military news, national news

‘Beautiful’ World War II? Seriously?

(CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Question of the Moment: Who in their right mind would ever place the adjective “beautiful” in front of the words “World War … “?

Answer: No one in their right mind would ever say that, which leads me to conclude that Donald John “Best Wordsmith in Chief” Trump is out of his mind. He’s gone loony. Bonkers.

He was asked on Fox News Sunday about the issue of renaming U.S. military bases that currently carry the names of Confederate army officers. He then launched into yet another incoherent rant about how those installatons had sent young Americans off to fight in two world wars … which he then described as “beautiful.” 

Yes, he told Chris Wallace that World Wars I and II were “beautiful” conflicts.

They were hideous, ghastly, monumentally tragic at every level imaginable. World War I veterans were subject to mustard gas while dug into trenches along a line facing their enemy.  World War II veterans were sent to battlefields that spanned the globe. The remaining WWII vets are in the 90s now, but ask any of them if they thought that conflict was a “beautiful” endeavor.

Yet the president of the United States, who sought to avoid service during the Vietnam War by claiming to have bone spurs in his feet, now calls the two global conflicts “beautiful.”

Donald J. Trump is batsh** crazy.

national news

Trump to resume ‘briefing’ clown show

Well, let’s all get ready for it.

Donald Trump is going to take the podium once again in the White House press briefing room to provide daily updates on the government’s feckless response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Wow. What could go wrong?

Oh, wait! At one of the final such “briefings” that Trump delivered you might recall he talked about ingesting “disinfectants” as a way to cleanse the body of the killer virus. You know, snort a little Lysol or Clorox and you’ll be as good as new … just like that!

It didn’t go well, as you also might remember. That’s when Trump stopped delivering the hocus-pocus “briefings” in front of actual experts such as Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci.

Trump is about to come back. The clown show resumes.

national news

Support the flag … and what it ‘represents’

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Check out this social media meme that showed up today. Read the text carefully … and then bear with me while I offer a brief interpretation of what it means to me.

First of all, I am a huge fan and supporter of Gary Sinise. I honor his commitment to our nation’s veterans and as an Army veteran myself — one who went to war for my country in the late 1960s — I thank him for his support; it means a great deal to me.

Now comes the “however.” He stands for the flag, puts his hand over his heart and salutes “what that flag represents.” It represents a lot of things to me as well.

It represents liberty, freedom, honor, sacrifice and the right of citizens to dissent, to oppose government policy.

So, when individuals choose to, um, “take a knee,” they do so in full compliance with what the U.S. Constitution allows them to do. The flag, thus, represents the Constitution, it symbolizes the greatness of this land.

One of the elements of our nation’s greatness rests in the rights we have as citizens to protest peacefully without recrimination from our government.

media news

This is how you expose this POTUS’s lies

The video I have attached to this blog post is about 40 minutes in length.

It is of Fox News Sunday moderator Chris Wallace interviewing Donald J. Trump.

Fox News, as you know, has been touted by Trump as the only “fair” cable or broadcast news outlet. The rest of ’em peddle “fake news,” he says, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post. So he went on Fox’s Sunday talk show, where Wallace — a fine journalist with years of experience covering presidents and other politicians — didn’t let up in challenging Trump’s false assertions on a whole array of issues.

Take some time to look at this. I hope you will be as impressed as I am with Chris Wallace’s handling of the lying president.

 

national security

Confederate flag also represents treason, oppression

Donald J. Trump just cannot bring himself to acknowledge what a majority of American southerners now admit … that the Confederate flag symbolizes racism.

Oh, no. Trump declares the flag is a symbol of “Southern history.” Well, yeah. It is that. The history, though, includes the Civil War. I know Trump has heard of it.

The war began when the Confederate States of America decided it wanted to form a new country. To do so it had to separate from the United States of America. Then the rebels fired on the Union garrison in Charleston, S.C. harbor. The war was on!

The conflict killed more than 600,000 Americans. Yes, I include the Confederate forces as “Americans,” even though they committed a treasonous act by taking up arms against the federal government.

Why did they go to war? Because their states wanted to keep human beings enslaved. They wanted the right to “own” humans as property. It’s been referred to euphemistically as a “states rights” issue. It is no such thing. The CSA wanted to retain the right to oppress human beings.

They fought the Union forces under the Confederate flag that Donald Trump — the man who has no understanding of history and its complexities — says represents “Southern history.”

The Confederate flag well might symbolize “history” to many Americans. To many others it represents hatred, oppression and enslavement. It is no coincidence that contemporary hate groups — the KKK, instance — flies the Confederate flag while spewing hate speech aimed at African-Americans.

Is that worth honoring? Hardly.

national news

Portland is hurting … and so am I

It hurts me terribly to watch the city of my birth going through what is occurring at this moment.

Portland, Ore., has become the scene of a terrible, heavy-handed and tyrannical response from some sort of secret security force that is rounding up protestors and taking them … oh, somewhere.

The Oregon attorney general has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, saying that the secretive security force is violating the civil rights of those who are protesting peacefully.

At issue, of course, has been the response to the death of George Floyd, the man who died at the hands of police of Minneapolis, Minn. Portland became one of the cities where protestors rose up in a “defund the police” movement.

In recent days, though, the situation has gotten out of hand. Security forces wearing unidentified uniforms have been collecting protestors, throwing them into motor vehicles and taking them to undisclosed locations; the protestors then are released.

It’s a bizarre, frightening and dangerous response from the federal government. Donald Trump has referred to the protestors as “anarchists” and hurled assorted other epithets at them.

Why does this trouble me so much? Well, for starters Portland in many ways no longer resembles the once-sleepy city where I spent the first 34 years of my life … minus a couple of years I was away serving in the U.S. Army.

I got married there. We brought our sons into this world in Portland. We moved away in 1984 to pursue my journalism career in Texas. My family and I have been back many times over the years and I have watched my hometown become a cosmopolitan, vibrant, busy and socially conscious city.

Now this has occurred. We have the president of the United States declaring his intention to “dominate” the streets to make sure the “anarchists” no longer protest. Really? This is happening in the city of my birth?

Watching this kind of jack-booted tyranny erupting in Portland simply hurts my heart.

national news

How will history judge this guy?

It is not too early to start wondering how historians are going to write the saga associated with Donald John Trump’s time as president.

I hope they can start their drafts soon, as in right after the November 2020 election. I am not a historian, although I’ve witnessed enough presidential history to see how some men have grown into more respected, if not revered, individuals in the years since they left office.

How will Trump fare? My goodness, I cannot fathom how this guy can redeem himself.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed for all the world to see clearly how this man is unprepared to lead a nation. He was elected in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” and to deploy his business executive’s skill to manage the massive government machinery. The pandemic struck at the beginning of this year and — boom!– just like, the nation collapsed.

Still, this clown keeps yapping about the “success” he has enjoyed. He tells us that he’s doing a “fantastic” job. My goodness gracious, he has done precisely the opposite .

This, though, is just the latest example of the trashing that has occurred on Trump’s watch as president. He has destroyed our alliances, he has turned us from the most indispensable nation into an international laughingstock. Trump has lied continually, incessantly, gratuitously. He is caught telling lies and then tells us he isn’t lying, that the “fake news” is reporting falsehoods.

How does a historian portray all of this? How do the men and women who write our history tell that story for generations that will come along and read about the aberration that occurred in 2016 and — I do hope — ends in just a few weeks from today.

I don’t envy historians the task that awaits them.

State news

Texas GOP has gone ’round the bend

I can declare it loudly that the Texas Republican Party has gone bonkers, around the bend, it’s out to lunch … and dinner.

The party has just elected a former one-term congressman from Florida as its new chairman. He is Allen West, who “distinguished” himself in Congress by picking fights with President Obama and riling even his own colleagues with his fiery rhetoric.

West succeeds James Dickey as Texas GOP chair. The two of them have locked arms in solidarity, pledging to keep Texas solidly Republican in the upcoming presidential election.

Let’s look back at former Rep. West’s still-brief political history. The African-American former Army lieutenant colonel once said blacks were better off under segregation. He said that Islam is not a religion but is a “totalitarian, theocratic political ideology.” I think my favorite utterance came when he said that congressional Democrats were being controlled by communists and Marxists dedicated to the overthrow of the American political and economic system.

As the Texas Tribune reports: “We’re disgusted but not surprised that Texas Republicans chose a certified racist conservative hardliner like Allen West as their new chairman,” state Democratic Party spokesman Abhi Rahman said in a statement. “West is everything that is wrong with the Republican Party and brings to light their failures on building an inclusive, welcoming party that is deliberate and thoughtful in handling crisis situations.”

This is the guy who now is going to lead the Texas Republican Party?

Oh, brother.

national news

Stop the happy talk!

Donald Trump’s denial about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic is placing the nation he was elected to lead in dire peril.

He said once again that we’re defeating the pandemic. We aren’t.

He said on “Fox News Sunday” that we’re putting out “embers,” only to be told by moderator Chris Wallace that it’s a “forest fire.”

Trump continues to demand that schools open up per normal this fall, while disputing the evidence of continued infection in such a circumstance; moreover, he continues to threaten to withhold money to school districts that refuse to follow his edict.

This guy is out of control. He is unhinged. Trump is the most dangerous American politician I have witnessed in, oh, just about my entire life.

I’m glad, though, that Fox News gave him the forum today … and that Chris Wallace challenged Trump directly on the many misstatements and outright lies he told about the self-imagined “progress” we are making against the pandemic.

If the nation’s effort was as successful as Trump contends, then someone needs to explain why the European Union has banned travel from this country to the EU.

national news

POTUS won’t commit to accepting results if he loses? Wow!

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a presidential candidate, let alone the incumbent president, say he cannot commit to accepting the results of a free and fair election if he loses.

OK, I’ll concede that we’ve heard it said once: Donald Trump made the same threat four years ago when he was one of two non-incumbents running for the office.

There he was today, on Fox News Sunday, telling reporter Chris Wallace that he cannot commit to accepting the results if he loses to Joseph R. Biden Jr. this fall.

As I think of that statement, all I hear is the president of the United States saying he doesn’t trust a government system of which he is in charge.

Trump told Wallace that since he didn’t commit to accepting the 2016 results if he lost that his saying the same thing now is no big deal. Actually, it is a big bleeping deal.

Trump has been hurling unfounded and unwarranted allegations of voter fraud for as long as he has been president. He declared that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016, which provided her with the 3 million popular vote lead over Trump. He is asserting much the same thing this time, with Biden’s team conspiring to collect illegal votes.

Trump alleges that mail-in voting is fraught with corruption, even though the states that conduct such balloting now stand firmly behind the integrity of their electoral systems.

Trump wants to suppress the vote. He doesn’t want to open the system up to every eligible voter. He has said that mail-in voting would make it damn near impossible for Republicans to win the presidency … ever again!

Donald Trump is sowing the seeds of suspicion on a system that works. For the president to in effect condemn that system by refusing to commit to accepting the results is yet another exercise in shameful demagoguery.

Still, I chuckled when I read the response from the Biden campaign. The Biden campaign responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

You know, that might be worth waiting to see if it occurs.

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