dishonourable conduct

Dana Bash’s interview of Harris/Walz last night went quite well. Bash, a skilled questioner, asked important and thoughtful questions while avoiding gotchas. Harris was a bit blurry on the fracking issue and Walz a bit vague on the “weapons of war” quote, but they did no harm. If the GOPers think they can make much hay from what Kamala/Tim offered, they can expect a crop failure.

Trump, for example, can’t attack Walz’s military record without expecting a counter-attack about how his own martial experience was cut tragically short by bone spurs. And, recently, Aging Orange endeared himself to us veterans by saying that the Medal of Honor — America’s highest military decoration — isn’t as good as the Presidential Medal of Freedom given to civilians.

His logic was as impeccable as always. “It’s actually much better,” he mansplained, “because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

Where to start?

Donnie John, not everyone gets the medal. As of September of last year, only 3536 Medals have been awarded, more than 40% of them for actions during the Civil War. It’s not just awarded to soldiers, which are members of the Army. Members of all branches are eligible: Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force and your own Space Force.

Trump spat this shit recently when he was referring to his presentation of the freedom medal to Doctor Miriam Adelson in 2018. Dr. Adelson was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust. An expert in treating drug addiction, she has founded treatment and research centers.

Nowadays, however, she is an avid Trump supporter and megadonor. According to Wikipedia, she “has written that Trump ‘should enjoy sweeping support’ among U.S. Jews and Israelis, and that Trump deserves a ‘Book of Trump’ in the Bible due to his support of Israel.”

That apparently qualified her for the freedom medal.

To top this and the litany of dissing McCain, “suckers”, “losers”, and “avoiding STD’s was my Vietnam”, Trump found a new way to offend veterans this week by turning a visit to Arlington National Cemetery into a campaign ad. When a Cemetery employee tried to stop his staff from illegally recording, she was pushed aside and called “despicable”. Although the Army issued a stark rebuke to his campaign, Trump brushed it off. The employee has declined to press charges for fear of retaliation.

Today’s technology cannot accurately measure the height of my contempt nor the depth of the cluelessness of that asshole.