The Wednesday Letter #196

THIS WEEK: Our Perfect Son of a Bitch; Meanwhile in Ukraine; Southwest Border; The Market in 2024; Money Men and Sports; Some Events in 2024.

OUR PERFECT SON OF A BITCH

“He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” is a well-known saying that explains, among other things, our government occasionally cozying up to a dictator in another country for proximate national security reasons. Its origins and uses are uncertain. FDR may have said it in reference to Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza Debayle or the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. Others may have said it with regards to unsavory one-time allies of convenience such as Augusto Pinochet or Saddam Hussein.

Today, it is sometimes used or implied by people around the world in reference to their own leader. For example this week, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said that former president Slobodan Milosevic had “set an example of how to love and defend one’s homeland”. That is the same Milosevic who, in a rare win for an international court, was indicted for war crimes in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo) and was extradited to The Hague …