The fleet of blue jet planes of the Blue Angels will once again grace Florida skies in Pensacola this weekend, after a brief hiatus following the death of one of their pilots in a plane crash during a practice in Tennessee last month.

Florida lawmakers have greeted the return of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight demonstration squadron, with heaps of praise, commending the pilots for their commitment to patriotism in a time of tragedy.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., praised the pilots earlier this week on the Senate floor.

"The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War," President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: Last week's NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliance's most serious response yet to Russia's aggression and provocations on its western frontier.

Next week’s Republican convention in Cleveland will have a Florida flavor as the GOP gets ready to nominate Donald Trump for president. 

Columbia University scholar Richard Hofstader once described a type of polarizing rhetoric that emerges from time to time in the public life of our society. He characterized the phenomenon as the “paranoid style in American politics.”

This mode of expression relies upon heated exaggeration and draws images of conspiratorial fantasy to push the public into accepting extreme interpretations of events or circumstances.