Monday, November 12, 2018

Scorn


He's just not that into you.

Oh, it has been obvious for some time now.   There was that time in July, 2015 that Donald Trump claimed that John McCain is "not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”  However, maybe that was only a slam at John McCain, provoked by the fear of a comparison between the Senator's war record and his own history of five draft deferments.

Fifteen months later, he perpetuated a stigma when he remarked "When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it." Yet, he did at the same time advocate improved mental health for veterans.

That same month, an interview with Howard Stern was unearthed in which Trump crowed "I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider." But that was ancient history, nearly twenty years earlier.





Faced with rain, Trump on Saturday skipped a Veterans Day commemoration at Aisne Marne American Cemetery, where many American soldiers killed in World War I are buried. On Sunday, he "chose not to walk side-by-side with other world leaders at another event Sunday, choosing instead to take his motorcade down an empty Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomph, rather than showing unity with the other heads of state."  Yet, a photo with other leaders of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance may have imperiled his job evaluation with President Putin, so he deserves some slack.

Now the President has decided to skip the Veterans Day commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery.  However, it is not only deceased veterans who annoy him. He has tweeted

Federal law permits voters who are overseas, many of them soldiers, to submit ballots after election day. In Florida, those ballots are not due until Friday. And Donald Trump wants them not to be counted.

President Trump believes many ballots from overseas are illegitimate. He believes also that prisoners of war are not heroes, avoiding sexually transmitted diseases is as courageous as fighting in foreign wars, commemorating the American war dead is unnecessary in rain, and ballots from soldiers are suspect.

If your name were Kushner, or you were an attractive daughter of his, or were himself, he wouldn't be holding out a sign reading "I find you contemptible." But it's not, and he is.




Share |

No comments:

Score One for the Former, and Still, Thespian

Not the main question but: if we're fools, what does that make the two moderates of The View? Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski real...