Keep It Pithy Read Free

than that, and the bandits get nervous.)
Am I being too harsh?
    Simple answer to that: no .

    ( photo credit 1.3 )
    But there are, and have been, exceptions .
The politician I most admire is Abraham Lincoln. The reason is simple: He was kind. He showed his concern for everyday Americans while trying to lead this country through its greatest crisis so far. Failure to act wisely and courageously at the height of the Civil War would have destroyed the nation, which was founded at such risk barely a hundred years before.
Even so, Lincoln devoted one day a week to reading mail from the people and answering with notes on the reverse side of the page. Not surprisingly, many letters were written to seek jobs or other favors. The president often tried to help these ordinary people, even though they were strangers to the corridors of power and influence.…
I have seen a number of these letters from mothers who wanted to visit their wounded sons, from older men who needed work to support their families after all the young relatives had gone to war, and from children worried about their fathers in uniform. Lincoln’s replies are amazingly compassionate. He reveals himself as a great man who used determination and humility to save the Union. Neither vain nor vengeful, he had no spin guys or bagmen and took no money. Because he loved his country, he suffered greatly at the loss of life on both sides of the conflict. Despite the tremendous personal stress and the nationwide chaos, Lincoln still helped individuals while working to keep the country whole.
Where are today’s Honest Abes?
    Dunno, but we should keep an eye out. Might happen again .
    The above sketch was written years before I wrote my recent bestseller , Killing Lincoln . Good in the world is too often matched by evil, as in the person of the assassin John Wilkes Booth .

    Am I serious about that observation?
    Yes .
Evil is a constant presence throughout the world. I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast withbombs, and heroin addicts with AIDS knowingly share needles with other addicts without telling them about the infection. Evil.
Once, I stood in the cellar of an abandoned Italian church that had been used by Satanists in rituals that included murder. The feeling of evil permeated this room. I had never felt anything like it.
But then I felt it again in Africa at Victoria Falls in Zambia. I stood where human sacrifice was practiced years before by tribes native to the area. Victims were tossed off the cliff into the thundering falls. I got out of there quick.
So I know that true, unrepentant evil exists. And I firmly believe it will be punished, just as good will be rewarded. That is part of the order of the universe, if we only take the time to recognize it.

TWO

I’VE QUESTIONED EUROPEAN SOCIALISM FROM THE BEGINNING
    Hello France, Next Stop—God Forbid—Greece!
    Europe is on such an economic roller coaster that no one, certainly not your humble servant, could reliably predict what will be going on when this book comes off the presses .

    ( photo credit 2.1 )
    Chaos? Collapse?
    Don’t point your finger at any one or two countries alone. The whole European way of thinking about social and economic matters has been a shared lunacy and a dangerous misreading of human reality .
You only have to travel to Europe to see the difference that an entitlement culture makes. While the United States is a vibrant, creative, and exciting place, Europe today is largely stagnant. Workers there have little incentive to move ahead, because the rate of taxation is punishing and the governments guarantee a certain standard of living. In France, young people demonstrated for weeks because the government wanted a new law that would allow employers to actually fire them during the first two years of employment if they screwed up on a regular basis. But nooooo, we can’t have that! The French sense of