Donald Trump’s stupid, insensitive crack about John McCain being captured, “I like heroes who weren’t captured,” has always stuck in the craw of decent people. Military people are voting for Joe Biden and that’s the only thing that makes sense. Trump doesn’t relate to veterans or their sacrifice. He’s a draft dodger and lacks the character or moral fiber to even attempt to comprehend what these men and women have been through. He isn’t fit to wipe the boots of any of them.
This is a much more somber Lincoln Project piece than you’re used to seeing. It’s very moving.
American POWs are heroes because they were captured. Our soldiers deserve a president that has their backs. pic.twitter.com/BDaadXbm4m
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 3, 2020
So sad. Some people are slow roasting in hell. More to come.
Just you wait…it’s more than Donnie who’s going to turn up the tempo on attacks over the next two months.
Republicans are monsters. How do you have a constitutional democracy when you have people supporting a man like Trump? I didn’t like McCain because he voted against milk for poor kids. Otherwise I thought well of him. I am ashamed to say I am crying after watching that. I should be doing and not crying.
Crying often helps with the doing.
No shame in your tears, Blue. Just remember who you’re crying for when you’re ready to do what we all need to do over the next two months, yeah?
As the child of a violent drunk, crying & acknowledging the truth saved my life. I’m 67 now. I now cry pretty much daily for the children of this world. Repressing sadness & rage will kill you. Expressing it in a healing way will save you. The puritans are the reason our culture promotes violence, but we are afraid to take our clothes off. It would be weird either way but facing CERTAIN DEATH makes it certifiably insane.
There was a very quiet older guy in my church I grew up in who never said anything. He never hung around after church for the coffee hour, and on the street would only nod to me or anyone else. I wouldn’t learn (from my dad) until I was in college he was a survivor of Bataan. Those guys fought like hell, and the ones who survived suffered years of brutal captivity. I also used to have a copy of the book When Hell Was In Session (I had a civilized divorce but it “mysteriously” disappeared!) signed by Jeremiah Denton himself. My ex-wife sat next to him on a flight in the 1980s, and as they chatted when she told him she was married to a Marine (he was an A-6 driver and a Commander in the Navy when shot down with his BN) he pulled a paperback copy from his carry on and signed it for her to give to me. For young folks, go look at when our Vietnam POWs came home and the brief ceremony on the tarmac as they deplaned. Although not the very first to have been shot down and survived (that was Eddie Alverez) and endured captivity until that day when it was finally all over for our troops, Denton was as I recall the second or third longest held that got to come home that day. He was the one who spoke for the group. His remarks were brief: “We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander-in-Chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America.” He was already famous back in the States though. He was one of the POWs that got paraded through the streets of Hanoi, and later put on camera where they tried to get him to admit to being a war criminal but he wouldn’t say the words they wanted him to. However, he did something more important than refusing to openly denounce his country. Naval Aviators are required to know Morse Code, and he kept blinking out the word TORTURE with his eyes – a message picked up on by other Naval Aviators back here and more importantly right away at the Pentagon. Eventually the North Vietnamese would learn how he’d put the screws to them and their bullshit about humane treatment of captives. He paid an awful price.
THOSE are the kinds of people Trump disdainfully trashed! Countless more in those and other wars wouldn’t even survive captivity.
Trump isn’t just a draft-dodger. Lots of people avoided service in Vietnam, either by working the system of deferrments wth extra school (grad school for instance) or other means. I have come to peace with that. It was clear even as a kid that was a fucked up war that we never should have escalated into the full scale war that we did. What I DO have a problem with are the Chicken Hawks – the ones who avoided service including outright lying like Trump did with his daddy paying the doctor for the “magic” bone spurs letter – that kind of doctor’s note being accepted and granting 4-F status (medically unfit – don’t bother with this one again) was only an option for the rich and or very, very well connected. A regular guy would have still had to (and did) go to a MEPS center and have a military doctor examine them!
Chicken Hawks are the ones who have avoided serving but talk tough as though they “would have served” if “really needed” or if not for this or that lame ass lying excuse. Trump? He’s not the Commander in Chief – he’s the fucking CHICKEN HAWK in Chief!
With apologies to the late and truly great John Lewis I simply can’t get past hating Trump with every fiber of my being. For most of my life my number one fantasy was to see the Cubs in the World Series. I wasn’t greedy and hoping they’d win it – just seeing them playing World Series baseball in Wrigley Field would have been enough for me. Had that not actually happened, I would have replaced that as my top fantasy with the desire to one day be able to PISS (and more) on Trump’s grave!
I had a manager for a while, a great guy, who said he only learned when his father was old that he’d been captured in the South Pacific and held by the Japanese for a long time – his father didn’t talk about it until then.
Denis, my aunt Ethel (Sally) Blaine Millett (my dad’s sister) was one of the Bataan nurses. If you haven’t already, read We Band Of Angels by Elizabeth Norman about all the nurses at Bataan and Corregidor. We buried Aunt Sally at Arlington in 2004. Her oldest son, my cousin, died in 2015 and his widow offered me Aunt Sally’s boxes of papers. I jumped on a plane and flew from Minneapolis to San Antonio to go through them and retrieve what I wanted. I am an author and I plan to write a young reader (ages nine to teens) book about her. Kids today don’t hear enough about our war heroes!
Wish John McCain could have lived to see this one. RIP my uncle Bill, Korean War vet who wasn’t captured but for whom Korea stayed with him for the rest of his life.
This vile piggy shouldn’t be allowed to talk about any solider, sailor, or airman. ANYONE who supports him is an ENEMY OF FREEDOM & THE US CONSTITUTION. REAL PHUCKING TALK.