Can you think of anything worse than a guy who faked a disability to avoid wearing his country’s uniform during the Vietnam War who then turns around and complains about those who did serve in the military? (Perhaps that is why when he uses the word “fake” I recall what a fake his is.)
Here is another one of his classy statements he made in late February on Morning Joe: “Well, I’ll tell you what, I don’t mind fighting, but you have got to win and number one, we don’t win wars, we just fight, we just fight. It’s like a big — like you’re vomiting, just fight, fight, fight. We don’t win anything. I mean, if you’re going to fight, you win and you get back to rebuilding the country. We don’t win. It’s really a terrible thing. I mean, our country used to win all the time. We don’t win at all anymore.”
That everyone who has worn a uniform is not insulted by such a remark from a faker shows how many people have sold their souls to the Pipe Piper of Mar-a-Largo. First of all he does mind fighting. He had his chance and faked his way out.
Second, the man is oblivious to history. Our military has been winning constantly in any war we entered in over the last 40 years. Where we fight we win. That is the job of our military. Only someone oblivious to our success and looking for cheap shots at our brave men and women in uniform could suggest we fight and don’t win. We have the best fighters in the world led by the best leadership. Did Trump forget he has some of those men on his staff?
The idea of us not winning is not because of our military but because of those who are supposed to plan for what happens after our military does its job. We have not been defeated in any war other than in Vietnam. That defeat was more the fault of the politicians especially that gross LBJ than anyone in the military. Speaking of LBJ two things come to mind: first, both he and Trump are thin-skinned, vain, foul-mouthed, vile braggarts.
The other thing to note is LBJ too all but ducked the military as a Congressman serving for 5 weeks during WWII. But worse than that, he was awarded the Silver Star by General Douglas McArthur for being a passenger on a B24 bomber as an observer. None of the crew got even a hardy handshake while the vile LBJ was commended for his bravery under fire when he just sat there. The bomber had mechanical difficulties and returned to the base and at some point, according to some, it came under fire from Japanese aircraft. According to others it never left the base.
LBJ, another faker, was in as much danger as Trump was of being shot at by the Viet Cong on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Don’t be surprised if Trump is awarded a military medal for bravery as he sits in the dining room at his Florida golf course. He may not be good at fighting but he can certainly brow beat the generals into giving him one. He, too, like Johnson would wear it on his lapel believing that he deserved it.
One other thing: his National Security Advisor, McMaster, in talking about LBJ described Trump to a T. He, “revealed a real propensity for lying. Both Lyndon Johnson’s self-doubt and his willingness to forgo the truth would color his relationship with his principal military advisers and shaped the way the United States became more deeply involved in the Vietnam War.” Are we on our way to another Vietnam?
Aside from the hypocrisy of D.Trump’s avoiding serving and criticizing those that do, a greater question remains: what does he mean by winning? It would be nice if he could set out what he would have done differently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Lybia, Yemen, or Syria than what was done in the past? Sadly, he has no clue.
Many suggest those ongoing wars are Obama’s wars. Fine, we will ignore that they were handed over to Obama by Bush. But those many have to admit that Obama has handed them over to Trump.
Trump is now in control of these wars. These are Trump’s wars. He whines about how they have been handled by others. He tells us he is going to win them. It would be nice if he tells us how he is going to win them?
What will a win look like in those lands with a multitude of ancient grievances? As we saw in Iraq we easily defeated its army but had no idea what to do then. As for Trump, he’s already had one go at winning. It was a botched raid in Yemen which he approved over dinner and may have been tweeting while our troops were engaged in a battle where one lost his life. What did he do after that: he blamed the generals or Obams, take your pick. No, “the buck stops here” for D.Trump. It’s typical of a guy who’d fake his way out of the draft, he blames others.
The Trump voters got their man. Let us see how he handles the wars. Let us hope and pray that it is not like LBJ who cared less about the deaths of our troops but only about himself and orchestrated the war with an eye on his political future. .
Matt, I agree that what roils those who served (whether by force i.e. draft, or volunteering,) is the “chickenhawks” whipping up the furor for wars that will not affect them or their families–Cheney, Wolfowitz, Trump, cClinton et al.. then disparaging those efforts.
What men are forced to do in the foul oduor of war is not something that feels like “winning” regardless of the results. The facile almost cavalier attitude of those who pound the drums for war instills disgust in those that have paid a price—including the friends, loved ones and sweethearts of those at home who have also paid dearly.
Here is a list of military service by Presidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_military_service
Of particular note is Calvin Coolidge’s service as Commander-in-Chief of the Massachusetts Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company. Marching and chowder society experience can be so vital for a President.
Just one serious point. “Trump is as equally in league with those people as she is.” Wrong. If you have ever worked with the very rich you would notice that there is a huge difference between hiring them and working for them. They can be as servile as any theatrical steppinfetchit and at the same time be arrogant and privileged to others to the point where they deserve killing.
The billionaires Trump has hired know they are beta dogs to his alpha dog. If they don’t, they will learn. Expect an unusual number resignations or “you’re fired” moments in his administration. It will not be instability. It will be steely-eyed purposefulness. The man is willful. The man is smart. One of his greatest weapons is the self-importance and overestimation of their own abilities of his enemies.
Every time I listen or read some *ssh*l* Hahvahd type pooh-pooh the Redneck Billionaire as crass or dumb I laugh. They actually believe it. They are that stupid. Education does not cure true ignorance as granny was wont to say. They are the swamp dwellers who need their abode drained.
Matt, you preen, satisfied that you are clever enough to discern that the military’s ability to prevail in battle does not equate to victory in war if the civilian leadership follows through with with failure. That point has been noted often. Trump agrees with you. He makes that point when he praises and expresses confidence in the military while at the same time judging that the wars they fought were lost. You agree with Trump.
Trump grew up in the post war triumphalist aura that victory meant only one thing: unconditional surrender. Most of history has a more ambiguous take on victory. Nations have lost battle after battle until the enemy wearies and gives up the fight. That is victory. If you choose define America’s interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as victories a case can be made. However, the opposite case can also be made. Reasonable men can disagree.
The young Donald Trump was examined by military doctors and found to be unfit for military service. Lucky him. He showed up. The law was answered. He was rejected. At no point did he evince any cowardice. He did not make any written promise to reappear after begging a deferment as did Bubba. That could be termed cowardice.
You dip your pen in venom to describe LBJ. The man deserves all your hate and contempt. But you cannot compare him to Trump for that man is more loathsome than even your bile etches.
LBJ called back rescuing aircraft on the way to the USS Liberty where Israeli planes were strafing wounded American sailors in the water. He was complicit in a war crime against America. He was getting frantic messages from Jewish donors calling in their chits. He grasped at their 30 pieces of silver in exchange for the blood of 34 brave sailors.
Donald Trump told that same group of so-called dual loyalists, or their sons, that he did not want their corrupting money, the first candidate in my adulthood to do so. He won the presidency without it. The candidate you voted for, Hilliary, gorged herself on shekels.
Additionally, to equate the loss of a single soldier in a raid to a lost war is Looney Tunes perspective. Trump did not lose a war because a good man died. Get a grip.
Your President and my President, Donald Trump, has promised to drain the swamp that is too much of Washington. It needs to be drained. Our country could use a dedication to prosperity and fairness to its citizens.
Being a Election Refusenik distracts from, hinders and may defeat the task of restoring America to the purpose of the Republic, to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.
Think about the value of “domestic tranquility”. Accept the Constitutional order. The election is over. You lost. Think four years from now.
Trump/Pence 2020!
Tadzio:
I was prepared to lose no matter who got elected since I voted for neither so having lost is not what bothers me it is that the winner turned out to be a consummate liar. I know you can somehow suggest that his lies are not lies but I call things by what I see them. I also felt the same way about Clinton, who I agree with you was a more serious draft dodger than Trump who was like that crazy doctor from New York whose name keeps slipping from my mind who tried for the Democratic nomination.Of course the worst one was Cheney but he is ancient history as are all the others so I must deal with Trump.
I disagree with you about the money bit and Clinton. Trump is as equally in league with those people as she is. Taking a look at his cabinet is enough to convince you of that.
You seem to suggest that before Trump we did not have domestic tranquility. I disagree. Our country was as peaceful under Obama as it has ever been. Things were going on reasonably well. As I pointed out the chance of being injured by a foreign terrorist was less than being killed by a dog bite.
I recognize Trump has only begun. I fear what lies ahead because the man is a little loony with his compulsive tweeting of lies or of messages that speak of how wonderful he thinks he is. You have said that is the modern way to communicate. True, but Trump is not modern. He is an old guy – he would be called our “elderly president.” I’m glad he does tweet since we can see how his mind works which is something he should try to hide but you may have heard that old people become fixated on things and it is difficult to treat them new tricks.
Matt: Agree. Obama was a solid president, the guy who reinvigorated the economy, pulled our troops out of the GOP-inspired war in Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden while he was at it.
Trump gives us a paranoid fantasy about being wiretapped by Obama. No facts. No logic. Evidently, both Clapper and Comey are part of a conspiracy against Trump since both deny there was any such wiretapping. On the one hand, Trump says the Yemen disaster was Obama’s fault, and on the other hand says the raid was a fantastic success. So sad.
It was quite a sight when Trump shoveled himself into a flight jacket and put on an admiral’s cap while lumbering around an aircraft carrier last week. The disguise didn’t help. Our commander-in-chief is still a draft dodger.
Both Obama and Clinton wore “flight jackets.” Google the images!
Selective outrage and sanctimony! Let’s look at some facts:
1. YEMEN: The Yemeni raid. Matt called it “botched”; General Mattis called it a success.
Navy Seal William Ryan Owens was killed in that raid. A true American hero and patriot.
And some civilians, including Al Alwaki’s 8 year old daughter, were also killed in that raid, too.
Matt doesn’t mention any “botched” raids under Obama:
Remember, Obama’s attacks in Yemen:
“Two weeks after the killing of Awlaki (September 2011), a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. ”
“Few events pulled the mask off Obama officials like this one. It highlighted how the Obama administration was ravaging Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries: just weeks after he won the Nobel Prize (2009), Obama used cluster bombs that killed 35 Yemeni women and children.”
“The U.S. assault on Yemeni civilians not only continued but radically escalated over the next five years through the end of the Obama presidency, as the U.S. and the U.K. armed, supported, and provide crucial assistance to their close ally Saudi Arabia as it devastated Yemen through a criminally reckless bombing campaign. Yemen now faces mass starvation, seemingly exacerbated, deliberately, by the U.S.-U.K.-supported air attacks. Because of the West’s direct responsibility for these atrocities, they have received vanishingly little attention in the responsible countries.”
———————————————————————————————————-
2. AFGHANISTAN: “Obama also vowed to turn the “good war” in Afghanistan around and pull out all U.S. service members.
“Eight years later, U.S. military fatalities in the war have more than quadrupled from 558 under Bush to 2,247 under Obama, Pentagon data shows. There were 1,689 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan under Obama, a figure that makes up more than 75 percent of all American fatalities since the war started in October 2001. The number of U.S. military injuries has increased more than 7-fold, from 2,702 under Bush to 20,237 now, according to Pentagon figures.
The number of U.S. military injuries under Obama’s watch (17,535) account for more than 90 percent of all 20,237 wounded in action incidents throughout the 15-year-old war.”
And now Matt calls them “Trump’s Wars!”
Best line was “hardy handshake” — altho WC Fields actual line in “The Bank Dick” was “hardy handclasp”
On Russian contacts: Matt will never tell us how Bill Clinton and Frank Giustra flew to Kazakstan where FG acquired control of Kazakstan’s uranium mines, then following that visit Giustra contributed $35 million to the Clinton Foundation. I guess Giustra and his associates eventually contributing $145 million to the Clinton Foundation had nothing to do with the Uranium One deal. And I guess Bill never told Hillary about the trip to Kazakstan, nor about the $500,000 fee Bill got from a Russian Bank for one speech.
Matt:
I’d call today’s column venomous, vile, vitriolic, but I don’t want to be too critical.
Any idea how many 1-Y deferments were issued during Vietnam? Hundreds of thousands, I’d estimate. 1-Y was for “minor medical” conditions such as flat feet, bone spurs, food allergies, dermatitis, childhood asthma, transient high blood pressure etc, etc. All those men were cowards? About 9 million men (and women) wore the uniform between 1964 and 1975. About 2.6 million served in the Vietnam theater. About 30 million young men were eligible for service between ’64 and ’75. All those millions of men who didn’t serve cowards?
Were Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney (all issued deferments) sniveling cowards? How about Sylvester Stallone? Were all those many thousands of folks fakers and cowards? Or only Trump? And how do you know that with any moral certainty?
As far as American “not winning”; that statement is irrefutably true. We didn’t “win” in Vietnam; We stalemated in Korea. Yes, you can point to some wins in the ’80s and ’90s; bombing Serbia was a mistake. And, of course, we had to respond to 9/11— but we invaded Iraq on a false pretext (WMD) pushed by fake news! We’ve been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for about 14 years. We’ve made a shambles of Syria and Libya. We’re helping the Saudis bomb (with cluster bombs) the Houthis in Yemen.
You ask: What should we have done? We can’t undue the past, but we should not have invaded Iraq, perhaps we should not have initially armed the Mujahadeen which brought Russia into Afghanistan, we should not have armed and incited rebels in Syria, we should not have bombed Khadaffi. We should not have played World’s Policemen, as if our CIA and our bombs could solve every problem in the world.
You ask: What should we do now?
I ask you: What should we do, now that our “Pols”, “Press”, “Intelligence Agencies” and 8 years of Obama have got us “stuck in the muck.”? Bush gave us Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama kept us there, and added Libya, Syria, etc. ISIS and Al-Qaeda have metastasized around the world. I guess we should just blame Trump.
And as for the recent mission in Yemen, that was planned, finalized and ready to go under Obama. Trump merely gave it the final green light.
Bill:
You wrote: “perhaps we should not have initially armed the Mujahadeen which brought Russia into Afghanistan” You got that backwards. We did that to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.
You blamed Obama for Bush’s wars but these are now Trump’s wars as much as they were Obamas wars. The Iraq and Afghanistan of Bush led to the other areas. Now let’s see what Trump will do. Right now it looks like he is digging in deeper and sending more men in.
The Yemen raid was planned under Obama but he did not authorize it. The military is planning raids and ideas all the time. It is not when the planning takes place it is who authorized it that counts or who gave it the green light.
All those other people you mention did not take over the job of president. It makes a difference. There is no indication that Trump’s bone spur whatever that was ever hindered him in any way other than keeping him from serving. Not something to be proud off when all those without connections went off and many died. You do notice the people you mention were all connected.
The big problem is Trump is a liar as we just saw. Putting a liar in charge of our military is a really scary thing. He will be attacking countries and justify the attacks based on lies.
Matt; You have to read more deeply into the arming of the Mujahadeen, and what triggered Russia’s military moving into Afghanistan to support the pro-Russian Afghan government.
Matt; You know better than Mattis.
The Yemeni raid was finalized and ready to go! Nothing was altered by Trump!
Bill:
He approved it. He should have paid more attention to what was being given him rather than doing it over dinner. Mattis may have said it was a success but anyone knows when a raid is tipped off before hand it can hardly be a success.
Bill:
I have. There was even a movie on it. The CIA armed the Afghan fighters to drive out the Russians. Not much more to know about it than that.
Well, Matt. You know what LBJ said.
“Nothing like tripping on a flat stone and hitting your head to make you wish you’d just stepped in a big, old pile of West Texas cow flop.”
Between overseas posts being the chief adjutant officer at a number of our embassies, my father-in-law was stateside for several long stretches working in the White House organizing world tours for Rusk, HHH, and LBJ. His LBJ stories were first hand accounts and I was probably the only person that heard the good stuff. He knew someone should hear it eventually, and I was his Father Confessor. For now I can assure you that Trump has many, many miles to go before he ascends to the level of vileness that LBJ soaked in on a daily schedule.
Honest:
Wow! I though LBJ was bad but to say he was worse than Trump is really saying something. That’s the best news I’ve heard in months. It gives me hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If we survived LBJ then we can possibly survive Trump.
There’s NO comparison.
Agree. Watch Mosul.