“He was one man, in one moment, changing the course of an action during one of the toughest battles of the war.”
Remember that quaint old notion called “responsibility”? It’s hit a patch of rough times. As problems and costs and scandals pile up in the shadow of the expanding American nanny state, as horrors mount in a world bereft of American strategic vision and leadership, it happens far too often that the buck stops nowhere. Instead, as far as our political elite are inclined to offer anything even resembling accountability, what we hear far too often these days is a phrase that has been hijacked as the ultimate non-apology: “I take responsibility.”
How many times in recent years have you heard that phrase on the news, uttered from some pinnacle of power – “I take responsibility” — and wondered what on earth it really means? What are the consequences of taking this ever more amorphous thing called responsibility?
Not that this vacuity of word and deed is confined to American politics. If anything, Washington has increasingly imbibed techniques perfected years ago by the likes of the United Nations, an outfit devoted to seeking control over everything in its path while taking genuine responsibility for almost nothing.
