History Lesson

   We get the kind of government we deserve. Not always the kind we need, but the kind we deserve.

   Here's a history lesson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard, who took to the Senate floor to denounce "appeasement" and compared current U.S. policy to that of Britain "in the 1940s." It was 1938, when then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany to announce an agreement with Adolf Hitler that would bring "peace in our time."
   Whether it's appropriate to compare President Barack Obama's health care program to Nazi appeasement efforts is another issue. At least get the decade right.

   Speaking of decades, that's a term that is regularly misused, substituting any ten-year length of time for a decade. Example: In a talk about Cher's singing career that spread over six decades, Kathy Lee Gifford enthused, "That's 60 years!" But a CBS Sunday feature noted that the length of her career was "almost 50 years."
   Here are the relevant years: Cher connected with Sonny Bono and first appeared on television in 1967 (decade one) and is still performing this year (decade six). But from 1967 to 2013 is just 46 years, not 60. We speak of the Roaring Twenties, the Fabulous Fifties, and other ten year periods that start with similar digits as decades. And while 1999 to the year 2000 involves two decades, the length of time is not 20 years -- much less two centuries.
   Check birth dates. For Cher to have been performing professionally for 60 years, as KLG suggested, the singer would have started at the age of seven. Not so. She was 16 when she met Sonny Bono, and 17 when she first appeared on TV.