When it comes to juicing up his own supporters, the Biden speech may have been effective, but it wasn’t statesmanship — or remotely truthful.

The world’s second-richest person, by some counts, could have easily afforded to settle the SolarCity case out of court, as all of his fellow Tesla board members did last year. Instead, he chose to fight it. And so he spent Monday and Tuesday last week in a dreary Delaware courtroom, defending his reputation against a lawyer bent on exposing him as a self-dealing fraud, even as his fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos were in various stages of adventuring to space.

In the 1950s, DACOWITS suggested that married servicewomen receive basic allowance for quarters, a financial benefit given to servicemen to support their housing arrangements. The DOD ignored this recommendation because at that time most Americans believed men should be a family’s primary breadwinner, and giving married servicewomen this financial benefit would imply that their husbands were incapable of taking care of them.

The threat turns out to be more visceral and urgent than any of us could have imagined. Yes, some people live in alternate realities. What’s worse, though, is when they have power to impose those realities on the rest of us. That’s what we’re seeing in Tennessee and elsewhere, and the results will be as tragic as they are predictable and preventable.

No one has to get the shot, but no one should have to employ those who won’t. Playtime is over.

Ask Americans to name a problem with our healthcare system, and you’ll hear a range of answers, from insurance bureaucracy to overbooked doctors to the inadequacies of Medicaid. Only a very few will name Medicare’s drug benefit, known as Part D.

People who are tenacious, overcome obstacles and succeed used to be part of the American story, a story we were happy to share to encourage others. What happened to it? Why do we focus less on success and more on envying and penalizing the successful? Why is there the constant drumbeat in our politics and most of the media about the unsuccessful and the proposals by certain politicians to throw good money after bad on programs that have mostly not worked?

Ronald Reagan assembled and held together a coalition of fundamentalists and big business that seem about as likely to be bedfellows as are peaches and frisbees. But Reagan got and kept the peaches and frisbees together, and Republicans won six of 11 presidential elections.

What did we learn from Vietnam? Obviously nothing because we have repeated history in Afghanistan. There was no “end game,” except to hold off the Taliban, an entity motivated by religious fervor that has no intention of quitting.