Decoration Day 2018 (Memorial Day)

In his closing chapter, the man who has spent a lifetime playing the maverick has gone full Bulworth. “I’m freer than colleagues who will face the voters again,” writes Sen. John McCain, 81, in “The Restless Wave,” co-authored with Mark Salter, his former chief of staff. “I can speak my mind without fearing the consequences much.” It was written for history. In an era of all-caps tweets and angry denunciations of supposed “witch hunts,” the Arizona Republican’s final book, published Tuesday, casts him as a profile in courage. McCain highlights his advocacy for the Iraq troop “surge” when it was toxically unpopular in 2007 and his decisive vote against repealing Obamacare in 2017. The key to this day was that Carter and Falwell treated each other with respect, and even affection, setting the tone for an encounter between the evangelical left and right. In 2015, Falwell also made headlines by inviting Sen. Bernie Sanders to speak on campus.Calling the 93-year-old Carter the "world's most famous Sunday school teacher," Falwell praised his declaration of born-again Christian faith while in public life and his legacy, as an ex-president, of serving others. Liberty's leader stressed that Carter showed political courage, and paid a high price among Democrats, when he signed the Hyde Amendment banning the use of federal funds to pay for most abortions.In the heart of his address, Carter listed possible areas of common moral ground, ranging from efforts to provide clean water in impoverished nations to the tragedy of modern slavery in the form of human trafficking.However, he placed his strongest emphasis on a topic -- women's equality -- that still divides many Baptists. Clashes over the ordination of women led to his own decision in 2000 to leave the Southern Baptist Convention. At Liberty, the former president specifically linked this cause to an issue -- gender-selection abortion -- that continues to separate him from many other Democrats.For decades, Carter noted, he thought that the possibility of nuclear war was the greatest threat facing humanity.