Stressed

Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale. via Historia Magazine. 

Weird from Marc Thiessen at Wapo in defense of Ronny Jackson's nomination as head of the Veterans Admimistration, starting off with a headline that really sounds like something that might mean something—
VA doesn’t need a manager. It needs a leader.
Until you ask yourself, well,  this guy certainly doesn't seem to be a manager, but, um, wait maybe it does need a manager.

Of course Thiessen seems to have been writing when this story was at a fairly early stage in its evolution,

Jackson’s nomination hearing has been postponed because of last-minute allegations that he created a “hostile work environment.”

before we started hearing about the misbehavior on overseas trips with President Obama, and the passing out of Percosets and writing prescriptions for himself, and the hostile working atmosphere turning out to be on the Game of Thrones model,

‘flat-out unethical,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘100 percent bad temper,’ ‘toxic,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘volatile,’ ‘incapable of not losing his temper,’ ‘the worst officer I have ever served with,’ ‘despicable,’ ‘dishonest,’ as having ‘screaming tantrums’ and “screaming fits,’ as someone who would ‘lose his mind over small things,’ ‘vindictive,’ ‘belittling,’ ‘the worse [sic] leader I’ve ever worked for.’

or he might at least have devoted some time to suggesting the stories might be fictional.

But I think he goes wrong in a somewhat less silly way here:

The Brooksy Awards 2015. II

Greek dancing and tumbling, via THE DANCE: Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D., BY AN ANTIQUARY, London, 1911.

So Brooks is pleased by Sebastian Junger's article from last May in Vanity Fair, which

starts by stating the American military has the highest post-traumatic stress disorder rate in its history, and probably the world. But then he notes there is no statistical relationship between suicide and combat. Vets who worked far from the violence are just as likely to commit suicide. Over the decades, combat deaths have dropped while PTSD rates have risen. The Israeli Army, which sees a lot of trauma, has a rate as low as 1 percent.

Obviously, to Brooks, that's a sign of our "lack of community" here in the selfish every-man-for-himself States, unlike that warm, loving, united Israel where there's no alienation because everybody's just so totally committed to togetherness, though what Junger was interested in is naturally something else, that is the effectiveness of the IDF in dealing with traumatic stress in a way the US fails to do, through a swift forward treatment (of the kind, as it happens, pioneered by the Wehrmacht in World War II: