Re: (ReacTor) Five Futures Where the US Ended Not With a Bang But a Whimper

The Horny Goat wrote:

On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 08:24:47 -0700, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:
 

The hell of it is that in 2024, Trump really WAS a better candidate
than Harris (much less Biden given his mental state in 2024) which
says more about Harris than Trump.
>
It's not the first time a political leader has been less than
completely 'compos mentis' - and Winston Churchill (even though in his
prime was a much better Prime Minister than Biden ever was as
President) at the end of his last term of office was in much worse
shape than Biden.

>
World Wars do take their toll, even on men at the top of the pyramid.

 Well WSC left office in 1955 when he was 80 and his father also
suffered from dementia before his passing.

Irrelevant.  Randolph was sick, possibly but not certainly from syphilis.  Nothing heritable, at any rate.
  Apparently Clement Attlee

had a fair bit to do with Churchill's 6 volume history chiefly because
former prime ministers don't get automatic access to the type of
documents that current PMs get particularly when they deal with
military subjects

The British system was somewhat different then. Leading opposition figures had a lot of access on the quite reasonable grounds that they might soon be in power, and it was best if they didn't have to learn on the job.
Even though he was not then seen as a future PM, Churchill had access to a great deal of military information even when he was an outsider in the 1930s.  After 1946 he remained a member of the privy council.  I doubt that he had access to the latest Enigma decrypts, but he was allowed to look at his own communications.
Unlike, say, Oppenheimer, who was not allowed to see documents he himself had written, on security grounds.  But then Attlee was a civilized man.
William Hyde