It's Just as Well

  (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

It's just as well that Trump's getting fellated in Japan, a nation that fears Trump will impose tariffs on them if his incessant Fox feed is interrupted for a second. He won't be around for Memorial Day, again, leaving Mike Pence to once more robotically leave a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier while secretly worrying whether or not the soldier was gay or not a Catholic.

     The lead image above that I'd chosen for this article pretty much is indicative of Trump's entire attitude toward the military. As Cadet Bone Spurs makes his way past these soldiers, he cannot even look them in the eye. He knows all too well that he was never one of them, never wanted to be, and then had the nerve to equate his reckless sex life in the 80's to the ultimate sacrifices made by over 58,000 men and women in Vietnam.

     Trump punctuated that by adding he felt he deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor.

     This was a guy who gladly accepted a Purple Heart from an obviously misguided veteran who'd earned it then said afterward, “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” That's the Trump Way- Easier is better. Gut instincts instead of reading policy manuals written by experts, governing by Executive Order, not going to an American military cemetery in France on the 100th anniversary of the Armistice because the weatherman called for rain.

     So, it's just as well he's not here to honor the fallen from the Revolutionary War to the ongoing and neverending war in Afghanistan. Trump's the kind of guy who doesn't appreciate weakness which includes even death and, in the late Sen. John McCain's case, capture after one's plane gets shot out of the sky.

     Memorial Day is one of those very rare days in which Mike Pence has some relevance and is at least willing to go through the motions of respecting the war dead he helped make by voting for the Iraq War that Trump only pretended to oppose. After all, going to Arlington actually requires some effort beyond moving one's thumbs on a Blackberry while on Twitter.

     That's because a self-absorbed sociopath like Donald Trump would never understand the pragmatic compassion that went behind a Kansas City suburb that refused to allow their living veterans to live on the streets and had built for them, free of charge, a little village where they could live in dignity. He also would never understand the simple but poetic tribute that Fort Bragg is having for the boots on the ground who lost their lives with boots on the ground.

     Donald Trump, like so many other casual monsters that had come before him and surely will succeed him, simply doesn't give a shit about the troops until he needs them in one sabre-rattling episode or another.  Or when he needs them as window dressing in a manufactured show of support even as he's attempting to steal personnel funds for his medieval border wall or sending them to the southern border in an idiotic display of cockwanding plainly in violation of Posse Comitatus that was stopped by four Governors.

     It's just as well he's not here because it's not as if he's ever truly there for the troops except when he pardons war criminals. So let us leave with this image taken at Fort Snelling that will endure long after we've at last been spared the nauseating spectacle of US Marines having to salute that psychopath every time he steps on Marine One after getting his ridiculous comb over destroyed by its rotor wash.