Tea at Trianon: Damages

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Damages

From Breitbart:

The nearly 50,000 Afghans whom President Joe Biden’s administration housed on five United States military bases for months through 2021 and early 2022 cost taxpayers almost $189 million in damages to the facilities, a federal report reveals. Following the U.S. Armed Forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Biden opened a refugee pipeline that has resettled more than 86,000 Afghans in American communities — many without having been screened or interviewed in person beforehand. Tens of thousands of those Afghans were housed initially at eight U.S. military bases, including 50,000 who were specifically placed at Fort Bliss in Texas, Fort Lee in Virginia, Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, Fort Pickett in Virginia, and Camp Atterbury in Indiana. Officials at those five U.S. bases, according to a Department of Defense Inspector General (DOD IG) report, noted nearly $189 million in damages which taxpayers will have to foot the bill to repair. (Read more.)