Vallejo Nocturno 2024
As we near the US election in this disheartening 2024 I don't feel good about the direction of this country. Not because of where Biden and Democrats are, though I have always been troubled by their unwavering support for Israel, but with the MAGA party and their inability to have any sort of conversation regarding anything of substance. Yes, its a stance that an extreme right wing, racist cult needs to take in order to cultivate their base but in the end it will destroy the fabric of our country. It already has and I'm sure that is part of the "plan". I have some faith in some of our fellow citizens but the normalization of Trump's behavior is worrisome. I will not repeat the litany of his transgressions but there should be no doubt this creature is rotten to the core and was mostly good for nothing to his community and friends. Time will reveal this pretty clearly, I just don't want it to impact my friends and family and unfortunately it will if he and his hoodlums get in control. Here is Tom Nichols from The Atlantic:
Donald Trump routinely attacks the institutions of American government, especially when he feels that those institutions have not served his personal interests. He has, for example, repeatedly claimed that American elections are corrupt and rigged, thus smearing the state, county, and local volunteers and officials who make American democracy a model for the world. He plans to gut the apolitical U.S. civil service and place it under his political control. And he has long harbored a special hatred—compounded by his new status as a convicted felon—for courts and the rule of law. This weekend, at a rally in Las Vegas, he continued his attacks on the Justice Department and referred to Special Counsel Jack Smith as “deranged” and a “dumb son of a bitch.”
Give the 45th president credit for being candid about his scorn for most of America’s institutions. He looks down upon the members of the United States armed forces as well, but where the military is concerned, Trump engages in a monumental hypocrisy: He has repeatedly expressed disdain and even disgust for Americans in the military while claiming to adore them. In Las Vegas, Trump said yet again that no one loves the military more, or has done more for them, than him. Such constructions—“no has done more for group X; no one loves group Y more; no one understands subject Z more than I do”—are a routine part of Trump’s Mad Libs approach to public speaking.
But these bursts of verbal chaff are especially meaningless in the context of Trump’s well-documented contempt for the military. Think of his 2015 shot at John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”), his comments floating the idea of executing former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and his sneering earlier this year about Nikki Haley’s husband (an Army officer who was serving in Africa at the time). As Michael Hirsh wrote in 2020 in Foreign Policy, even when Trump was at the military school where his parents effectively exiled him when he was a teenager, he showed, according to one of his fellow students, “contempt for military service, discipline, and tradition” and an “ungoverned sense of entitlement” that included, according to some students, the cardinal military sin of wearing decorations and medals he had not earned.
This weekend, he was particularly incensed (read: humiliated) by the resurfacing of Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting about Trump referring to dead American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Goldberg’s article gained renewed attention during coverage of President Joe Biden’s D-Day speeches in Europe, when some media outlets pointed out the obvious differences between the two presidents, noting Trump’s unwillingness in 2018 to visit an American military cemetery in France. At the Vegas rally, Trump fumed (as he has for years) at The Atlantic’s reporting on his vulgar disrespect for the fallen, calling it “a made-up deal from a magazine that’s failing, financial disaster.” He also referred to Goldberg as “a horrible, radical-left lunatic.”
(These are, of course, standard Trump insults, but for the record, The Atlantic is profitable, and although I have not formally interviewed our editor on his political views, I suspect most readers of his work would not place him on the “radical left.”)
“Now, think of it,” Trump continued, referring to his own comments disparaging the U.S. military. “Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway? But who would say it to military people?”
Sometimes, a rhetorical question is a little too tempting. But let’s move on.
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