In an audacious display of historical ignorance and partisan grandstanding, Alabama’s senior U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville chose the solemn occasion of D-Day to launch an attack on President Joe Biden. Tuberville claimed that Biden “turned a speech honoring heroes into a Ukraine pep rally.” This, from a man whose grasp of history is as tenuous as his commitment to truth.
Biden’s speech at Pointe du Hoc resonated with the echoes of past presidents who marked D-Day by urging the nation and the free world to stand against tyranny and injustice. On June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan addressed those gathered in Normandy with a powerful call for European leaders to remain steadfast during a tense Cold War period. Reagan’s speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, described his remarks in the Wall Street Journal as a “speech within the speech,” addressing contemporary struggles as much as commemorating past heroics.
Reagan’s address touched on the crises within the Western Alliance, where peace movements in Britain, West Germany, and Italy sought to halt the U.S.-Soviet arms race, which threatened global annihilation. Today, Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine threatens the fragile peace established after WWII. Yet, Tuberville and his ilk either fail to grasp this threat or are willingly serving as Putin’s pawns. Their rhetoric echoes the misinformation propagated by former President Donald Trump, a known admirer of the Russian strongman.