Cast your glance about the world and ask yourself how dark things now appear. The answer, O children of liberty, is very dark indeed, if the low esteem into which the manful habit of consuming intoxicating liquors in large quantities has fallen in this Republic of late is any indication. Not long before the composition of this notice one numbers blog based in the capital of this once-proud nation even limited the quantity of drinks which its employees are permitted to enjoy at its annual Yuletide festivities to a mere pair.
How will you respond when the final storm comes? What fearsome truth will confront you in that stygian and unavoidable hour, and how will you respond to it? If you are wise, you will follow the example of the four men in red life vests who, amid the tumult of Hurricane Harvey, recognized that it was their sacred duty to get in a sweet boat, rescue defenseless women and children, and drink in the middle of a live television newscast.
"Look at them sharing water just out of the cap of that bottle," said Kaitlin Monte of Houston's Fox 26 News. "It's fantastic."
"Yeah, I'm not sure that that was water," said her colleague Tom Zizka.
It certainly was not. Nor did these sea-faring altruists sip champagne or even other less rarified non-carbonation method sparkling wines like preening toffs. Rather, like true sons of the Alamo, in their moment of reckless glory they drank loyal shots of what looked unmistakably like the hard stuff, either vodka or whisky, the silver grain-based elixir of the frozen tundra or the hot brown potation of the unforgiving West, the chosen libations of pioneers and prisoners of tyranny, and resigned themselves to almost certain doom aboard a vessel with hopeless journalistic elites.
As it happened, they survived. But had they not found their deliverance and occasioned that of countless others, had they fallen like so many heroes in the face of unforgiving nature, they would still be remembered—as warriors, as leaders of men, as alcoholic exemplars.
For their shining example of what it means to stare destiny in the face and in defiance of schoolmarmish America-despising teetotalers, we name this dauntless quartet 2017 Washington Free Beacon Men of the Year.
