Entered World War Ii? Hitler And Mussolini Jumped In On The Side Of Francisco Franco And His Spanish Nationalists, Sent Them Vast Amounts Of Military Aid, Airplanes, Tanks - And Mussolini Sent 80,000 Ground Troops As Well - Because They Wanted A Sympathetic Ally In Power. So I Think It Really Was The Opening Act Of World War Ii.

One Of My Favourite Contemporary Fiction Writers Is A Texan, Ben Fountain. His Extraordinary Novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-time Walk, All Takes Place Within The Half-time Show At A Dallas Cowboys Football Game. No One Has Better Summed Up The American Appetite For Spectacle, The Link Between Sports And Politics, And The Absolute Madness Of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

The First World War In So Many Ways Shaped The 20th Century And Really Remade Our World For The Worse.

How Many Really Great Writers Are There Who Are Totally Non-political? You Can Hear The French Revolution In The Poetry Of [percy Bysshe] Shelly And [john] Wordsworth; You Can Sense The Vast Inequalities Of Tsarist Russia In [anton] Chekhov And [lev] Tolstoy.

If Your Real Wages Are Declining, Your Job Is At Risk, You Fear Your Children Will Be Worse Off Than You Are, It's Tempting To Want To Blame It All On An Easily Identifiable Target: Muslims, Immigrants, Refugees, Blacks, Jews.