October 30, 2019: Fox News Shills Help the President Trash Another Veteran

 

Well, thank you - if you never piss President Trump off.

10/30/19: Today, we have additional leaks from Col. Vindman’s testimony. According to reporters, Vindman made it clear that in the July 25 call to President Zelensky, President Trump specifically asked his Ukrainian counterpart for help in digging up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. 

Republicans still won’t admit this happened, or that this was the quid pro quo. But we already knew Trump asked because: 

1.     The original whistleblower said he did. 

2.     Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted that he did and said everyone should “get over it.” 

3.     The call memorandum – which is not an exact transcript – even though President Trump says it is (it says at the bottom of the first page it’s not) – includes Trump suggesting he’d like Zelensky to investigate. 

  

____________________ 

Vindman told lawmakers that the president’s comment about the tapes, and a number of others, were omitted from the July 25 call memorandum.

____________________

 

 

Now we had Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated combat veteran, appearing before lawmakers and testifying that Trump told Zelensky there were tapes or recordings of Joe Biden discussing corruption in Ukraine. And could he please, publicly announce, before he got any military aid, that he was looking for those tapes, even if, in the end, he couldn’t find them? 

Unlike Trump, who refused to sit for testimony under oath, when Robert Mueller asked, Vindman testified for ten hours. He told lawmakers that the president’s comment about the tapes, and a number of others, were omitted from the July 25 call memorandum. As part of his job, he tried to have the inaccurate transcript corrected. White House staffers blocked him. 

As per the whistleblower complaint, Colonel Vindman said the more complete record was locked away in a special codeword-protected security system.

 

Sad to say, Vindman’s testimony opened him up to attack from the extreme right. So a little context might help. Vindman was wounded in combat in Iraq in 2004. He has worn the uniform for twenty years. His two decades on duty would equal all the years of service, combined, of Donald J. “Bone Spurs” Trump, Donald J. Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka and Tiffany (women can serve), Melania (Vindman is an immigrant), Fred Trump, the president’s father, and Friedrich Trump, the president’s grandfather (he ducked service in Germany before immigrating in 1885). 

Let’s go to the calculator. 

Tap. Tap. Tappity-tap, tap. 

Okay, combined, the “Fighting Trumps” have 0 years of service. 

Purple Hearts? 

0.

 

How do we know Laura Ingraham isn’t a spy? 

This does not stop the right-wing nuts from attacking Vindman. The colonel is Jewish. That, of course, brings out the anti-Semites who inhabit the fringes on the right. At Breitbart, fury is expressed because Vindman appeared on Capitol Hill in uniform! Wearing medals! On Fox News, pundit John Yoo agreed with Laura Ingraham, after she suggested that Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, when it was part of the Soviet Union, might be involved in “spying” or “espionage.” On CNN, Sean Duffy, a former GOP congressman, wondered if Vindman cared more about what was good for Ukraine than America. Brian Kilmeade, on Fox & Friends, echoed Duffy’s theory. Yes, it could it be that Vindman was “simpatico” with Ukraine. 

Goddam. Did these fools understand that it was Trump who made the questionable phone call? 

Vindman merely listened to what was said.

 

A little added context, then: Ingraham’s maternal grandparents were Polish immigrants. Using Ingraham-logic, we can agree that’s suspicious. Her father was of Irish and English extraction. Did she grow up eating crumpets! That’s not an American meal! How about a burger and fries! Even more suspicious, Ingraham never joined the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines! And she once worked for “Fake News” MSNBC! How do we know she’s not a commie? 

And Yoo! Holy crap! He was born in South Korea! Using the same approach we watched Yoo employ on Ingraham’s show, can’t we assume Yoo is trashing Vindman because Yoo is a “spy” for his home country? 

Yoo never served in the U.S. military, either. 

Does his patriotism extend, as Washington Irving once said, only as far as the end of his tongue? 

What about Duffy? Did Duffy ever dodge bullets for our country? No. He did not. He did, however, take up log rolling when he was five.

 

Finally: Kilmeade. He’s of Irish and Italian descent. Again, if we use good old Fox News-thinking, how do we know he’s not a member of the Mafia? I, mean, do we know he’s not? We have no way of proving Kilmeade is not a member of the Gambino crime syndicate. Someone should be looking into his background. Maybe Laura Ingraham could do a show on the topic. As for serving in the U.S. military, the closest Kilmeade ever came to combat was as a broadcaster, early in his career, covering the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Also, when he covered professional soccer, he could have been hit in the head by an errant kick while patrolling the sidelines. 

Finally, just for fun, let’s consider Lt. Col. Vindman’s twin brother, Eugene. He’s career military too, and an officer. (It appears he served in Iraq; but this blogger is not sure. He did have a role in developing ways to track the kind of bombers who were attacking U.S. forces with IED’s.) 

 

You don’t get a Purple Heart if you contract an STD. 

Finally, we should remember that Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman is not the first combat veteran President Trump and his supporters have slandered. Trump famously said John McCain wasn’t a hero. Robert Mueller, a decorated combat veteran during the Vietnam War, was somehow a threat to the nation. Admiral William McCraven, a former Navy Seal, wasn’t up to Trump’s standards. Neither was former Marine General James Mattis, who Trump appointed to his cabinet, and later described as the “world’s most over-rated general.” Even the mother of slain Capt. Humayun Khan was not immune from attack by “Fighting Lips” Trump. 

And let’s not forget what Citizen Trump said, back in 1997, in an interview with Howard Stern. 

He had faced danger, he said. When he was single, in the 90s, he could have picked up an STD. 

“It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world,” he told Stern. “It is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” 

Trump went on to tell Stern that women’s vaginas were “potential landmines” and insisted “there’s some real danger there.” 

You just don’t get a Purple Heart if you contract an STD.

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, left, Lt. Colonel Eugene Vindman, right.

  

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SOMEHOW, the “War on Coal,” conducted by President Barack Obama continues to this day! Murray Energy becomes the eighth major coal mining company to file for bankruptcy in 2019, which is clearly Obama’s fault. 

President Trump likes to shout at rallies that “coal is back” and promise he’s saving coal mining jobs. Former President Obama apparently has magical powers and continues to thwart his efforts. According to CNBC, demand for coal fell last year to the lowest level in forty years. In April, for the first time in history, renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, supplied more power than coal. 

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NEW RESEARCH paints a dire future as climate change threatens coastal cities. Estimates place the number of people who could be displaced temporarily from their homes by sea level rise at 300 million by 2050. (It is unlikely this blogger will be around at age 101; his granddaughter will be, age 37). 

Rising seas are also expected to permanently submerge lands on which 150 million people currently make homes.

 

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“They were in flying coffins.” 

ALSO, be wary of Boeing executives! Even before the second 737 Max 8 nosedived into the ground, company leaders had been warned about problems with computer software in the plane. 

The company addressed that problem by lobbying F.A.A. regulators to keep mention of the problems out of pilot manuals and training procedures. 

According to Boeing, when the two planes crashed, the pilots were to blame. That wasn’t true. The software contained a fatal flaw. “Those pilots never had a chance,” said one U.S. senator, as lawmakers grilled Boeing execs in a public hearing. Neither did the passengers. “They were in flying coffins as a result of Boeing deciding that it was going to conceal MCAS [Manual Characteristics Augmentation Program warnings] from the pilots.” 

Under withering attack, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg had no recourse but to concede, “We have made mistakes, and we got some things wrong.” 

As in “two crashes” wrong.

 

On October 29, 2018, the first 737 Max 8 to fall from the sky as a result of malfunctioning software, carried 189 passengers and crew to their deaths. 

On March 10, 2019, the same problem caused a second 737 Max 8 to slam into the ground, resulting in another 159 dead. 

(This is why, as all Trump fans know, government regulations are always the biggest problem of all.)

 

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SPEAKING OF GETTING “some things wrong,” we learn that the Trump Tax Cuts are not paying for themselves. Nor are those cuts juicing the economy. GDP rose at an annualized rate of 1.9% during the third quarter of 2019, after growing only 2.0% in the second quarter of the year. 

Candidate Trump promised to return the U.S. economy to 4% annual growth. That mark has not been achieved since Bill Clinton, the last guy to get impeached, in 1994 (4.0%), 1997, (4.4%), 1998 (4.5%), 1999 (4.8%) and 2000 (4.1%). Bush 43 never managed in eight years and left it up to Obama to pull the U.S. out of a near-catastrophic recession. Obama’s best year was 2015, when GDP grew 2.9%, a figure Trump matched in 2018. 

It is unlikely he will match that again this year. 

 

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WELL, WHAT DO YOU KNOW, a Republican in Congress tweeted a willingness to break with Trump over abuse of power!  Oh, no, wait. Rep. Amash had to quit the party, in order to retain a soul.

  

You could at least find a former Republican senator who might speak the truth. William Cohen, who used to represent Maine, described for CNN’s Christiane Amanpour what he saw in the president’s recent behavior. 

It reminded him of the way Big Brother talked in the novel 1984. 

Speaking of Trump, Cohen warned: “He feels that he alone can take action, without regard to any of the other institutions which are there to make sure that the rule of law stays intact. And so that, ‘Only I can do this,’ and that has the sound of, you know, a dictator or a dictatorship.”