Sacred Oaths, Traitors, and the Uncontrolled Antimatter Implosion of the GOP that Threatens Everyone
It has been a remarkable few days and sadly much of my time was consumed by doing work on my doctorate, and writing tests for my high school history class students. I wanted to write several articles but at the end of every day I was just too tired to do so. My apologies to all of my subscribers, paid and free, and especially to all the new people who subscribed while I was silent. I will do my best to get a few articles out before getting slammed again.
General Mark Milley handed over his position as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Air Force General Charles “C.Q.” Brown. In his retirement remarks, General Milley reminded all of us that the oath that military officers swear to uphold is not to a President, king, dictator, or wannabe dictator, but to the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. General Milley has been the target of the disgraced, twice impeached, judged as a rapist in a civil trial, four times indicted with 91 felony charges ex-President, and his gang of petulant and violent cult members. He has received death threats, mostly instigated by Trump’s rantings, that he should be executed, even before General Milley’s remarks.
Both Milley and retired Marine Corps General John Kelley discussed how Trump repeatedly disrespected military personnel, living and dead by demeaning them because serving in the military wasn’t worth it, and those who were killed, wounded, missing, or captured were losers. They told of how Trump didn’t want to be seen with combat wounded veterans because it looked bad for him, and Kelley told of how Trump refused to visit to cemetery in France where the Marines and Soldiers who turned back the Germans at the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918 are interred for the same reason. To this day I cannot understand how anyone who had ever sworn the oath of office as a military officer can support someone who hates the country and the Constitution, and shows the contempt Trump does for us and those who sacrificed all for our country, except that they only supported that oath when a President of their faction was in office.
The officers oath is different from the oaths of enlistment sworn by enlisted personnel. It developed over time, but the most important change occurred after the Civil War when it was changed to reflect that officers swore that they would support the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Had it not been for treasonous men like Robert E. Lee and his compatriots who forsook their oaths and declared war on the United States for the abominable cause of expanding slavery resulting in the bloodiest war in our history, the change would not have been needed.
I took my first oath as an Army officer in 1983 and over the next four decades I reaffirmed it in the Army, its Reserve Components, and the Navy. That oath states:
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Swearing that oath was never something that I took lightly, it was sacred, and though I am now retired, it is an essential part of who I am. The oath that I took was not to any President, as I served under six, or a political party, I have been a Republican and a Democrat, but my oath was to the Constitution. I consider anyone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution, be they a military officer or in another capacity who supports a man an party who intend on destroying the Constitution, trampling the ideals embodied in the Declaration, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms, who threaten the lives anyone opposing them, to be traitors.
Of course other things happened during my silence.
It was like an uncontrolled antimatter implosion on a starship. First the fiasco in the House of Representatives, then Donald Trump’s appearances in the New York trial of his corporation.
Less than 72 hours after making a deal with Democrats to avoid a disastrous government shutdown, the unprincipled, cowardly, self-absorbed, now former Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy was the victim of the Devil’s deal that he made with Matt Gaetz to become speaker. Never has a man humiliated himself so much to gain an office only to have his face rubbed in shit by the people that he made his deal.
Of course, McCarthy didn’t blame himself or the ones who engineered his fall, after the vote, he blamed the Democrats who saved his sorry ass on Saturday, who he blamed Sunday for the near shutdown. Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield Bumpkin and serial liar got what he deserved. Unfortunately, his actions since becoming Speaker have harmed all of us. He encouraged, aided, and abetted people committed to destroying out country. He left a stain on the House of Representatives and that of the office of the Speaker of the House that will not be easily removed.
The really abominable thing is that McCarthy and his GOP-MAGA consortium did everything to curry favor with Donald Trump, who once again, though he is about to lose many of his corporate holdings managed to get himself slapped with a gag order for his social media posts about the clerk of the court that left her in danger from his cultists.
While my Schadenfreude for McCarthy knows no bounds, I am extremely concerned with how vulnerable our country, and allies like Ukraine are because of him, Trump, Gaetz, and the GOP. Those people have shown that they hold nothing sacred, including the oath of office that they all swore to uphold. The have no honor or integrity, and to them their oath and their vapid words about being patriots are nothing but punch lines to be uttered on Fox News and the Right Wing Media that their cult like followers listen to if they were Jesus.
Anyway, tomorrow is my long day teaching so I need to sign off, but I won’t be silent for as long as I was the past week.