Donald Trump Can't Believe People Don't Like His Straight Talk On Loser POWs
Just in case you hadn't heard about Donald Trump's very special weekend shitshow , he had a terrible horrible no-good very bad Saturday at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, where he made the mistake of talking smack about somebody other than Mexicans. In a Q & A with emcee Frank Luntz, Trump went after John McCain on the one thing Republicans do not want anyone questioning: his status as an honest-to-god "Five And A Half Years, Alan" war hero.
He's not a war hero...He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay?
Mixture of shock and a smattering of applause, which was probably reflexive Trump Applause and maybe a little "McCain's a RINO" applause. And then Trump kept going:
Because he was captured, okay? Perhaps he's a war hero. But right now he's said some very bad things about a lot of people.
Let's catch Trump's brilliant performance in the video replay, shall we? We're pretty sure it'll be in the 2016 campaign retrospective as the moment when even Republicans remembered that Presidential Candidate Donald Trump is the same guy as That Fucking Bigmouthed Idiot Donald Trump:
Wow, imagine that. Donald Trump said something tasteless and dumb. What a shocker. And Republicans wasted no time making it very clear that they think John McCain is the kindest bravest warmest most wonderful human being they've ever known in their lives, even if they never agree with him on anything. As Kaili noted earlier, pollster Charles Franklin tossed together a handy reaction chart showing how all the other GOP candidates responded:
It's kind of fun to parse out some of the more careful shows of support for McCain. Everyone agrees he's a hero, but not everyone's quite ready to condemn Trump, because he's fake-polling well (which means nothing at this stage; as NPR's Bob Garfield pointed out, he's mostly got a lot of name recognition going for him, "like Justin Bieber, Al Sharpton, and gonorrhea.") And who wants to risk angering The Base that loves Trump?
The one person not backing away cautiously from Trump's comment was, of course, Trump, who took to Facebook to explain that if anyone should apologize, it's John McCain, for saying that Trump's anti-immigrant claims had been “firing up the crazies." Trump was shocked, shocked , that McCain was so mean to so many great Americans who have supported Trump's brave willingness to lie about the Mexican government's plot to send all their rapists and murderers to the U.S. (plus some good people, he assumes), and piled on with some further lies about John McCain:
I am not a fan of John McCain because he has done so little for our Veterans and he should know better than anybody what the Veterans need, especially in regards to the VA. He is yet another all talk, no action politician who spends too much time on television and not enough time doing his job and helping the Vets.
Yeah, that dummy McCain, ignoring our capital-V Veterans, like how he and Bernie Sanders co-sponsored that reform of the Veterans Administration last year. Oh, sure, he worked to fix a broken agency, but did he yell about Mexico enough? That's what Americans want.
Trump is also appalled that he is being so universally condemned, just for calling POWs losers, when no one ever defends him against equally unfair attacks:
“People are constantly attacking my hair," he said. “I don't see you coming to my defense. My hair is just fine. But if I say something about somebody else …"
Still, now we know what angers Republicans -- you can vilify Messicans for weeks and that will get you to the top of the (meaningless early) polls, but don't you dare criticize a war hero. At least not a Republican war hero. You can make fun of Democratic war heroes all you want, as virtually the entire GOP did in 2004, when John Kerry's three Purple Hearts and Bronze Star and Silver Star medals were determined to be fake by people who got deferments. Remember the hilarious remark that Bob Dole made about Kerry? "With three Purple Hearts, he never bled that I know of. And they're all superficial wounds." Hahaha, what a faker, that Kerry! And then there were the witty people at the 2004 Republican National Convention who wore Band-Aids with little purple hearts on them, because really, that is such a sucky fake medal that nobody gives a shit about (if a Democrat receives one):
John "Chickenshit with Only Five Medals" Kerry immediately denounced Trump's comments about McCain, saying in a statement:
I have known John McCain for more than 30 years. We've had our share of disagreements and still do today. But one thing I know is beyond debate is that John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified.
Without mentioning Trump by name, Kerry added, "If anyone doesn't know that John McCain is a war hero, it only proves they know nothing about war and even less about heroism." This seems pretty unfair to Donald Trump, who also fought extra hard during the Vietnam War -- to keep from going to Vietnam. As the New York Times reports, in addition to a bunch of college deferments, Trump also got a medical deferment "because of a bone spur in his foot. Mr. Trump could not recall which foot was afflicted." Might be the one lodged in his mouth.
Anyway, now that Trump has made it clear that real heroes don't get captured, we'd like to suggest he make his next TV appearance wearing a variation on those funny Band Aids from 2004. We bet his supporters would really get a kick out of this:
Oh, and just in case you're wondering, Trump also said this weekend that he wouldn't rule out a third-party run. In the extremely unlikely event that he's not declared the Republican nominee before the primaries, that is.
[ Bloomberg / NPR / Donald Trump on Facebook / NYT / AzCentral.com / The Guardian ]
I'm no fan of McCain, but he was not responsible for the USS Forrestal fire. Gregory Freeman, author of Sailors to the End, a book on the Forrestal disaster, pretty conclusively addresses the matter here:
The recent presidential race gave new life to some bad information about McCain and the Forrestal fire. As my book Sailors to the End explains in some detail, the fire actually was started by an unusual combination of electrical glitches and human errors by the flight deck crew, which resulted in a Zuni rocket being fired across the deck and into McCain's plane. Theories about a "wet start" and other possible causes were disproven soon after the fire. McCain was never suspected of causing the fire because investigators determined immediately that the rocket misfired from the other side of the flight deck. (The pilot of that plane also was not at fault.)The real culprit in the 134 deaths on the Forrestal was the Navy's decision to supply the carrier with very old, unstable bombs that exploded on the flight deck once the fire started. Bombs typical for 1967 would have withstood the fire long enough for the crew to put out the blaze, but the old bombs blew up almost immediately and turned what could have been a manageable fire into a disaster.Some detractors are citing the Forrestal fire as an example of McCain's supposedly reckless behavior or poor performance as a pilot, but the facts do not support this conclusion. Regardless of what kind of pilot McCain was, on this day he was essentially a bystander to the cause of the fire, just like all the other pilots. He didn't cause it and he narrowly escaped death by jumping out of his plane as it was engulfed in fire. Once on the flight deck, McCain was injured when a 1,000-lb. bomb exploded. He then went below decks and assisted the crew with the difficult task of throwing bombs overboard to prevent them from blowing up in the fire. Afterward, he went to the pilots' ready room.McCain did nothing inappropriate on July 29, 1967. While he is the first to say that credit for the heroic actions on the Forrestal that day should go to the ship's crew, McCain responded properly and admirably, as any Navy pilot would in such a crisis.
McCain may have been a lousy pilot, but he was definitely not responsible for the Forrestal disaster -- and claiming he was is one of those bits of folklore on our side of the political spectrum that I wish people would drop forever. There's plenty to dislike about him, but no, he didn't kill 130 of his shipmates.
This column ages well, but I find myself strangely protective of 2015 Dok’s innocence. When he wrote this, he didn’t know, couldn’t know, what the years held in store. When I was a child I saw a scene in a movie that stuck with me. Christians were being herded out into an arena full of hungry lions, and an old man holding a young child wrapped a portion of his garment over her face so she wouldn’t see what was coming. It wouldn’t shield her, of course, but only spare her for a moment of seeing what lay ahead.