She has to swing far enough right to win the (significant) part of the electorate that's very, *very* far to the right in the 1st round. Otherwise, she won't make it: She needs the people who now say they'll vote for Le Pen & Zemmour.
But then she'll (almost surely) be facing off against Macron, and there will be no left candidate. Most of France is *not* very, very far to the right. If she persuades Zemmour/Le Pen voters that she's right-wing enough for them, she will surely alienate the center and left.
So I've been picking random locations in the US, finding random high schools, and looking at the assigned reading. Kids are reading Shakespeare, for sure, at this high school in Wisconsin: k12.com/content/dam/sc…
And this high school in Dallas is having a Shakespeare monologue competition. That sounds intellectually wholesome: udallas.edu/constantin/aca…
A few thoughts about this. 1) Your question is rhetorical, but the answer is obvious: It's because no one is scared of Ukraine, which doesn't have nuclear weapons. This is what is *so* morally--and long-term, strategically--obtuse:
2) Why doesn't Ukraine have nuclear weapons? Because *we forced them to give them up.* And in turn, guaranteed their territorial integrity. No matter how people try to argue the Budapest Memorandum doesn't count, it does:
3) Why? Because if we don't stand by it, what kind of damned fool will ever give up his nuclear weapons, or abandon his program to build them, because we promise that in exchange, we won't let anyone chew them up and spit them out?
I'm formatting an article I wrote several years ago, and I've found a sentence that seems as if it should be in quotation marks, because the style is different from the rest of the text. But when I search for it on Google, the only instance I can find is in the article I wrote:
I would hate to plagiarize, but I truly can't figure out if I wrote it. So I'm putting out an appeal: Does anyone recognize this sentence? Is it yours?
"This isn’t a Presidency anymore. It’s the People’s Temple in Jonestown. The President is Jim Jones, and his supporters are determined to follow him right up to the moment of death."
ICYMI, @cosmo_globalist ran a review by my father, David Berlinski, of Pankaj Mishra's essays. It's an outstanding review. He does what a reviewer ought, in my mind, and which far too few do correctly:
1. He reads the book, carefully, and tells you what it says.
2. He places it in its larger literary and historical context. 3. He checks the author's work--the references, the claims--extremely carefully.
4. He tells you what he liked and didn't like, and why.
There's a maddening tendency, among book reviewers, to do none of that. Far too many reviewers use the book as a one-paragraph excuse to write a hobby-horse essay that has nothing to do with the book.