Do You Honor and Respect the U.S. Military? Pt. 1

I certainly do.  The picture is of my father, Peter Baerg. He grew up on a farm outside the small town of Delft, Minnesota and was a member of the Mennonite church, a group that has historically been pacifist.  But he and some of his friends decided to enlist during World War II.  As he said, “We decided that Hitler had to be stopped.”  (How I wish he were still here with us!  I’d love to ask him more questions about that decision.  He made it sound pretty matter-of-fact, but I’m sure it wasn’t.)  Once he got over to Europe he had to get his assignment for duty; one of the stories we heard many times was of him standing in line as they counted down the row for soldiers who would fight in what turned out to be the Battle of the Bulge.  He thinks they stopped just four or five men short of him.  Had he been in that conflict he might very well not have come home.  Again, I’d love to ask him how he felt as he stood there waiting for the commander to finish counting.  
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Other members of my family, including one of my nephews who was deployed for two terms in Iraq, have also served this country honorably.  In a couple of weeks we will be celebrating the 90th birthday of a World War II veteran who attends our church.

It is an insult to these men and to all veterans and those in active military service that someone is running for President who has belittled John McCain’s 5 1/2 years of imprisonment and torture by the Viet Cong.  I refer of course to Trump’s sickening comments about McCain last year in which he said that the only reason McCain was considered a hero was because he was captured, and “I like people that don’t get captured.”

Yes, this was said in the heat of the early campaign.  Yes, McCain had labeled the people who came to Trump’s rally in Arizona as “crazies.”  The fact of the matter is, there are some things that you simply don’t say if you are even an imitation of a decent human being.  You do not mock someone else’s suffering.  If you do, if that’s what comes out of your mouth, then that is what is in your heart and mind.  “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh,” Jesus said in Matthew 12:34.

Oh, but it gets . . . well, not worse, exactly.  Just more of the same.  So, not only is John McCain a loser because he got captured, but: “MLK was a great guy. An amazing guy. But I wouldn’t hire him because he got himself shot! I don’t like people who get shot.”

But all of this foregoing almost pales in comparison with Trump’s statements on the use of torture and his recent approving comments about Saddam Hussein.  Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 as I look at those egregious outbursts and what they signify.

In the meantime, let me re-emphasize, once again (redundantly speaking) that what we have in this election is a choice of the lesser of two evils.  It has become abundantly clear that Hillary Clinton lied numerous times about her e-mail server, and if you think the so-called mainstream media is giving her a pass on this, think again.  I just listened to her being eviscerated on Slate.com’s “Political Gabfest.”  What we have is a choice between someone who has a completely obvious record of gaming the system and someone who doesn’t even know that there is a system, someone who will walk into the White House and treat it like a reality TV show.  Or, to quote an excellent article in Sunday’s Denver Post (another mainstream media outlet that gave prime editorial space to a conservative journalist) by Jennifer Rubin, author of the Right Turn blog:

As unseemly as this all is [referring to the whole e-mail schemozzle]] the episode only underscores the utter stupidity of Republicans.  By selecting Donald Trump they found the one person whose defeat may be more essential than Clinton’s to the health of the republic [my only disagreement would be with the words “may be”].