Sucking Up

     To anyone with not even a refined but just a rudimentary sensibility, the sight of Donald Trump on the world stage, treated like an equal by actual heads of state, must be a cringe-worthy and nauseating experience. It's impossible to remember or imagine a "man", for want of a better word, more manifestly unfit to be president than Donald Trump, a person so vastly unsuited for the role of statesman of, ostensibly, the most powerful nation of earth that it comes dangerously close to defying words themselves.
     Indeed, even the most unrefined and uneducated Middle American or Appalachian with a rudimentary sense of morality and critical faculties can see in Donald Trump all the world's worst qualities that humanity can offer wrapped up in one distended bag of skin: He's a pedophile, a serial adulterer, a tax cheat, a welcher who has thrust countless numbers of contractors out of business because he doesn't like paying his bills, he's a narcissist, a megalomaniac, a sociopath (or psychopath, depending on your rubric and perceptions) and that's just the start of the laundry list of things that should have made Donald Trump a footnote in American history.
     The spectacle of what happened in Japan was just the latest in a never ending series of gaffes in which Trump embarrassed us before the world. Japan's Shinzo Abe was the prime enabler, in sucking up to Trump and his bloated ego to avoid retaliatory tariffs that have been levied against China and many of our allies. Shinzo even arranged it so that Trump would be fed a steady diet of hamburgers made from American beef and his favorite ice cream. Because God forbid Donald Trump should show respect for a host country by at least sampling its cuisine.
     It continued when the Trump White House (not Trump, as he was quick to say on his Twitter perch) had instructed the Navy to hide the USS John S. McCain from Trump's sight, even to the point of hiding the name on its aft section with a tarp and parking a tugboat behind it. The captain of the McCain said the ship was not hidden as it's undergoing repairs and couldn't be moved. Yet, while 60-70 sailors from all the other ships were invited to attend Trump's speech, a few sailors from the McCain who tried to attend and had the McCain's insignia on their uniforms were actually turned away and told to leave.
     You know, as if they weren't Americans who swore to give their lives to defend our nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
     Threats such as Donald Trump. for instance.
     The McCain's captain aside, the entire chain of command from the White House down to the officers at Yokosuka Naval Base hopped to hide all traces of the McCain, named not just after Sen. McCain but his admiral father and grandfather, from the petulant man-child masquerading as an actual head of state.
     In trying to honor the wishes of a paper-skinned tyrant, the United States Navy, my former employers, did a grave disservice to the man who'd endured nearly five years of torture at the hands of the Viet Cong and refused early release because McCain had repeatedly run afoul of said man-child's graces.
     But it really started with Trump, who early in his campaign took a pot shot at Sen. McCain by saying he wasn't a hero and was only considered one because he was captured. "I like people who weren't captured," he truculently added to a chorus of boos. What's dispiriting to realize was that those boos were virtually the last ones that Trump would ever have to hear.
     Yet, still, for the sake of party, McCain, a former Republican presidential nominee, gave his endorsement to Trump. Then Trump continued talking until McCain had gotten so fed up with his anti-military bullshit that he did the unthinkable and, just weeks before the election, took his endorsement back.
     That was a slight Trump never forgot. In spite of all the evils he has inflicted on the world, he cannot stand the thought of being ridiculed, slighted or insulted in any way. That is simply because Donald Trump is a seven year-old governed entirely by his Id, a second grader trapped in the bloated body of an old man.
     Then in the twilight of his career, McCain ran afoul of the Emperor's graces yet again when, in a theatrical, Romanesque gesture that was Capitol Hill's version of Gladiator, McCain turned his thumb down at the Obamacare repeal. One suspects McCain did so not because he wished to continue giving Americans the same level of health care that he'd been receiving during his cancer treatment but to spite Trump. When the senator passed away last November, Trump was pointedly not invited to the services. Another slight. If he'd been permitted to speak, he plainly would have made it a campaign speech and would've found some way to denigrate Senator McCain at his own funeral.
     We saw it again just today when Trump responded to the death of former Mississippi senator Thad Cochran, by referring to him as a "real senator" who'd voted to repeal Obamacare. Trump is still dwelling on McCain foiling his plans to rob tens of millions of Americans of their health care.
     If you go back to the earliest posts of this blog, which was started in July of 2008 during the end of the primary season, you'll note that I heaped tons of ridicule on McCain and his ridiculous campaign. But that was then and this is now. Since the senator's cancer diagnosis and especially after his death, I have not said one unkind word about John McCain, which is a lot more than can be said for the imposter squatting in the West Wing.
     His supporters still sing his praises in spite of the countless moral failings and his political failures. Racists love him as long as he's obsessed with the wall. Evangelicals love him because they see him as an actuator of the End of Days for which they've been slavering for centuries. The poor white trash still love him as long as he keeps hurting the right people. And the human military wallpaper behind him keep smiling and nodding their heads even as he inevitably turns solemn occasions into campaign speeches even as he blows off his own Secretary of the Air Force who'd had the effrontery to publicly ridicule his Space Force.
     It speaks volumes of the moral rot and the cravenness upon which that rot depends that John McCain's own former employers in the United States Navy and the federal government are willing to dishonor his memory, even going as far as to hide a destroyer with McCain's name on it, in order to appease the easily-slighted man-child who was put in power by a hostile nation with the intention of weakening us.
     But our own government's willingness to dishonor one of our greatest heroes to smooth the ruffled feathers of a latter-day Nero shows that morally we're vastly weaker than Putin even knew.