From My FB feed

[Old Crank]

I am an immigrant. My parents moved to the US for health reasons, just in time for me to start high school. After graduation I floundered around in college for a bit and then entered the Air Force after becoming a US citizen. Military life did not suit me, and I got our just short of 5 years to go back to school with my wife at that time.
I do not like a lot of what our military does. The worldwide escapades, the continuous wars, the destruction of other countries. There is a lot of what the US has done since WWII with our military might and our proxies that have made life unbearable for other people in other countries. Places where we have no right to be in helping and largely failing to bring democracy to them at the point of a gun, or bomb, or drone.
I say this because I believe the US is doing the wrong thing militarily in bases around the world that are uncountable. We have stations small and large in over 100 countries. We kill without remorse people we have deemed from afar, by remote means, to be the bad guys.
This situation does not make me “anti-service member.” The men and women who enlist into the service of our country have no real say in the above matters. They have signed their lives over to our government. The government tells them what to do daily. Where they are going to live even if they will be living with their families. This is part of being in the services. There is physical risk, some services more than others, but all can be called to combat. You can see the names of service man and women who gave all by going to the Viet Nam Memorial. 55,000. One of my high school classmates did not come back a year after we graduated.
Yet we have our president denigrating the very men and women who have taken on this burden. Prisoners of war denigrated. Gold Star family members who have lost a father, son, daughter, denigrated. Officers working in national security hounded out of their careers for following the laws they swore to uphold. Where were the complaints from his party? Not heard. Too many dehumanize the service members they say they support by calling them “boots on the ground.” It is a lot easier to send boots to combat than flesh and blood, I guess.
Now we have reports that our president could not go to honor the men who died in France because his hair might get wet. He went to Dover to pay respects to our war dead four times. Quit because a father of one of the dead returning service members was not nice in his comments to him. Now it is alleged that our president thinks that the casualties, dead and injured, are “losers and suckers.” No, they are not. They are men and women who signed up to protect the country, swore an oath, and did their duty, no matter how horrible or for whatever ill formed reasons.
I have plenty of reasons to dislike US foreign policy and the use of military power instead of trying to work out a way that reduces bloodshed. But I will not denigrate the men and women who are doing the work that others have assigned. These people deserve respect for the tasks that they are told to perform not called losers and suckers by the president of this country.

[mr_lebowski]

1. Holy Wall-of-Text Batman! (nt)

[madaboutharry]

2. The men who died in WWI, some whom were

still teenagers, died in muddy fields and flooded foxholes.

And this vain coward didn’t want to get his hair wet.

His followers think he is some kind of a big tough guy, but he actually is a little weak fragile coward.