I have been on thousands of flights on aircraft. Never once did I fall down when I stepped into the aircraft. Even when I had had to much adult beverages, way to much.
The lady, and I use that term loosely, obviously has a balance problem or motor problem with her muscles probably associated with traumatic brain injury.
This may or may not also affect her cognitive functions. President Roosevelt was crippled by polio. His muscle motor functions were severely compromised. His cognitive functions were unfortunately 100%. Even today we live with his horrible decisions at Yalta and Tehran post WWII. His decisions set the stage for world strife after our supreme victory in WWII. We still live with his bad decisions today. His decisions set the stage for the Korean War, the Vietnam War etc. We won the Korean War and actually the Vietnam War, but we lost both in Washington DC thanks to liberal progressives and the media.
All true . . . and yet after further reading I find myself grudgingly respecting FDR’s foreign policy up to at least the Battle of Kirsk (sp) in, IIRC, 1943.The reality of American polity was that in America in 1941, as in Britain in 1938, war with Germany polled 80% against. And the reality is that, starting in May, 1940 with the Fall of France, FDR pushed as hard as he could to keep Britain out of the grasp of Hitler, and to get US production on a war footing. That included Britain’s sending America virtually all its secret technology, short of Ultra. And the US put much of it into production. Churchill was lying when he said, “Send us the tools, and we will finish the job;” Britain was on the back foot in a serious way and had no prospect of defeating Germany without US troops.
The US had critical shortages of all military equipment upon the advent of Pearl Harbor, not because the US wasn’t producing such - its production was ramping up geometrically at that point - but because whatever we had, we sent to shore up Britain and the Soviet Union. The current book, 1941, says that the free-world consensus was a horrified expectation, upon Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, that Hitler would defeat Russia the way he had taken France.
Harry Hopkins - whom I considered an unmitigated horror story - was the one who turned that situation around. He was in lousy health, death warmed over, throughout the war. Hopkins was in Britain when the Germans invaded Russia, and it was he who flew to Moscow to get the pulse of the situation. He found Stalin fighting mad over Hitler’s betrayal, and believed Stalin when he said Russia would fight for a year at least and, given foreign aid, would not be defeated. Upon hearing from Hopkins that the USSR would be a viable opponent for Hitler, FDR attended a ceremony at which some partially assembled P-40s were about to be formally shipped to British forces in Africa - and amazed the attendees by ordering that the planes be unwrapped, assembled, and flown to Siberia.
Without the aid the FDR sent to Stalin Hitler would, if not as quickly as he would have liked, have taken the Caucus oilfields which he most coveted and which would have made him that much more powerful. In the event, Hitler never did gain that prize. And without “der Ostfront" . . . do you seriously think that Germany would have been defeated before the (in 1941, speculative) advent of the A-bomb?
From the Fall of France, FDR was cutting corners to get American industry converted to military production. The first Packard-built Merlin ran in August, 1941 (Packard had to translate the drawings from British to American before they could even begin to make engines). It took time to manufacture the requisite machine tools for the production scale necessary. By the end of 1943, production capability was such that actual production figures were selected, not settled for. Without that 18-month ramp-up of production before Pearl Harbor - well, "for want of a nail . . .”
The real thing to fault FDR on is that he continued and exacerbated the policies which failed to cure the Depression under Herbert Hoover - so the economy was still the pits until Britain started buying war materiel. Given Cooledge economic policy, the economy might have been 50% larger by 1939, which would have helped tremendously. Compare with the situation in America before the Civil War; if the secession crisis had come to a head in 1850, the South could have won - because the North’s economy was so much smaller then than it was in 1860.