Trump's Big CON: Trump Has No Principles, CONt Part 3

"President Trump's most faithful supporters like to believe he's always a step ahead of the media and the political establishment — that he's playing three-dimensional chess while we're stuck on checkers. Where we see utter discord, they see carefully orchestrated chaos.

This week should disabuse absolutely everybody of that notion.

On two issues — health care and calling the families of dead service members — the White House has shown itself to be clearly unmoored, careening back and forth based upon the unhelpful and impulsive comments and tweets of its captain.

On the more substantial issue of health care, Trump apparently told Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to craft a deal to replace the Affordable Care Act subsidies for insurers covering low-income Americans. Trump then canceled the subsidies and explained that the money was only making insurers rich (it's not). Then he suggested he would support Alexander's deal. Then he apparently realized that those two things were completely inconsistent, and he backed off his support for the deal, leaving Alexander holding the bag and apparently (understandably) puzzled. . . 

On Gold Star families, Trump . .

    Brought this issue up of his own accord even when he hadn't called some of the very few (relative to his predecessors) new Gold Star families he's seen lose loved ones on his watch. While more than 2,500 service members were killed in action during Obama's tenure, only 20 have died in Trump's first nine months.

    Claimed “proof” that his own White House admits he doesn't have.

    Rehashed the death of his own chief of staff's son, suggesting Obama didn't call John F. Kelly when his son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Kelly hasn't commented.

    Put the White House in the position of disputing the accounts of Gold Star families.

If you think any of these things were planned, you are kidding yourself. . .

There is no game plan on any of this; it's Trump simply floating from one controversy to the next and making things worse by flying off the handle and saying untrue things. Trump's controversies are usually at least within the realm of plausible deniability; these examples just seem totally careless and haphazard."

Read the Washington Post, The Trump White House’s utterly unmoored week.

What do you expect from The President Without Principles.

Trump's Big CON: "He's So Pretty", Dead Soldier Edition (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 19))

UPDATE XVI:  "Dear Mr. President, . . .

Probably nothing is more humbling than when your role as commander in chief turns into 'comforter in chief' in the wake of fallen soldiers abroad. . .

You hold the most powerful position in the world, so the fact that you thought of them to make a call will mean far more than the substance of what you say. In fact, it’s best to swallow your pride and admit that you don’t know what to say. . .

Just acknowledge and validate their pain and their sacrifice. Nothing you can say will make it go away. . .

These calls are not supposed to be about photo-ops or news releases or poll numbers. They are private calls focused on listening to the family and letting them know that the nation appreciates their loved one’s service.

You were right to refuse to release a transcript of the calls you made. This should be between you and them. They don’t need grandstanding. They don’t need a politician to become their hero. They already have a hero for their family — one who has given his life in service of this country. . .

Don’t think you can provide satisfactory answers about why this happened. Instead, ask them to tell you a few stories about the deceased service member and sit back and listen. Your goal should be to get to know that person, if only for a moment. The family wants empathy, not platitudes. . .

Rather than explanations or proclamations of revenge, families just want to be assured of one thing. They need to know that the nation weeps with them, Mr. President. And they need to know those tears are real.

Read the Washington Post, Dear Mr. President: Don’t make military deaths about you.

UPDATE XV: Do you think Kelley is "an incredible leader who is beyond reproach"?

Read the Washington Post, John Kelly said ‘women were sacred.’ That attitude perpetuates the military’s culture of misogyny.

Read also the Washington Post, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is wrong about John Kelly, which states:

"Of all the repellent statements issued by President Trump or his aides, the one that came out of the mouth of Sarah Huckabee Sanders last week was maybe the most chilling. There she stood, asking a White House reporter who the hell he thought he was to question the veracity of John F. Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, who had just smeared a congresswoman. 'If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you,' she cautioned. 'If you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.'

Well, sorry to pull rank, but I would not hesitate to criticize Kelly. In the first place, Kelly was dead wrong to say that Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) made the noise of 'empty barrels' when she helped memorialize the death of two FBI agents in a Florida speech. Wilson had not used the occasion to beat her own drum, as Kelly alleged, but instead insisted on proper respect for the slain agents and for the FBI in general.

Had Trump gotten things so bolloxed up it would have been par for the course. After all, he gets almost nothing right. But Kelly is one of the so-called adults, brought in to bring some order to the White House Romper Room. He’s the details guy, the one who has taken charge of the paper flow, who would have — had Trump been about to deliver such a speech — checked YouTube to see if Wilson had actually grandstanded in her Florida remarks. This was his task. Yet, he failed miserably.

Did Kelly lie or did he misremember? I prefer the second choice, but either way, the stars he once wore on his shoulder do not immunize him. The rank I referred to above — mere citizen — is the one you and I hold. It is the one George Washington chose when he resigned his commission before becoming president of the United States. It is way higher than general. . .

Sanders was relying on the current veneration of the military to deflect criticism of Kelly. It was tawdry of her to do so, if only because it was Kelly and no one else who managed to call into question his vaunted competence. He brought dishonor to his office — the presidency is now too tarnished to dishonor — and signaled he is a better heel-clicker than he is a proud soldier. He should resign — and so, for good measure, should Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She knows how to be a press secretary, but not an American." [Link in original, emphasis added.]

UPDATE XIV: The Donald could learn something from this ex-Marine, who served his last assignment as a military casualty notification officer, one of "the guys who knocked on your door with the bad news", if he wanted to.

Read the Washington Post, This Marine told families when a loved one was killed. It was harder than combat.

The article notes that the Marine "knew how to take a punch, how to have humility and humanity when facing a fellow American’s lowest moment. That’s called leadership. We could use more of it."

As the story notes:

"'What it’s really all about is common sense, use your feelings. Go in there with what’s in your heart.

'Pretend that’s your mom you’re talking to. Think of how you react if someone knocked on your door with that news.'

Merna knew how to take a punch, how to have humility and humanity when facing a fellow American’s lowest moment. That’s called leadership. We could use more of it."

Therein lies the problem, The Donald lack humility, humanity or any ounce of leadership.

BTW, it was a real punch, not like the verbal punches The Donald so bravely trades with military widows.

UPDATE XIII:  "The drama began last Monday with a falsehood by Trump. A reporter asked him during a news conference why he had been silent for 12 days about the deaths of four soldiers in Niger, the deadliest combat incident since he took office. Trump responded defensively, falsely asserting that his predecessors, including President Barack Obama, never or rarely called family members of service members who were killed on their watch. In fact, they regularly did.

Trump’s actions since then have followed a careful formula that he long ago devised for winning a skirmish and that has been described by senior White House advisers: Make it a fight, use controversy to elevate the message and never apologize.

The conflict bears all the hallmarks of a typical Trump rumble: over-broad boasts, inconsistent official accounts, tweeted name-calling, partisan attacks, aides ensnared in controversy and a steady effort to pin the blame for the whole hullabaloo on the news media.

'Trump grew up in a New York PR and media environment of Page Six beefing and gossiping, so he looks at his whole life through that window,' said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and a vocal Trump critic. 'His philosophy of always fighting back is morally divorced from any other situation. And to stay in Trump’s good graces, his aides have to play that game.' . .

Without Trump’s rules of engagement, the bungled effort to soothe a mourning widow could easily have been resolved with a simple statement of clarification from the president. But Trump chose otherwise, and Kelly followed him into the breach, along with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. . .

In close adherence to the Trump rules, the president and his aides escalated the fight, welcomed the controversy and refused to apologize. And it might have worked more effectively had the whole enterprise not ended with the president in a standoff with a mourning widow."

Red the Washington Post, In sparring with a grieving widow, Trump follows his no-apology playbook.

UPDATE XII:  "Republicans and Democrats alike have been deluding themselves for some time about White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. They were certain that Kelly was a 'grown-up' who understood that the president the American people elected was hobbled — morally, intellectually, temperamentally — and it was Kelly’s job to steer the ship of state away from the rocks. He wouldn’t lie to the American people as President Trump did, these Kelly fans believed.

Recognition is now sinking in that Kelly is not so different than all the other politicians and officials who come in contact with Trump. To serve him requires suspension of integrity, and therefore those who serve become morally corrupted. (The sole exception to this seems to be Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who from day one simply refused to act as Trump’s political flack.) One can hear a palpable sense of sadness after last week’s events, a sense of disillusionment. . .

Kelly’s fall from grace was swift and senseless. It was all so unnecessary; he need not have gone out to spin for the president. . .

So from adult day-care shift supervisor to enabler in a short week, Kelly sacrificed a good deal of his utility to the president for nothing. In seeking to elevate the military above the rest of us, he ironically undercut his own stature as a guarantor of our democratic norms . . .

Those harboring unrealistic expectations about Kelly have learned once again: None of Trump’s advisers can make up for the deficits of this president; and with a lonely exception of Mattis, all of them look worse for having tried."

Read the Washington Post, We’re down to Mattis, I suppose.

UPDATE XI:  "The United States is in the middle of a very unfortunate experiment in how disoriented a great nation can become before it loses its moorings entirely.

At times, politics seems fairly conventional with Republicans and Democrats arguing about health care and tax cuts, as they long have done. But former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama reminded us last week that there is nothing normal about this moment. They issued searing, overlapping condemnations of Trumpism without naming President Trump. Former commanders in chief of opposing parties don’t do this sort of thing unless the country faces an emergency.

Our disorientation is reflected further in the way honorable men and women allow themselves to be pushed into defending the indefensible and twisting noble concepts into cheap and ultimately shameful talking points. These are designed to get the president through one more news cycle or around some controversy he could easily quell if he had any familiarity with the words 'I’m sorry.'

In the realm of political commentary, the now-daily detonations set off by a man who sees the common good as the pursuit of suckers drown out any serious discussion of the problems his voters thought he might try to solve. . .

For all the talk about Trump being something other than a Republican, he always falls back on the party’s old ideas because he has none of his own beyond promising to build a big wall, stop NFL players from kneeling during the national anthem and fix bad trade deals while offering few details.

But we can’t even have predictable, if necessary, partisan and ideological debates. These are blocked by self-involved spectacle and ruthless attacks against any who raise their voices to criticize the president.

We can try to resist being drawn into this swamp of petty invective, knowing that we are being pulled away from the consequential questions. Yet doing so would mean overlooking the central fact of our political situation: that Trump is systematically sapping our democratic capacities through his routine behavior. As Bush put it, 'We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. . . . Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization.'

This is why all except the most blind Trump partisans had to be heartsick over the performance of White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly on Thursday. The retired Marine Corps general, who devoted his life to service and suffered stoically when he lost a son in combat, stepped out as a hatchet man against Rep. Frederica S. Wilson.

It was Wilson, a Florida Democrat, who revealed that the president told the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson that the slain soldier 'knew what he signed up for.' Kelly could not back up Trump’s claim that Wilson had 'totally fabricated' the president’s conversation. In fact, Kelly seemed indirectly to confirm her account. So he resorted to a vicious rebuke of the African American congresswoman.

Kelly didn’t even have the decency to use Wilson’s name, and he compared her to noisy 'empty barrels.' It was hard to hear him and not think of Bush’s warnings about 'dehumanization.' Kelly went on to give a false account of gracious, bipartisan comments Wilson made at the dedication of a Florida FBI building.

Thus is our world turned upside down: A genuine patriot is reduced to the role of propagandist for a boss whose idea of sacrifice, as Trump once explained on ABC News, is running a business from which he profited.

We are numbed to the squalor we see daily. It’s common to hear the president called a 'disrupter.' But unlike the tech-world heroes to whom the label is typically applied, he builds nothing, creates nothing and moves a majority of our fellow citizens only toward rage or a sense of helplessness.

But helplessness is not an option, and rage alone will change nothing." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, What Trump did to Kelly shows how far we have fallen.

Read also the Washington Post, Gold Star father Khizr Khan knocks White House chief of staff on military condolence controversy, which noted that Kelley should have advised Trump to show respect, restraint and dignity to the widow.

UPDATE X:  "[F]or reasons that are not entirely clear, Kelly then went after Wilson with a vengeance. He didn’t say she lied; to the contrary, he said Trump had delivered the line Kelly had recommended. Rather, he skewered Wilson for politicizing the call (he was stunned, he repeated) and then falsely accused her of bragging at a ceremony dedicating an FBI building to two slain officers that she had gotten the money for the building. That accusation was apparently untrue as well, not to mention irrelevant. . .

We’ve grown sadly accustomed to watching Trump behave badly, punching 'down' at those who call him out. The focus must always be on him, the perpetual victim.

Kelly’s conduct was a sad revelation, however, and a reminder that while he looks upon himself as serving the country (and he is), he is also enabling a dishonest, morally detestable politician. As The Post reported: 'There was evident irony in Kelly’s making that particular point in defense of Trump, whose presidential campaign last year was marked by name-calling, harsh rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans and other minorities, and allegations of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women.' I would call it hypocrisy, not irony. He’s after all standing next to and by someone who truly treats nothing — people, the truth, democracy — as 'sacred.' He’s using his reservoir of honor and credibility to shield a president who is lacking both.

Moreover, Kelly’s presence brings us back to the unprecedented number of military-men-turned-civilian-counselors in this administration. Stocking an administration with generals diminishes the military (by forcing revered figures to play politics) and undermines the concept of civilian control, especially in an administration in which the ex-military and military advisers are taking 'adult day care' shifts to mind an unfit president, as Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) memorably said.

Our men and women placing themselves in harm’s way and their families deserve better than the Trump crowd. The country deserves honest civilian leaders. Unfortunately, like all Americans, our fighting men and women are stuck with Trump — and his reckless saber-rattling — for the time being."

Read the Washington Post, Trump makes himself, John Kelly and everyone around them look rotten yet again.

UPDATE IX:  "President Trump appears unable to opt for the higher moral ground when the gutter beckons so invitingly, and so it is that his battle over his response to the death of La David Johnson, one of four U.S. service members gunned down in Niger, has now entered its fourth day. Trump tweeted:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

The Fake News is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson(D), who was SECRETLY on a very personal call, and gave a total lie on content!
9:53 PM - Oct 19, 2017

In so doing, Trump slathered additional layers of ugliness and dishonesty on top of comments by White House chief of staff John Kelly, who yesterday told reporters that 'it stuns me that a Member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation,' adding: 'I thought at least that was sacred.' . .

But instead of treating this as mere theater of high dudgeon, there is actually a way to at least try to evaluate who is right in this situation. As a start, we can look at the process by which these presidential calls to the families of fallen soldiers come together.

Here’s the short version: It is not unusual for multiple people to be listening in on calls to the families of the fallen. The living next-of-kin generally is deferred to when it comes to who listens in, and it is not that unusual for the president to be placed on speakerphones."

Read the Washington Post, John Kelly’s defense of Trump was absurd. And he surely knows it., which explains the call process in detail.

The article notes that Kelley used "the 'sacredness' of women while defending Trump, who is accused of multiple counts of sexual assault and has repeatedly and very publicly denigrated women in horrifying ways, but Kelly is of course not responsible for Trump’s actions. What is worse is the sleight of hand Kelly used to align Trump culturally and morally with the military and the families of the fallen while casting the Congresswoman as belonging to a kind of cultural category that, in the minds of people of Kelly’s generation, which came of age during the country’s searing divisions over Vietnam, is characterized by empty, valueless showboating and doesn’t have sufficient respect for the military and the ultimate sacrifice made by fallen soldiers and their loved ones. . .

[T]the decision as to who listened in on the call was a personal one made by the next-of-kin. And Kelly should respect that. Instead, he helped Trump play the aggrieved party. But in this case, Trump apparently botched the call to a family. . . Trump and the White House could simply have let this die down or even apologized to the family and treated their feelings as more important than Trump’s personal pique or political fortunes. Yes, this this might mean taking a few lumps that the White House considered unfair, without retaliating. So what? Is it really that awful or unthinkable for Trump to lose a round? Yet the White House chose not to show restraint — even though Kelly understands as well as or better than anyone else what the family is going through." [Bold emphasis added.]

Kelly, just another enabler, should be ashamed for propping up The Donald, who will never change if not forced to do so.

And as the next article highlights, an ego and a lack of empathy are very dangerous.

UPDATE VIII: "Context matters. From another person, at another time, observing that Sergeant La David Johnson 'knew what he signed up for' by joining the Army wouldn’t have sparked outrage. But consider what else Representative Frederica Wilson—with the backing of Johnson’s mother—has alleged: that Trump didn’t know Johnson’s name; he repeatedly called him 'your guy.' And that Trump’s tone was oddly jovial: 'He was almost, like, joking.'

Above all, consider what we know about the way Trump discusses pain and death. This is the man who congratulated Puerto Ricans—whose island had been utterly devastated—for losing only “16” and not 'thousands of people.' The man who told a crowd in Corpus Christi on August 29, while 30,000 Texans were displaced, 'It’s going well.' And who said after touring the convention center where thousands of Houstonians were taking refuge that, 'We saw a lot of happiness.'

Donald Trump minimizes suffering for which he might be held responsible. That’s likely what he was doing in his conversation with Myeshia Johnson. And it’s not just insensitive; it’s dangerous. As the former Missouri Senate candidate, and former Army intelligence officer, Jason Kander observed on Wednesday night on CNN, people say, 'He knew what he signed up for' because 'they are seeking emotional distance from the situation. People say that because they want to avoid feeling that pain.' That’s worrying, Kander added, because 'I want the president, any president … when they’re making a decision about sending people to a dangerous place, I want them to have as one of the things in their mind, the visceral, emotional feeling' that comes from absorbing a widow’s inconsolable grief.

That’s the key point. Trump’s comments bespeak a refusal to face the human costs of violence and war that could have frightening consequences for American foreign policy. . .

Trump still finds the WWE paradigm—candy-corn violence—attractive. . .

By ignoring, or even celebrating, [the horror of real violence and war], he gives himself permission to delight in its pageantry and power. He relishes calling his defense secretary 'Mad Dog.' He dropped the 'mother of all bombs' in Afghanistan. He shocked Chinese president Xi Jinping when he informed him, over chocolate cake, that he had bombed Syria. He relishes public displays of weaponry: In June he flew to France to witness 'one of the greatest parades I have ever seen … two hours' of 'military might,' and then proposed something similar along Pennsylvania Avenue.

And he relishes threatening war against North Korea. . .

'I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way,' Trump told an Iowa rally in 2015, 'But only when we win.' It’s plausible that Trump will avoid war with North Korea because he fears America cannot prevail. It is far less likely that he will avoid war because he can’t bear the human cost. He never bears it.

That’s what Myeshia Johnson—who has a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and is pregnant, and who said she doesn’t know what she’ll do without her 'soulmate'—confronted Trump with: the human cost. The human cost that doesn’t exist in professional wrestling. The human cost, which proves that violence and war aren’t always grand, manly spectacles, and that America doesn’t always win. The human cost, for which Trump, as commander in chief, bears responsibility.

He couldn’t handle it. His attacks on Wilson suggest he still can’t. He won’t abandon his decades-old intoxication with pretend violence and pretend war. And that makes him a very dangerous man to be leading the most powerful military on earth. "

Read The Atlantic, Why Trump Can't Handle the Cost of War.

UPDATE VII:  "Offering succor to the families of service members killed in the line of duty is one of the most solemn exercises a president must undertake. It is a task requiring, above all, a sense of humility. 'In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of . . . your brave and early fallen child,' Abraham Lincoln wrote to the parents of a deceased Union soldier.

Unlike true leaders, however, Trump seems to associate humility with weakness. . . He always seeks to deflect responsibility. Somebody else is really at fault. Others who came before him have done worse. Bad people in the media are treating him unfairly.

Trump is a weak, narcissistic man in a job that requires strength and empathy. I’m not sure that empathy is a concept he even understands. He acts as if he believes that feeling someone else’s pain is strictly for losers, not winners.

None of this is a surprise. We learned a lot about Trump during the campaign when he attacked the Khan family, who lost a son in Iraq, for having the temerity to criticize him politically. We have a president who believes that making the ultimate sacrifice for the nation is less important than supporting or opposing Trump.

The Post reported Wednesday that earlier this year, Trump phoned the father of Army Sgt. Dillon Baldridge, who was killed June 10 in Afghanistan. In the course of the conversation, Trump offered to send the father a personal check for $25,000 — but did not follow through. The check was finally sent this week only after The Post asked about it.

Sadly, that’s typical Trump. He makes a grand promise, which allows him to feel big and generous — which is the whole point. Even in interactions with Gold Star families, it’s all about him. Later, having played the role of Trump the Munificent, he forgets about it and goes in search of the next opportunity to shore up his fragile ego.

No one should expect him to grow in office. He’s 71. At that age, either you have compassion, self-knowledge and a conscience, or you don’t." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s mindless cruelty to a soldier’s widow speaks to the core of his character.

UPDATE VI:  ANOTHER MUST READ, the Washington Post, Trump does not possess an ounce of compassion, which states in full:

"Just when you think that President Trump cannot go lower, he goes lower. First, he managed to turn the deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger into a spectacle of narcissism. The victims included not only the dead soldiers but also the president who had to call the bereaved and offer his — and the nation’s — condolences. 'It’s the toughest calls I have to make,' the president said. Actually, it’s the toughest call a family ever has to receive.

Then Trump said that President Barack Obama did not make such calls. He contrasted Obama’s alleged indifference to the deaths of American soldiers to his own practice of making such calls. Trouble was, Obama did make such calls. Trump never misses an opportunity to take a cheap shot at this predecessor. Each time, Obama rises in stature and Trump descends. He is pretty close to the floor already.

You will notice that everything so far is about Trump. He must have noticed, too, because he’s been on a roll. He then took another shot at Obama. He said Obama never called Gen. John F. Kelly after his son, 1st Lt. Robert M. Kelly, was killed in Afghanistan while on patrol in 2010. Kelly himself has refrained from using his son’s death in a political context, but Trump did not. He used the death to once again go at Obama and defend his own actions.

Then Tuesday, Trump did indeed call the widow of one of the slain soldiers. Her name is Myeshia Johnson and her husband was Sgt. La David T. Johnson. She is the mother of two children and is pregnant with a third. Trump reached her in a car and supposedly said that Johnson 'must have known what he signed up for.' It was an odd way to extend sympathy and Trump later insisted he said nothing of the sort. A witness, Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.), who was in the car at the time, also said she heard it. So did the sergeant’s mother, another passenger in the car.

It nevertheless remains possible that either Trump was misunderstood or that he failed to say what he meant to say. We all do that from time to time. And when we do, we offer our apologies. We concede that we might have been misunderstood, and we reiterate what we meant to say — what we should have said. Trump did not do that. Instead, he said his words were 'fabricated' and he dared Wilson to repeat her words.

Trump does not possess an ounce of compassion. He is reptilian, knowing only to show his fangs, hiss and attack. This is why he mocked a physically disabled reporter for the New York Times, why he derided the heroism of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and why he dismissed the authenticity of the Khans, who had lost their son in Iraq.

This inability to feel the pain of others — even to acknowledge it — is not a minor tick in an otherwise good man. It is the salient characteristic of a sadist, of someone so wrapped up in himself that he has contempt for victims. Trump’s name for them is 'losers.' They are the poor and the unlucky. They deserve what they get.

Trump is not a conservative nor a nationalist nor some reality show creation. He is a mean S.O.B., base in his motives and cruel in his targets and, until he won in November, unthinkable in American history — a brat in the Oval Office. He’s not man enough to throw an arm around a grieving widow. He disgraces his office and will be remembered by history as a lout. It is now a fate he cannot escape. Sorry, but he knew what he was signing up for." {Emphasis added.]

UPDATE V: What do you think of The Donald's condolence call to the familes of service members killed under his presidency: 'The President sends his condolences on the death of ______ (please fill in the blank, he is to busy to bother) but he "must have known what he signed up for".

Read the Washington Post:

Fallen soldier’s mother: ‘Trump did disrespect my son’;

Trump’s alleged ‘knew what he signed up for’ comment to widow is worth caution, but fits a clear pattern, which noted that:

"[T]he widow was in tears after the call and lamented that Trump 'didn't even remember his name', and

"And whatever you think about Trump, displaying empathy is not his strong suit. The way he talks about tragedy is routinely awkward, at best, and tasteless, at worst. Puerto Rico is dealing with the fallout of a devastating hurricane, and Trump talks about how it will pay for the relief effort, suggests the island is at fault for its poor situation, and attacks San Juan's mayor. He turned a death during a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville from a tragedy into a political football when he blamed 'both sides.' While in Florida for the Hurricane Irma relief effort, he seemed to be more reserved, but then he asked a man to attack Obama on camera. When Navy sailors were missing after a tanker collided with a destroyer near Singapore, Trump responded, 'That’s too bad, too bad.' There are plenty more examples. [Links in original.]; and

Yet again, Trump’s defensiveness makes his handling of a Gold Star family’s grief worse.

The Donald says there is a recording.  He should release it, or resign.

BTW, in an attempt to remedy his lack of empathy, how about an offer of money, which will never be sent.

Read the Washington Post, Trump offered a grieving military father $25,000 in a call, but didn’t follow through.

Who wants to admit they voted for this disgusting despicable person?

UPDATE IV:  "White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that President Trump’s chief of staff is 'disgusted' that the death of his son has become politicized — even though it was Trump who thrust the Marine's death into the political glare.

In an interview with Fox News radio this week, Trump cited John Kelly, his chief of staff, as he attempted to bolster his false claim a day earlier that President Barack Obama had never called families of fallen U.S. service members."

Read the Washington Post, White House decries ‘politicized’ death of chief of staff’s son — which Trump thrust into the spotlight.

The lesson here: if you work for a psycho-narcissistic con man, expect to be shamelessly exploited and used.

UPDATE III:  "Every once in a while, a politician says something so outrageous that it produces not the feigned outrage that has become so familiar, but genuine outrage. That’s what President Trump managed yesterday, when in a news conference he was asked about his public silence on the four American soldiers who were killed in Niger, and claimed that while he calls the families of those killed in action to express his condolences, previous presidents, particularly Barack Obama, hadn’t done so.

This was a particularly despicable lie, because it painted Obama — and other presidents, but let’s be honest, mostly Obama — as cruel and dismissive when it comes to the sacrifice of those in uniform, while portraying Trump as the only one who truly cares. . .

It’s obvious from his [statements] that Trump had absolutely no idea what presidents before him did or didn’t do in this situation, which he admitted again today ('I don’t know what Obama’s policy was'). But he went ahead and claimed that only he calls the families.

This is quite familiar to anyone who has been watching Trump these past couple of years. He takes his own limited experience and characterizes it as unique, extraordinary and unprecedented. No one has ever done this before, no one has accomplished so much, no one knows more than I do. There’s an element of the salesman’s puffery at work, but it also comes from a place of pure ignorance. . .

When a normal person is in a state of ignorance, he or she might exercise some caution, and refrain from making a volatile accusation that, for instance, his or her predecessors were callous to Gold Star families. But not Trump. You’ll notice that the first time he says it, he asserts it as simple fact: 'if you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls.' When he’s challenged, he equivocates: 'I don’t know if he did … President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told.'

Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama. If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this. (Trump’s insistence that there was 'fake news' at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.) And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Trump has the sensitivity to do so.

And that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.

If you’re one of those who marvel at the fact that Trump’s approval ratings aren’t even lower than they are, this is a big reason. It’s absolutely necessary to correct Trump’s falsehoods, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that any poisonous lie he tells won’t find an eager audience. And the whole country gets dumber and dumber."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s lie about Obama and fallen soldiers shows how he makes America dumber.

UPDATE II:  There is nothing The Donald can not shamelessly lie about.

Read the Washington Post, ‘Disrespectful lie’: Anger grows over Trump’s claims about past presidents and fallen troops.

UPDATE:  As the article notes, normal people don't brag about contacting the "families of soldiers who died in combat".

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s claim that Obama ‘didn’t make calls’ to families of the fallen.

''This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others. This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner — and to lie about how previous Presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers — is as low as it gets.'" [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, ‘A soulless coward’: Gregg Popovich slams Trump’s comments on slain soldiers.

I do disagree on one point, I'm sure The Donald will find a way to impress us yet again with his narcissistic focus on his greatness.

Let's not forget the danger he faced down in his "persoanl Vietnam . . [as] a great and very brave solider".

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Military Strong Man Edition (AKA Trump's Big CON: He is Really is a Moron)

UPDATE III:  It's not verified until The Donald calls it "FAKE NEWS!" and threatens the media.

Read the Washington Post, Trump attacks NBC News over report he wanted massive increase in nuclear arsenal.

UPDATE II:  The Donald loves to look pretty.

And nothing says pretty to his supporters than lots of new military equipment, especially nuclear weapons.

Read the Washington Post, Trump sees power as military strength — and nukes as the apex of that power, which notes:

"Trump came to the job from the private sector, from spending decades as the sole authority over his own company. He revealed his sense of what the job of president entailed when he said during the Republican convention last year that 'I alone can fix' the problems the country faces. He never had a distinct strategy for building consensus on Capitol Hill and has, instead, pushed the boundaries of unilateral executive orders to enact his will. The president isn’t a CEO, but there are ways in which the president can act like a CEO, and Trump has embraced those tools.

Nowhere is that power more immediate than in the president’s role as civilian commander of the armed forces. As president, Trump calls the shots for the nation’s soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. He can’t launch a war without congressional authority but, as recent presidents have shown, he has a lot of leeway to take military action without a formal declaration of war. This is the closest Trump will get to CEO power in the White House — and it’s a power for which he has an ingrained respect.

Trump never served himself, avoiding the Vietnam War draft by deferment while he was in college and later for bone spurs in his heels, a reason that has been met with scrutiny. He instead suggested that his time at the New York Military Academy — a boarding school north of New York City — offered him an equivalent experience. . .

[T]here’s no military more raw or more powerful than a nuclear weapon. The country’s reduced-but-still-significant nuclear weapons could obliterate any number of countries in a near-instant, including, as Trump threatened from the lectern at the United Nations, North Korea.

That’s a tangible expression of power, and it’s not subject to veto. Trump can launch a nuclear strike without any intervention, likely becoming a global pariah but, certainly, demonstrating the power of the United States and its president.

So we get to Trump in that meeting asking why the arsenal can’t be substantially larger instead of being winnowed into nothing. Reducing the number of nuclear weapons is, when extrapolated outward, a reduction of the central source of power Trump seems to understand.

This was the meeting after which Tillerson reportedly referred to Trump as a 'f—-ing moron.'"

My Mr. President, what big crowds you have!

P.S. This would be funny if it wasn't so scary!!

UPDATE:  Silly pundits, a showman doesn't need a plan, he has the show.

Read the Washington Post, The real problem with Trump’s foreign policy plans? He may not have any., which notes "Trump’s slurs and insults may be distracting us from a more basic foreign policy problem: On some key issues, when it comes to actual policy plans, the cupboard is bare."

Remember: it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

The Donald is a showman and he knows that there is nothing like some military arms for a good show.

Remember how badly he wanted the military to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue for his inauguration.

Of course, after the parade is over, nothing like spending money on the military and nuclear arms to show your supporters you are a 'Great Military Leader'.

Read the NBC News, Trump Wanted Tenfold Increase in Nuclear Arsenal, Surprising Military, which reports:

"President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the build-up. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.

The July 20 meeting was described as a lengthy and sometimes tense review of worldwide U.S. forces and operations. It was soon after the meeting broke up that officials who remained behind heard Tillerson say that Trump is a 'moron.' . .

[Trump's] comments raised questions about his familiarity with the nuclear posture and other issues, officials said.

Two officials present said that at multiple points in the discussion, the president expressed a desire not just for more nuclear weapons, but for additional U.S. troops and military equipment.

Any increase in America’s nuclear arsenal would not only break with decades of U.S. nuclear doctrine but also violate international disarmament treaties signed by every president since Ronald Reagan. Nonproliferation experts warned that such a move could set off a global arms race.

'If he were to increase the numbers, the Russians would match him, and the Chinese' would ramp up their nuclear ambitions, Joe Cirincione, a nuclear expert and MSNBC contributor, said, referring to the president.

'There hasn’t been a military mission that’s required a nuclear weapon in 71 years,' Cirincione said.

Details of the July 20 meeting, which have not been previously reported, shed additional light on tensions among the commander-in-chief, members of his Cabinet and the uniformed leadership of the Pentagon stemming from vastly different world views, experiences and knowledge bases. . .

That meeting followed one held a day earlier in the White House Situation Room focused on Afghanistan in which the president stunned some of his national security team. At that July 19 meeting, according to senior administration officials, Trump asked military leaders to fire the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and compared their advice to that of a New York restaurant consultant whose poor judgment cost a business valuable time and money.

Two people familiar with the discussion said the Situation Room meeting, in which the president’s advisers anticipated he would sign off on a new Afghanistan strategy, was so unproductive that the advisers decided to continue the discussion at the Pentagon the next day in a smaller setting where the president could perhaps be more focused. 'It wasn’t just the number of people. It was the idea of focus,' according to one person familiar with the discussion. The thinking was: 'Maybe we need to slow down a little and explain the whole world' from a big-picture perspective, this person said.

The Pentagon meeting was also attended by Vice President Mike Pence, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford, Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva, Undersecretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, Stephen Bannon, who served then as Trump’s chief strategist, Jared Kushner who is a senior adviser to the president and Reince Preibus who was then chief of staff. Sean Spicer who was then White House spokesman, and Keith Schiller who was Director of Oval Office Operations at the time, also accompanied Trump to the Pentagon that day. . .

It’s unclear which portion of the Pentagon briefing prompted Tillerson to call the president a 'moron' after the meeting broke up and some advisers were gathered around. Officials who attended the two-hour session said it included a number of tense exchanges.

At one point, Trump responded to a presentation on the U.S. military presence in South Korea by asking why South Koreans aren’t more appreciative and welcoming of American defense aid. The comment prompted intervention from a senior military official in the room to explain the overall relationship and why such help is ultimately beneficial to U.S. national security interests. . .

The president left the Pentagon on July 20, telling reporters the meeting was 'absolutely great.'" [Emphasis added.]

Note all the people needed to 'babysit' the president.

And now we know why The Donald was called a moron.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Afghanistan Edition

UPDATE VII"  "To some of the Marines, though, optimism, no matter how cautious, rings hollow after nearly 16 years of war and new approaches that sound a lot like the old ones."

Read the Washington Post, ‘It’s like everyone forgot’: On a familiar battlefield, Marines prepare for their next chapter in the Forever War.

UPDATE VI:  "President Trump proved one thing beyond the shadow of a doubt in his Afghanistan strategy speech Monday night: After nearly 16 years of fighting America’s longest war, there are no new ideas.

He called his plan 'dramatically different.'

It wasn’t. The only thing that seemed a striking change from his two presidential predecessors’ approach to the war launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was Trump’s escalatory rhetoric. He repeatedly vowed to 'win' a conflict that his Defense Secretary James Mattis told Congress recently 'we are not winning' and sharply criticized Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, a troublesome ally Trump excoriated for offering 'safe haven' to terrorists. . .

In many ways, the target of much of his speech was neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban but Barack Obama. Trump went out of his way, for example, to criticize his successor for “hastily and mistakenly” withdrawing from Iraq in 2011—without mentioning that he supported that move at the time. In his speech on Monday, he claimed that he now viewed it as a mistake so consequential it had shaped his own determination to fight on in Afghanistan.

Read Politico, America Is Out of Ideas in Afghanistan.

In blaming Obama, there was "one layer of dishonesty piled on top of another."

UPDATE V:  "The president has escalated fights in six countries. Now his supporters are wondering what happened to ‘America First.’"

Read the Daily Beast, Trump’s Base Goes Ballistic Over His ‘Unlimited War’.

UPDATE IV:  "At a low ebb in his presidency, amidst questions about his judgment and mental stability, President Trump on Monday night asked the country to trust him in sending more troops into the nation’s longest war. Coming after his panned tweet to throw transgender people out of the military and his incendiary remarks about Charlottesville, his paean to military cohesion and diversity rang hollow. ('The men and women of our military operate as one team, with one shared mission and one shared sense of purpose,' he said. 'They transcend every line of race, ethnicity, creed, and color to serve together and sacrifice together in absolutely perfect cohesion. That is because all service members are brothers and sisters. They are all part of the same family. It’s called the American family. They take the same oath, fight for the same flag, and live according to the same law.') At times he seemed to be defensively rewriting his remarks on Charlottesville. ('Love for America requires love for all of its people. When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry, and no tolerance for hate.')

What we did learn was the 'America First' has no meaning (other than to deceive gullible isolationists). Aside from that and a general disposition toward 'winning,' we did not hear with any specificity how he intends to achieve victory or even how he defines 'victory.' . .

Unfortunately, the means to achieve victory seemed both vague and insufficient. 'We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,' he said. (That’s fine, but could we get a ballpark figure to assess whether the commitment is sufficient to obtain the desired result?) One platitude followed another. '“Another fundamental pillar of our new strategy is the integration of all instruments of American power, diplomatic, economic, and military, toward a successful outcome.' But have we not been doing that for almost 16 years? The result hardly sounded like a definitive victory. . .

[Former ambassador Eric] Edelman observed: 'It is hard to call it an approach, it is really more of an attitude. The speech was in keeping with Trump’s approach to everything, which is to say it was more about him than anything else.' Edelman pointed out that from the effort to recover from the Charlottesville debacle to his ''I wanted to pull out' instincts to his pathetic whining about the crappy hand he was dealt — it read less like a carefully thought-out strategy and policy and more like an internal monologue.' He added, 'It was not a compelling argument to the public for continued involvement and sacrifice.'"

Read the Washington Post, A hobbled commander in chief tries to rally the country.

UPDATE III:  "In his televised speech last night, the president flip-flopped his position on the war in Afghanistan. We know this because, to his credit, Trump explicitly copped to it:

'My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all my life, I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. In other words, when you are president of the United States. So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle. After many meetings over many months, we held our final meeting last Friday at Camp David with my Cabinet and generals to complete our strategy.'

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph. Watching it live, when he said 'I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle,' I literally laughed out loud. Let’s be blunt: The only printed material that Trump has studied in great detail from every conceivable angle are periodicals that contain glossy centerfolds.

That said, I do believe Trump’s claim that he preferred to pull out and subsequently changed his mind. The question is why. For all the myriad ways the president tried to claim that his strategy of 'principled realism' was different from President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, it’s pretty much the same. The Trump administration cares a little less about democracy promotion and a lot less about civilian casualties than the Obama administration. . .

[W]hy the shift? Two big factors pushed him in the same direction. The first, obvious one is path dependence: Given the situation today, there is no magic formula to change things for the better with dramatic action. . .

The second factor is one that I have been hammering again and again, but it bears repeating: Trump is an exceptionally weak commander in chief. He lacks the gravitas and expertise to countermand his military advisers, even when his instincts push him in that direction. . .

What was unusual about this decision is that when faced with a choice between an unappetizing status quo and a future of even worse alternatives, Trump chose the status quo. He does not normally do this — except when it comes to decisions involving the military. That is consistent with what he did in Syria in the spring. . .

The U.S. military is not really all that hawkish, but the armed forces do tend to prefer more firepower to less in those conflicts where they already have a footprint. So while the military might not advocate for any new conflicts, they have and will advocate for more resources to prosecute the conflicts they are enmeshed in.

Which means that, contrary to some who believed that Trump was the less hawkish candidate in 2016, Trump will repeatedly defer to the military in his grand strategy. No matter what he claims, he has no better ideas.

This means longer and bloodier wars."

Read the Washington Post, Why did Trump flip-flop on Afghanistan?

UPDATE II: It's the status quo plus a little more in Afghanistan.

Read the Washington Post:

Trump announces new strategy for Afghanistan that calls for a troop increase,

‘It’s a hard problem’: Inside Trump’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan,

Trump’s muscular but vague Afghanistan speech, annotated,

In escalating America’s longest war, Trump acts against his ‘original instinct’,

Trump faces the grim reality of Afghanistan: No quick path to victory and no clear way out, and

Bannon’s Breitbart spins Trump’s Afghanistan speech as ‘flip-flop’, which noted:

"Trump — who has for years called for a withdrawal from the war — said during his speech that although his 'original instinct' was to pull out, 'decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.'

He provided few specifics about how much the U.S. military commitment would increase."

UPDATE:  The problem with Afghanistan, there are no good options to what is essentially a series of civil war that have been a feature of Afghanistan's history for more than 100 years.

Read:

The Washington Post, Trump’s ‘strategy’ on Afghanistan: Let the next president figure it out, and

NPR, Trump To Deliver Prime-Time Address On Afghanistan.

Trump always has a secret plan, even one to "win" in Afghanistan.

Now, approximately 9 months after the election and 7 months after taking office, he might tell us.

Read the Washington Post, The Latest: Trump to address nation Monday on Afghanistan.

Remember: it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: 'I Can Win in Afghanistan', and

Trump's Big CON: The Generals Decide How to Fight.

Trump's Big CON: 'I Can Win in Afghanistan'

"Why are we still there? We went into Afghanistan after 9/11 to get Osama bin Laden and to punish the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda. Now bin Laden is dead; al-Qaeda is dispersed; the Taliban has been battered. Afghan civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced in increasing numbers. The United Nations reports that there were more than 11,000 war-related civilian casualties last year, and 660,000 Afghans were displaced, adding to the country’s massive refugee crisis.

The war has now cost us over $1 trillion, making it the second-costliest U.S. war, after World War II. In fiscal year 2017, the war will cost about $50 billion, nearly a billion every week. We’ve lost over 2,350 soldiers, with 20,000 more suffering injuries. And as Trevor Timm of the Guardian noted, in a couple of years, there will be soldiers fighting in Afghanistan that weren’t even born at the time of 9/11.

We’re no longer fighting to defeat an enemy; we’re engaged in “nation-building.” Good luck with that. . .

The military has no strategy for victory, merely a plan to avoid defeat. After 15 years, no president wants to accept defeat. Yet a feature of Trump’s campaign was his scorn for the United States wasting $6 trillion in Middle Eastern wars we 'don’t win.' He ought to read his 2013 tweet: 'We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.'"

Read the Washington Post, The U.S. will never win the war in Afghanistan.

Trump's Big CON: Where in the World Is Trump's 'Armada'?

UPDATE:  Apparently Trump didn’t lie because he "didn’t have any idea where his armada was. 'He probably saw it on TV.'

Trump, who tends to eschew security briefings, spends much of his day watching Fox News, often tweeting about what he sees. And Fox News was beating the drums of war in the days and hours before Trump spoke of his armada . . .

Trump’s many falsehoods aren’t necessarily lies; he seems not to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, believing that whatever he says is true."

And whaever he saw lat on TV.

Read the Washington Post, Where is Trump’s ‘armada’? Apparently, wherever Fox News says it is.

"Trump administration officials on Wednesday denied misleading the public about the location of an aircraft carrier and whether it was redeployed as a show of strength against North Korea.

The whereabouts of the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and its accompanying strike group were swept up last week in an intensifying standoff between the United States and Pyongyang, which Washington has warned is risking American military action by pushing ahead with its disputed nuclear and missile programs.

As North Korea escalated its war of words with Washington, President Trump declared last week that he was “sending an armada, very powerful” toward the Asian nation. He, like other officials, made that assertion after U.S. Pacific Command’s April 9 announcement that the ship was headed from Singapore toward the western Pacific, part of a U.S. response to tensions with Pyongyang.

But news early this week that the ship at the time was actually in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles to the southwest, triggered speculation that the Trump administration, eager to illustrate its hawkish stance on a range of national security issues, was using deceptive means to send a message to Pyongyang."

Read the Washington Post, Trump administration defends how it described ship movements amid North Korean tensions.

Read also the Washington Post, Where America’s carrier groups were as the administration talked about its ‘armada’.

Thank You Veterans!

Repost:

Kiss's Military Salute, filmed during a USO Tour in Iraq:

The Republi-CON 'We Love the Military' Myth (They Don't Even Like Ordinary Citizens)

UPDATE:  "Tucked into a dusty corner of the Senate’s Highway Trust Fund bill — legislation that must pass before the fund runs dry on July 31 — is a zombie proposal to hire private debt-collection agencies to hound delinquent taxpayers on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has actually tried outsourcing tax collection activities to private debt collectors before, at Congress’s behest. Twice, in fact, over the last two decades.

Both times, the experiment was a disaster.

Privatizing delinquent tax collections led to complaints from taxpayers who got harassed and bullied by an industry known for rampant harassment and bullying, articularly of low-income people who don’t know their rights. In one oft-cited case, a private debt collector made 150 calls to the elderly parents of a taxpayer even after the collection agency learned that the taxpayer was no longer living at that address.

Perhaps more important, at least from a fiscal responsibility perspective, both times the program was scrapped because it actually cost taxpayers money on net, despite assurances ahead of time of the huge bounty it would lasso in."

Read the Washington Post, The Senate’s wrongheaded IRS proposal.

Republi-cons only love their corporate benefactors.

"House Republicans are pushing legislation to block predatory lending protections for American soldiers, under pressure from the banking lobby."

Read The Huffington Post, House Republicans Want To Block Predatory Lending Protections For American Troops.

The Republi-CON "We Love Our Nazi Gestapo Military" Hypocrites

The latest Republi-con conspriacy, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command is planning "an attempt to institute martial law, possibly in collusion with Wal-Mart. . .

'It’s the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany: You get the people used to the troops on the street, the appearance of uniformed troops and the militarization of the police.'"

Read the Washington Post, Jade Helm 15, a military exercise, brings wild speculation in Texas about 'martial law'.

Our Communist Military

UPDATE: The military "builds solidarity by taking care of its own, relying on a far more egalitarian structure of pay and benefits than the civilian economy." Read The New York Times, Saluting Teamwork.

FYI, egalitarian philosophies include are socialism, communism, anarchism, left-libertarianism, social liberalism and progressivism.

Racial and gender desegregation, equal opportunity for working-class families, single-payer universal health care, excellent child care and educational opportunity, and salaries that limit income inequality. Name that belove American socialist organization. And read The New York Times, Our Lefty Military.

Budget Gamesmanship and Tough Decisions

UPDATE VI: Something else to cut, undeserved combat pay. Read the Washington Post, I didn’t deserve my combat pay.


UPDATE V: Another tough decision after years of irresponsible budget decisions. Read the Washington Post, Tricare target of Pentagon cuts as health care projected to reach $65B.


UPDATE IV: "Public media fear budget may pull plug" Read the Pensacola News Journal, Public broadcast cuts catch static.


UPDATE III: As noted before, "we should discuss some of the difficult decisions that will have to be made to balance the budget, with a case study of WUWF, focusing on the general expenses (I'm trying to get a copy of the station's $1.135 million budget), funding sources, and Public Radio's campaign to prevent cuts to government funding."

Well, I got a copy of WUWF's 2010 Audited Financial Statements. The total WUWF budget is $2 million.

I noticed that "Cash paid to Employees" (page 9) is approximately $730,000. To understand that number, I asked the station manager how many full-time paid employees work at WUWF. Also, what part of that budget item is attributable to his position. His reply:

"WUWF radio has 12 full-time employees. Of that, 3 positions are funded by federal or state grants. 7 positions are funded by the university (including mine). The remaining 2 positions are funded by the UWF Foundation. $55,334 of the salary budget is attributable to my position, representing 50% of my compensation. The other 50% is paid from our television operation, which I also oversee. The television operation has 3 positions (in addition to mine), funded partially by the university and partially from earned revenue. It receives no federal or state grants."

We can discuss on the next show.


UPDATE II: "We’re going to be doing a lot of deficit cutting over the next several years. The country’s future greatness will be shaped by whether we cut wisely or stupidly. So we should probably come up with a few sensible principles to guide us as we cut.

The first one, as I tried to argue last week, is: Make Everybody Hurt. The sacrifice should be spread widely and fairly. A second austerity principle is this: Trim from the old to invest in the young. We should adjust pension promises and reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life so we can preserve programs for those who are growing and learning the most. . .

[Third, n]ever cut without an evaluation process. Before legislators and governors chop a section of the budget, they should make a list of all the relevant programs. They should grade each option and then start paying for them from the top down."

Read The New York Times, The New Normal.


UPDATE: "Governing is not a 'hostile corporate takeover,' Morgan tells Gov." Read the Pensacola News Journal, Sheriff Morgan gets frank with Gov. Scott.

The article includes a link to the letter.

Imagine a politician who takes a logical approach to budget decisions by "recommend[ing] that the governor compile a list of agencies and tasks performed, then delineate 'want vs. need,'" instead of focusing on political gamesmanship. Read Rick's Blog, Sheriff Morgan questions Scott’s budget.

In the Navy, It's Not Like Not Used To Be

"Never in its history has the military been quite so squeamish about sex." Read the Washington Post, No dirty videos, please - we're in the Navy, which notes that:

"Most military experts believe that it will make the integration of openly gay troops into the ranks much easier. 'The military will have no problem with homosexuals because it is a sexless environment,' [a British civilian who spent several years working as an adviser to top American commanders in Iraq] said. 'It just won't be an issue.'"

Why Is America Great?, Questioning the Status Quo

The capacity to learn and adapt in the face of adversity.

One example, "[t]he Army’s implementation of a new counterinsurgency strategy shows that institutions don’t have to stay wedded to the status quo." Read The New York Times, Leading With Two Minds.

The U.S. military is especially good at critical examination of the status quo.

Does Christian Fundamentalism Threaten World Peace?

Chuck Baldwin is the pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida, and was the presidential nominee of the Constitution Party for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

In his latest column, Army Report Says Christians Threaten US Foreign Policy, Baldwin discusses a paper written at the School of Advanced Military Studies, United State Army Command and Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. An abstract of the paper, titled Strategic Implications of American Millennialism, states:

Since the beginning of the Republic, various forms of millennial religious doctrines, of which dispensational pre-millennialism is the most recent, have shaped U.S. national security strategy. As the dominant form of millennialism in the U.S. evolves, it drives changes in U.S. security policy and subsequent commitment of the instruments of national power. Millennial ideas contribute to a common American understanding of international relations that guide our thinking irrespective of individual religious or political affiliation. Millennialism has great explanatory value, significant policy implications, and creates potential vulnerabilities that adversaries may exploit.

In the simplest usage of the word, millennialism refers to any belief system, religious or secular, which anticipates a purification of society or the world through dramatic and sweeping change. In the U.S. today, the most well-known and influential form of millennialism is a religious variant known in formal, theological parlance as dispensational pre-millennialism. This contemporary form of millennialism took shape during the 1970s and has significantly shaped current U.S. security policy. Dispensational pre-millennialism is loosely based on depictions of battle between the forces of good and evil in the biblical Book of Revelation. In the U.S., dispensational pre-millennialism contends that in the very near future Jesus Christ will ‘rapture,’ or remove his church from the Earth. A period of intense tribulations and battles will follow, culminating with a cataclysmic defeat of Satan. Jesus would then establish an earthly kingdom for 1,000 years – the millennium. Today, the theological doctrines of dispensational pre-millennialism contribute significantly to American culture. This has resulted in a pervasive sense of determinism and pessimism that has significant implications for U.S. security policy around the world.

Military leaders, planners and strategists require greater understanding of American millennial thought. Millennialism shapes both American culture and U.S. government policy. While most Americans are influenced to some degree by the ideas of pre-millennialism, many are unaware of the philosophical or theological underpinnings. Military leaders charged with interpreting policy into strategy and acting on behalf of the nation on the international stage cannot afford to remain ignorant of the effects of pre-millennialism. Due to a general lack of awareness of millennialism and an uneasy reticence to discuss religious factors, understanding and analysis of our own policies and motives is often deficient. Additionally, the cultural imprint that derives from millennialism impairs our understanding of the words, actions and motives of other actors on the world stage. These factors can be problematic for any military leader or planner attempting to achieve U.S. Government policy objectives through strategy, operations and programs.

What do you think?

Foreign Policy By Assassination

"Whether or not drone missile strikes and assassination plots are legal, are they a good idea?" Read The New York Times, The Price of Assassination.

How would you respond if a foreign country was assassinating local people in your community?

A-TEN-HUT

Attention Soldiers, Sailors, Airman, Marines, Veterans, and family members. In honor of those comrades who have given their lives in service to the country, watch Taking Chances.

Dismissed.