
Some say this speech, nonsensical in its ambition to coerce Afghanistan itself away from corruption, browbeat Pakistan into ceasing to harbor terrorists while cutting off the long time bribery of aid, and to somehow convince India to place their oar into the water of this drawn out farce, while upping our troop level and throwing our weight around in added futility, is a diversion from the failure and ineptitude and cartoonish buffoonery of his presidency.
Whoever wrote the speech was obviously attempting to infuse some image of humanity into Trump's empty soul, to actually soften or even erase the toxicity of his ugly and insulting off-the-cuff denunciation of the so-called alt-left in comparison to armed and torch carrying Nazi's and white supremacists chanting racist garbage in Charlottesville.
So the draft dodger lines up those men and women in their ribbons and delivers his war speech, a gaggle of delusional nonsense eaten up by the right wing pundits desperate for some raw meat, anything to deter the constant calling out of Trump's declining poll numbers and doubting of his competence and sanity to hold office, notwithstanding his daily tweet-load of lies and asinine bombast.
These chicken-hawks can't get enough of the military, can't control their saccharine praise of the bravery of the common soldiers, those little guys and gals from the end of the line who do the dirty work, who get maimed or deranged or killed while the Trump's of the world get richer, and fatter, and more flowery in their gushing palaver about unity and patriotism as they use these men and women like peons in a chess match of political manipulation. We saw it with George W. Bush, who somehow found himself in the national guard in 1968 when nobody but the rich and connected could get into it, and the draft dodging Dick Cheney who had at least 5 deferments and “had better things to do,” and now we'll see it in Trump, who paid off a doctor during Vietnam and has jettisoned most of his staff and handed his foreign policy over to the generals and allowed them to call the shots, something President Obama was loath to do, because, in the end, Generals are bred and trained to fight wars. They like it.
We are defined by our military—the most powerful and advanced in the world. It is our hole card as the empire slowly crumbles around us. Like the subhuman throngs rooting on the gladiators in the Roman days, we have our military, our nuclear arsenal, our nationalistic hubris that allows us to attach ribbons to our automobiles and fly flags from our porches. that fosters a rampant jingoism and arrogance bordering on fanaticism, truly a danger to the country. As Americans, we can look down on the rest of the world, even our allies, because WE have our army, our marines, our navy and air-force, and our absurdly inordinate monetary allotment to it, an amount so ponderous it leeches what could, like certain advanced countries, guarantee us life time medical care and education.
Trump's threatening of North Korea and poor little tormented Venezuela, and his talk of “fire and fury” is that of a guy who, as General Colin Powell put it, coming out of a meeting with Bush's war cabinet, “has never been in a good bar fight.”
As a country, where many of our smartest, strongest, healthiest and most entitled young males do not have to serve, we have become, like Trump. a collective gang of craven saber rattlers and a stink in the nostrils of the greatest generation—like our president.
As an army veteran, who has been in his share of bar brawls, I would not want to be in any of our armed forces with Trump calling the shots.