Veterans Slam Trump for Border "Stunt"

Trump seeks to use the military  against refugees.

In an effort to energize his racist, white supremacist base, Donald Trump wants to send 5,000 U.S. military troops to the US/Mexico border - a move that is likely illegal since federal troops are banned from being used within the country.  Like everything else he does, Trump seemingly sees himself as above the law and above the Constitution.  The reaction from military veterans has not been positive with many no doubt fearful of the optics both at home and abroad of soldiers confronting women and children (especially if they fire on unarmed families) and also concerned about the illegality and cost of the move.  Sadly, evangelical Christians - who as noted have confirmed their racial animosity towards non-whites in a recent poll - are likely cheering and further perverting what being "Christian" is supposed to mean. If allowed, the move could create a dangerous precedent for using the military domestically against those Trump labels as "a threat to national security.).  Here are highlights from CNN:

With his decision to deploy more than 5,000 troops to the US-Mexico border, President Donald Trump has ordered more military personnel to the US southwest than he has serving in some of the world's most contentious combat zones.

[T]he mission -- dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot -- raises a slew of questions, with many veterans condemning it as a political stunt by a President eager to fire up his political base just days away from the midterm elections. "Donald Trump thinks unarmed people who are fleeing horrors and are still 1,000 miles away are a national security threat a week before election day?" said Will Fischer, a former Marine who now works for the VoteVets, a progressive veteran's organization.

"I don't think so," Fischer said. "It's a political ploy to blow upon the embers of racism and nativism, and he is using the military again as a political prop to advance his own agenda" 

Fischer and other veterans point to the unknown cost to taxpayers, given that much smaller deployments of National Guard to the border have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They also question the cost the military will bear, as the operation pulls troops away from training, other missions and their families. And then, they say, there's the murky legality of the mission, its scope and its purpose.

US troops will join over 2,000 National Guardsmen who are already at the border, meaning upwards of 7,000 American forces will be mobilized to stop Central American migrants that are still some 900 miles away from the border and weeks away from arriving in the US.

Despite Trump's unsubstantiated claim that the group of Central Americans includes "gang members and some very bad people," most of the migrants have reportedly indicated that they plan to apply for asylum once they arrive in the US.
 This is not a national security issue. ... We're seeing women, children and the elderly within this caravan fighting for their lives. We don't need more military there," according to Bishop Garrison, the interim executive director of the Truman National Security Project . . . "We don't need to make a sensitive issue and situation all the more dramatic," said Garrison, a former Homeland Security and Pentagon official.
 Both Fischer and a former military official, interviewed separately, raised the question of the rules of engagement for the troops. . . . "what if something does happen and lethal force is deployed and you have the US military firing at unarmed civilians?" Anger about the deployment and the perception that Mattis is allowing the military to be used for political purposes led one former Pentagon official to call for him to step down.

"This is a craven political stunt by President Trump ahead of the US midterms, and a cynical capitulation by a secretary of defense who has prided himself on improving the readiness, focus and lethality of the US armed forces," Kelly Magsamen, a National Security Council official under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, wrote in Defense One. The former military officer, who logged two decades of experience as an army officer before moving on to become a strategist, said the troops were being sent to "do a mission that could ... be done by another entity" such as the National Guard.  Dave McGinnis, a former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense, agreed. [A] former official pointed out that US laws prohibit the military from detaining people, "so it's not like we're sending down an operational force, it's just people in a largely supportive role. That's why I say it's a stunt, so [Trump] can say, yeah, we're sending the military down to the border." McGinnis said Trump's move also sets a precedent. "If Congress allows him to do this, you're pushing the envelope on using the military for things this country has never, ever permitted," he said. "The visual on this for the world is really bad from a military perspective," McGinnis said. "It's using regular military troops for things that democracies really don't do."
 Cost also remains a major concern. Congressional sources with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees told CNN that they have not received cost data from the Pentagon.

Vote Democrat on November 6, 2018 - Trump and his lawlessness must be stopped. #NotMyPresident.

Trump and Trumpism Rejected in Virginia

I will admit that I am on a post election win high at the moment.  Last nigh's Democrat blow out victory has helped restore my faith in the decency of Americans - at least Virginians after a depressing year watching Donald Trump trash decency, wage war on LGBT citizens and strive to make the reprehensible normal.  Thankfully, Virginia rejected Trumpism and bitch slapped Republicans who for the most part have prostituted themselves to Trump and all but donned KKK robes as they sought to emulate his racism/hate and bigotry agenda.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the election aftermath.  It correctly notes that yesterday was a first step in taking America back from the forces of hate, division and bigotry.  Trump lost big time even though not on the ballot.  Here column are excerpts:

One year after President Trump rode a campaign of white nationalism into the White House, the American people struck back. Decisive Democratic wins for governor in New Jerseyand Virginia, not to mention the Democratic victories for lieutenant governor and attorney general, are a clear sign of the electorate’s disquiet with Trump’s low-road Twitter presidency.

But three other signs come to mind in the afterglow of Election Day 2017. Here are my quick thoughts.

Borrowing pages from Trump’s white-nationalist playbook will hurt you.

Nothing was more disturbing and degrading of the presidency than Trump’s both-sides nonsense in response to the ugly white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was allegedly killed by a racist who plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. That Ed Gillespie adopted Trump’s rhetoric on monuments to Confederate generals and tried to scare voters with loose talk of Latino gangs clearly was a bridge too far the people of the commonwealth. 

No, Democrats don’t need to have a progressive, Bernie-anointed candidate to win.

Tom Perriello lost the primary to now-Governor-elect Ralph Northam, a centrist anchored in the establishment. Perriello was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for president in the Democratic Party in 2016 but doesn’t see fit to join the party. But Perriello didn’t disappear. He worked hard on Northam’s behalf and not grudgingly. . . . Thus proving that a vanquished primary opponent who works hard to help his victor during the general election is essential.

The American people are not afraid of self-correction.

When the election was called for Northam, I was sitting in the same spot on my sofa where I watched in horror the dawn of Trump nation a year ago. The American people broke my heart that night. Everything that I knew to be true — hoped to be true — about my country was voided by voters who responded positively to the most racist, xenophobic and misogynistic campaign for president in recent memory. The fear his election unleashed was raw and palpable. But the ugliness and incompetence that followed Trump into the White House had an impact.

The Democratic gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia are the first sign of correction. Another is the successful run of Justin Fairfax, the newly-elected lieutenant governor of Virginia who will become only the second African American to win that seat. L. Douglas Wilder won the post in 1985. He went on to become the commonwealth’s and the nation’s first black governor. And yet another is the election of Danica Roem to the Virginia House of Delegates. She becomes the first openly transgender state legislator in the United States by defeating the homophobic and anti-transgender Republican incumbent Bob Marshall.

Zac Petkanas, former rapid response chief for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, summed it up best in a tweet after the race was called for Northam. “The #resistance began on November 9, 2016,” he wrote. “The #revolution began tonight [Nov. 7].”

Onward to taking our country back from the marauding forces of division and hate in 2018. This is not over.

The 1933 Germany Scenario is No Longer Hypothetical

In 1933 Germany I suspect that few Germans - even those in Hitler's inner circle - truly appreciated what had happened to that nation or had any comprehension of the horrors and shame that would be the results.  Too many Germans simple went on trying to live their lives and deny what was happening as events unfolded. By the time that those who found Hitler and the Nazi regime abhorrent full realized the extent of the damage, it was too late.  I believe, as the author of a piece in Salon argues - that America is now at a point similar to Germany in 1933.  The question is whether people will see the danger and seek to stop it before the cancer spreads or not.  Frighteningly, too many do not seem to see the danger or, if they do, they don't care because they are part of the white, heterosexual Christian population that foolishly believes that they they will benefit from Trump's toxic policies and empowerment of right wing extremists.  I, in contrast, will be on the side of never ending resistance. Here are article highlights that are a must read:

We have crossed the river of history into a new country, and there’s no way back. Now we are stumbling around, amid the gathering darkness, and trying to figure out whether anything in this alien landscape is recognizable. Will the presidency of Donald Trump — an eventuality unforeseen by anyone, including Trump himself — resemble things that have happened before? Or is it a trip to an unknown planet, where all the things we thought we understood about reality and democracy and the nature of America no longer apply?

Karl Marx’s famous maxim that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce, has itself been repeated too often, both in contexts where it fits and ones where it doesn’t. This time around, we damn well better hope it’s true. Farce, failure and incompetence are among the better possible outcomes of a Trump administration. The worse outcomes — which come more clearly into focus with every noxious new appointment, and every new report of a hate crime that the president-elect hasn’t heard about or blandly disavows — are almost too much to think about.

It’s time to think about them. Those worst-case scenarios have been nestled in their eggs feeding on ignorance and hatred for a long time, like the face-huggers of “Alien.” Now they’re hatching, and they’re hungry.

It’s bad, but the badness goes well beyond vulgarity, greed and bad hair. . . . . . We don’t know whether the Trump election marks a fatal tipping point for the American experiment in popular self-government, . . . . But history demands that we take that possibility seriously. Indeed, I think we have to behave as if it were true — as if our democracy has been irreparably damaged and must now be renewed and rebuilt, pretty much from scratch — because that may be the only way of preventing it from coming true.

We don’t know whether the election of Trump is an American echo of the winter of 1932-33 in Germany, when a fragile democracy collapsed into tyranny and an infamous demagogue rose to power on a promise of economic renewal and restored national pride, with an unmistakable racial subtext. It’s an inflated comparison in many ways: Trump is too lazy and stupid to be a good Führer, . . .

A reality TV star and real estate salesman with the demeanor and intellect of a petulant child has been elected president with a minority of the vote, thanks to a flukey electoral system, a severely divided and demoralized electorate, a beleaguered and overconfident opponent and a concatenation of other circumstances too strange for fiction.

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is now more than 2.1 million votes, in itself a radical departure from anything that has ever happened before in American history.

That’s before we get to all the vile things Trump has said and done to galvanize the most ignorant and jingoistic tendencies in the American public, and the incoherent and/or vile list of things he has said he will do in the future. Those are also aspects of the emergency.

Then there’s the fact that President-elect Trump has so far served as a channel for the most retrograde elements of the hard right: He has appointed an old-line white Southerner with clear links to Jim Crow-style racism as his attorney general (Jeff Sessions), a defrocked general given to paranoid anti-Islamic tirades as his national security adviser (Michael Flynn), and a millionaire zealot who wants to defund public schools as his secretary of education (Betsy DeVos) . . . . Mike Pence or Steve Bannon or whoever is orchestrating things behind the scenes is installing a right-wing dream team that would have been too extreme for Dick Cheney.

Those who try to assure us that the emergency is not an emergency, or to insist that the enduring institutions of democracy will surely triumph over this mass hallucination, are either cowardly or stupid or have their heads buried somewhere that isn’t the sand. . . . . At some point, clinging to your broken idols while barbarians ransack the temple just becomes pathetic.

To be more charitable, the “normalizers” are just afraid. Which is understandable; we should all be afraid. We have good reason to be afraid if we are Muslim, if we are gay or lesbian or trans, if we are black, if we are recent immigrants with or without papers. We have good reason to be afraid if people in those communities are our neighbors, our family members, our friends, our loved ones. We have reason to be afraid if we are Americans who do not define that nationality by looking backward to an imaginary past. The question now is how we respond to that fear. What we do with it.

Resistance and renewal and rebuilding will take many forms, and will take a long time. They may not work; the damage is significant. We will have to get past seeking a unitary explanation for what went wrong: It wasn’t the fault of the Russians or racist white people or identity politics or Hillary Clinton or the Electoral College or the Republican Party. (OK, it was some of those things, and a lot of it was the Republican Party. But even that is a long and complicated story.)

It took years for American politics to deteriorate badly enough that Donald Trump could be elected dogcatcher, let alone president. There’s plenty of blame to go around. None of us did enough to stop it from happening, quite obviously. So now we confront a national emergency that must not be denied and an old question out of the history textbooks that cannot be avoided: Whose side are you on?