It’s disrespectful to our troops to kneel during the national anthem, according to our president.
According to his example, here’s how you honor the troops like a good American:
- Get a medical exemption for bone spurs and avoid being drafted during a war.
- Declare that you know more about ISIS than US generals, despite your career in Manhattan real estate.
- Denigrate a senator who was a POW for 4+ years because you “like people who weren’t captured, okay?”
- Ignore the fact that he refused early release because it would have left his fellow POW’s behind.
- Ignore the fact that his service and capture was in the very war you avoided via your bone spurs.
- Repeatedly insult the family of a fallen soldier who challenges your understanding of the Constitution after you call for a religion-based test for entrance to the country.
- Ignore the families of fallen soldiers for two weeks, and call them only once the media highlights your silence.
- Claim that former presidents rarely or never called families of KIA warfighters, despite overwhelming amounts of direct anecdotal and photographic evidence to the contrary.
- Tell a pregnant widow of a slain serviceman that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”
- Forget that serviceman’s name while talking to his widow, just for good measure.
- Politicize the wartime death of your chief of staff’s son against the COS’s repeatedly stated objections.
- Relentlessly goad the unstable leader of North Korea while 30,000+ US troops are stationed within 35 miles of the Korean border.
- Refer to the United States military as “my military.”
- Scrap the Iran nuclear deal (after we’ve already given them the money), putting Israel at risk and greatly increasing the likelihood of future conflict for our military.
- Inquire about the possibility of North Korea/China/USSR-style military parades down Constitution Avenue.
- Inquire about the possibility of a tenfold increase in our nuclear weaponry, despite worldwide, generational work toward nonproliferation.
I get it. He finds the act of kneeling during the national anthem distasteful. That’s his take, and I don’t have a problem with it. To each his own, and contrary to his wishes, it’s a free country for everyone – including NFL players and presidents.
And you might find it distasteful, too. That’s your right. But if you are against NFL players kneeling AND an advocate for Donald Trump, you have some explaining to do.
Donald Trump took an oath to protect and defend the CONSTITUTION of the United States. Not the culture. Not the history. Not the patriotism.
The Constitution. The foundational document that makes this conglomerate of diversely pigmented and opinioned people…a people.
His argument that the NFL should demand that the players stand, and his assertion that the government should strong-arm the NFL into compliance with his demands, is honestly a non-starter. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.
But beyond that, his insistence that “patriotism” and “the troops” demand mandatory respect couldn’t come from a less patriotic or respectful human being.
Your leader’s angry representation of your opinion undermines the validity of your very opinion—precisely because he’s lived 71 years flouting the very values he claims to hold dear. And he didn’t turn over a new leaf on January 21, 2017…he doubled down and got much, much worse.
So, if you are against NFL players kneeling, be against it. Good for you. But if you want to make your point ten times more valid: tell your president that his actions and inactions speak louder than his pandering, blatantly insincere words.
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F %$#*ing RIGHT ON!!!
Thank You Ricky.
Thank you, Ken! Glad you liked it.
Again, the question must be asked of the soulless drones of the Republican Party elite: Is getting rid of the estate tax and shoving more of the nation’s wealth upwards really worth putting up with this?
From The Washington Post:
Sgt. La David T. Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, told The Washington Post that she was present during the call from the White House on Tuesday to Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson. Johnson’s mother also stood by an account of the call from Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) that Trump told Johnson’s widow that her husband “must have known what he signed up for.” “President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband,” Jones-Johnson said. Trump lashed back. He denied Wilson’s account in a Twitter message Wednesday. He said he had “proof” that the exchange did not go as Wilson had described. Trump did not elaborate, but the claim again raised questions about whether the president tapes calls and conversations.
“Trump lashed back…”
That should be enough to sicken any rational person. The mother of a U.S. soldier killed in action, in a place where most Americans didn’t even know there were American soldiers to be killed in action, upbraids the president* for his insensitivity toward her son’s widow and the president* feels obligated to “lash back.” (This, I would point out, is the president who trotted out the mother of one of the Americans killed in Benghazi to demand that Hillary Rodham Clinton be jailed, and I don’t recall HRC’s “lashing back” at her.) All he had to do here was shut up and ride out the storm of opprobrium that his initial insensitivity caused. But he couldn’t even do that. And I don’t believe he has “proof” any further than I can throw Trump Tower.
I mean, honestly. Mike Pence would sign the same tax plan that is being proposed. He wouldn’t stand in the way of the ongoing project to marry the Gilded Age to the age of Jim Crow in a more permanent fashion than was the case in their original manifestation. Why continue to marry yourself and your party to a malignant Macy’s Parade balloon and his family of grifters? The same gang of vandals and incompetents will be in the Cabinet. Nothing will change in policy. Pence isn’t smart enough to pull that off. But the White House will no longer be a place where war widows get used for political chum to feed an unbalanced ego.
“Trump lashed back…”
Of course, he did. He can’t help himself. He lives in his own world in which the rest of us, at best, are props. That was true when he “lashed back” at the Khans last summer. It was true when he inexcusably used the memory of his own chief-of-staff’s son as a cudgel on his predecessor. (Come to think of it, how did John Kelly manage to come to work the next day and look himself in the mirror?) Everything in the world that doesn’t feed his ravenous narcissism is essentially fit for burning. Christ almighty, what does he have to do?[editoriallinks id=’7b5ba2e4-32e5-49db-81f7-12b1ac1fb795′][/editoriallinks]
How much more of this shit do we have to put up with?
GET THIS CLOWN OUT!!!
Exactly right. I read someone put it this way (paraphrased): a group of knowing hucksters is sowing and leveraging people’s knee-jerk racism, nostalgia for some fictitious “good old days,” and misplaced anger in order to help billionaires pay less taxes. Ridiculous. And I agree 100% about Pence. They’d get 99% of what they want, and he wouldn’t get us into WW3 by flexing his muscles to show the world how macho and tough he is. He’s boring and milquetoast, but he’s also not a psychopath, so he’s at least got that going for him!
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