Commentary America lost a great patriot and one of its foremost public intellectuals yesterday with the untimely death of Angelo Codevilla at the age of 78.  Professor Codevilla, whose career spanned the Navy, the foreign service, the intelligence community, academe, think tanks, the blogosphere, and the literary world, was one of the sharpest and shrewdest observers of the contemporary political scene—hardly surprising, since the Italian-born scholar produced a notable 1997 translation of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”  The core of his appeal—for his students, for those who heard him speak, for those of us who appeared with him on panels and at public events and had the thankless task of trying to match both wits and breadth of knowledge with him—was Angelo’s ability to cut quickly to the heart of any matter, instantly bolstering his fluent and elegant arguments with examples from history both ancient and modern.  It is therefore, with profound …