Fresh New F*ckery Incoming

 

President Trump on JFK Files: "We are tomorrow announcing and giving all of the Kennedy files...I don't believe we are are going to redact anything...it's going to be very interesting...approximately 80,000 pages." pic.twitter.com/0NW4QdLSzL

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 17, 2025

Remember when the White House traipsed some little right-wing influencers off with their photo op and their binders of nothing-burger Epstein files? 

Well, I think this is kind of like that, except it smells to me that they are doing this on the same day that Trump is going to be in contact with his buddy Putin and has been talking about pre-surrendering Crimea and continuing to lie about Ukrainian forces surrounded and so on. They have a good idea which showcase the goofballs in our media are going to pay attention to on this cursed game show.

 It feels like a distraction that will be as enlightening as a flashlight with a dead battery. I mean, we will see....

Something to Do With Ends and Means

 

The killer of the UHC CEO is apparently Luigi Mangione, although some people online have the idea that being caught with the weapon and fake ID of the shooter and carrying a three-page manifesto is a little too "on the nose".  I don't know what to tell you, folks. The above screen cap is his Twitter profile--he definitely did not have that many followers this morning!

I said the other day: 

I am a bit of a cynic at times, and we might find out that the killer is not actually a folk hero with a wronged loved one, bankrupted by medical bills or brought to an untimely end by denied claims. Some of the populist "death to the bloated ticks!" sentiment may be inauthentic (people do love a viral bandwagon).

The idea that a bright, promising young man was deranged by pain from a back surgery is appealing, but inapt. Many people experience pain and don't resort to violence. He deliberately chose a brutal, individualized solution to what could be potentially resolved by legal collective action based on the valorization of the man of action as a hero/martyr.

If he hoped through his actions to put the health care system on trial, the surprise is that he will be on trial for premeditated murder: full stop. 

Unauthorized Thoughts and Declined Prayers

 

Generally, when a stranger is murdered in cold blood, there's at least a muted "Damn shame!' sort of reaction. If a man with a family dies at the age of 50, why, you can certainly say "That's far too young, that poor man's family!" (Not that he was poor--unfortunate, but not poor.) You don't actually see people writing folk songs about the killer and posting them to social media, or see people back out of the search for the killer. 

What has happened, if one can at all "read the room", is that the murdered CEO has become a stand-in for a parasitical industry. Our health insurance system isn't a "health care system"--it's a promise to pay for protection. Some of your health care bill will be paid. Not all. Your course of treatment can be affected by your insurance company. 

This can and does result in bad (fatal or crippling) outcomes. Of course, people feel some way about that. 

And the result of that feeling may look very cold-blooded. It isn't. It's rather hot, actually.

Deep in the Dark Heart of Texas

 

BREAKING: Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardons Daniel Perry for killing BLM protester Garrett Foster pic.twitter.com/lSn3WafPE4

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 16, 2024

I could just blog about how TX Gov.  Greg Abbott is a signifying sociopathic fascist who is pardoning a racist and pedophile murderer to send a chilling message to his state about his values, but I need to point out that he is not just following through on a political promise, but that the Texas Pardon and Parole Board recommended it. 

Let me repeat that: this was not without the consent of other people who sit in judgment over who gets pardons or parole, but with their express approval. Greg Abbott isn't a brand-new baby governor trying to feel out the ethos of his state--he is a monster who has figured out that many people will clap for a particular kind of monster. 

In Texas, anyway. 

Did You Raise Your Kids Not to Kill?

 

I wanted to talk about the deaths of two children, but for a while I wasn't sure how. 

Brianna Ghey was murdered by teenagers because she was a trans girl. Nex Benedict died after an assault after a year (at least) of bullying because he was trans masc/binary. There are people who would claim that these children somehow died because of something called "gender ideology".  If some "force" didn't make them think they were trans--wouldn't they have just not stuck out and then been killed for that? 

The so-called "gender ideology" people are pissed off about is the idea that you are okay to be yourself. The gender ideology that they say is so fucking stringent and dogmatic is--let people live being what they feel they are, and don't fuck with them for it. They can express femininity or masculinity or not really identify with either. They can dress how they will and express their feelings about who they are and what they like without oppression.  How they dress, and whether they are gay or straight or ace or what they want from their one, great beautiful precious life is up to them.  

That life is theirs, and they should be able to live it to the fullest. 

And all society has to do in return is not punish them for existing as themselves. Call them by their names.  Let them live. Let them tend to their bodies as their own vehicles for living in. Just don't oppress. The same rights you would extend to anyone else and not one different thing. 

TWGB: Nearly Nothing to Say

 

The death of Alexei Navalny is an example of how authoritarian power reacts to courage--the strongman is, at heart, a small villain. The warm voice of opposition is the thing that threatens his snowflake grip on power. In the US, we enshrined freedom of speech in the Constitution. In Putin's Russia, it is punished, sometimes fatally. The likelihood that Russia will call this "natural causes" is a laugh--naturally, we know what caused his death. 

But I'm not an expert in Russia politics, so there's only so much I can add to that discussion. I just want to note that the power to eliminate opposing voices was exactly the power that Trump's claim of total presidential immunity would result in. It would be the power of the thin-skinned and weak man to no longer have to argue his case, but to end the argument with one fatal command. 

I won't link to the sickos on the right who linked the imprisonment of Navalny and the straits of former president Donald Trump, except to note them by name, D'Souza, Zeldin, Mace (there's more, but linking to them hardly matters). Trump is not a crusader against corruption--he is corrupt. He is not downtrodden by political violence; he is an ardent encourager of it. This is the real Trump Derangement Syndrome: to never blame poor little Trump for anything, ever. Not even the legal troubles of a long-time crook. 

I see Stupid People, But They Don't Know They're Stupid

 

Musk doubles down on his claims that there's no evidence the Allen, Texas mall shooter had white supremacist beliefs, and that @bellingcat "does psy-ops" professionally. pic.twitter.com/60yvbbspYZ

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) May 16, 2023

Do the big fucking Nazi tattoos confuse Elon, here? Because to the extent we have a potential motive, it looks like this shithead was fucked up about Asians. Also, Musk wants to pretend his weird Twitter obsession is somehow like Inigo Montoya but I don't think Elon's father got killed by the woke mind virus or he's doing anything especially brave by being a shitposter. An actually shit, shitposter. 

Bleeding America

 

It comes out that the mass shooter at the Allen, TX outlet mall was a man named Mauricio Garcia, who was fascinated with right-wing politics and white supremacy, and wore a "Right Wing Death Squad" badge. So, cue up the right wing defenders of the faith, saying it's unpossible that a Hispanic man is also a white supremacist. Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio and so on and so on aside.  Leave it to normie suburban Republicans to try and defend actual white supremacists by saying they wouldn't allow freaking mestizos in the country club. Why are our racists not more racist?  is quite the realization for the party that accepted Trump and birtherism and wanted Muslin bans and mass deportations. 

Of course, here at this blog, we've been aware of the love some right wingers have for Pinochet. And know very well why Garcia's politics might be swept under the rug. It doesn't fit the narrative that it's always and only mental illness, and Garcia also suffered from that.  

Just today, another incident in TX claimed lives without guns: an SUV rammed into a bus stop claiming eight lives and injuring multiple others. And it is both senseless and fraught with meaning--did someone decide that immigrants were just people who could be killed because it was politically determined to be fine? I mean, don't people plow into crowds and have other people deem it to be fine? They were only illegal aliens, after all. 

Look, I can be hard on Texas, but we have a violence problem throughout this country. Sure, it's a North Texas meteorologist who is on high alert because a six year old with a missing kitten might ***gasp*** ring his doorbell, for which he needs to be strapped and locked and loaded, but also, we just have trigger happy herpderps out here for non-being Texan reasons. 

The War at Home

 

Tonight on ⁦@11thHour⁩ with ⁦@SRuhle⁩: Kansas City shooter was “…fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line”. Grandson says Andrew Lester influenced by conservative media | The Kansas City Star ⁦@MSNBC⁩ https://t.co/IJivWs9Yxx

— Frank Figliuzzi (@FrankFigliuzzi1) April 21, 2023

A kid was shot because he knocked on the wrong door.  A girl got shot because she turned into the wrong driveway.  Cheerleaders were shot because they approached the wrong car. A little girl and her family were shot at because a ball rolled into the wrong lawn. 

I try to not just blame the guns--our violence problem is exacerbated by the availability of guns, but that isn't the whole problem. There is a synergy between some kind of overly defensive mindset, some kind of near-paranoia, and the access to weaponry, that is the problem. Something has gone terribly wrong with the basic American brain that it looks for enemies everywhere.

Our gun-related violence statistics are something to behold. The grandson of Andrew Lester talks about the viewpoint of his grandfather and you almost wonder how such shootings aren't more prevalent. 

Even while I understand how the AR-15 became a fetish for certain people, I don't blame the weapons--not entirely, even though I think we should keep them out of the hands of people who have previous assault charges, domestic violence, and restraining orders against them. That just seems logical to me. But we have a whole narrative, an NRA/gun lobby voice, saying having guns is your masculinity and your freedom. It's a solution to problems. The rhetoric isn't just home defense--it's payback and civil war. 

The fixation on violence as a front line tactic is disgraceful and damaging to civil peace. The gunhumpers who facilitated this POV need to understand their bullshit is why so many progressives want to ban various weapons. 

I get that the thing (any long gun, automated or not, any handgun, anything that goes boom and fires a projectile) is just a tool. But the rhetoric of gun nuts has weaponized the people for the sake of selling guns. 

And the people go off, hurting people and sometimes killing them. And that is not acceptable. 

Governor Abbott is Who He Is

 

I could write rather a lot about what pardoning a man who said he was thinking of killing people on his way to work, who did plow into a crowd of peaceful protesters who were exercising their 1st Amendment rights, and then fatally shot someone in the crowd who was lawfully exercising his 2nd Amendment writes would mean: the sanctioning of murder based on whether you agreed with the choice of victims--

But let's face it, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas choosing to do just that based on Fox News and the opinions of no less an intellect and subject matter expert on this than Kyle Rittenhouse is very, very on brand, And saying more just feels like a waste of words, in a way. 

Here there be massacres

 It is traditional,

like love letters

and candy, 

we have massacres here:

red and black and white

color our Valentine's Day,

cupid's arrows replaced by bullets,

the romance of the gun

and an affair with Death.

It is traditional,

like a daily ritual

practiced in tiny classrooms

and taught in auditoriums,

and workplace videos to remind you

your co-worker could go berserk,

so please take time to think how

you should run, hide, fight.

We have massacres here

for the old and young with no exemption,

our one truly inclusive

experience, and some

get to see two or more

in even one short lifetime.

Here there be massacres--

a feature of our landscape like amber waves of grain,

only waves of pain

and passersby that jest at scars

not having felt a wound.

And it happens so many times in a week 

we can hardly speak to it,

other than to say it happens and something goes horribly awry--

but we never quite answer: why?

Climate Sunday: The Riskiest?

The riskiest places aren't always obvious, but some of them have already demonstrated vulnerability in the face of storms they have already experienced. And fire and drought also matter. You would not understand how the places most subject to experiencing climate change are also the places most likely to vote against politicians who would not do  anything for climate change unless you understood the saturation of political propaganda. 

Investing in fossil fuels is jobs and money and success and capitalism and why would you not want these things, you Commie? 

But it's dumb. We sometimes use the idea of a frog in boiling water. The frog doesn't know how fucked he is because it's slow and steady--and the damage climate change is doing is mostly slow and steady. 

He Was Just Trying to Get Home

 

I have no interest in sharing the video that some of us had to watch to take in, once again, the brutality human beings can inflict on one another, and that some of us had to avoid, unable to see another violent, avoidable death. So, I choose this image from a video of a skater, full of life, arms stretched out in the light, in motion as he should still be. 

Tyre Nichols should be alive. We don't even have a good answer as to why he was stopped. But what I saw was disproportionate force on a compliant individual undertaken with what looked like enthusiasm. This video of police brutality was twice as long as the Rodney King video I saw so many years ago--and which then felt to me like watching an eternity of a human suffering--he lived. This is watching Black officers of the law behave unlawfully, keepers of order being without order. This feels like watching something primal and ritualistic. 

I am not better for having seen it. It leaves me wondering what trapdoor in the human soul drops open in the midst of serving one's job that reveals a monster below--not for one depraved individual, but for a collective. 

And what also breaks me is that he called for his mother--and yeah, I've heard that before too, and I, without kids by choice, hear that and I am suffering for that human, so close the last of his life calling out for she who was there for the first part of it. If I am so moved, what is it like for one who carried a child under their heart, and lived with a child in it, concerned for their every breath under the sun, until the time that breath was stolen? 

Blowback Isn't Always Immediate

 

Breaking News: The Justice Dept. charged a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Wednesday for plotting to kill John Bolton, a Trump-era national security adviser. Prosecutors said the man had offered $300,000 to hire someone to kill Bolton. https://t.co/oHbuJ5ocXG

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 10, 2022

Amidst Trump's Mar-a-Lago search warrant drama and the recent serving of several PA legislators over the false electors' scheme, the story of an assassination plot against John Bolton as a late retaliation over the slaying of General Suleimani surfaces for me as an example of something that US foreign/military policy sometimes fails at: theory of mind. The idea that our allies and enemies alike have the agency and will to respond in proportion and according to their own schedule is something that the "deciders" sometimes miss--almost as if they believe they are playing a game where the "other side" consists of NPC's.

That there would be blowback of some kind should have been obvious. That former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also a possible target of Iran's Revolutionary Guard would not shock me. And naturally, none of this helps the attempt to renew the JCPOA that the Trump Administration fecklessly scuttled. 

The decision to escalate tensions with Iran was a Trump Administration fuckup we will be dealing with for some time. It wasn't necessary--it was ideological, and yes, Bolton and Pompeo were obvious anti-Iran antagonists and I nonetheless do not endorse their mortal peril because of the decision that ultimately came down to a green and under-prepared CinC who may have thought the exercise was about dick-measuring and clout.

It is simply as natural as night following the day--actions do have consequences. It's not that the IRG's assassination plot is acceptable--no! But it isn't unexpected when you appreciate the other side has a side.  

Justice and the Bittersweet Exhalation

 

Three white men, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, were convicted by a Georgia jury for murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who ran through their neighborhood. All three face a federal trial next year on hate-crime charges https://t.co/Sz19nnLTFM pic.twitter.com/umFrpBm2Cm

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 25, 2021

It shouldn't be so hard to expect that people who murdered a young man on video (and were so certain of the situation that one of them leaked the video of the slaying with the idea that it would resolve public opinion) would be convicted of the deed, but we don't live in the most logical of times (and never have!), and not even video of some slayings has been enough to condemn certain malefactors for one of the most heinous of crimes--because it is the most irrevocable--the taking of a life.

And yet, the system almost failed. It almost failed in many places and with several different people.  It took work to even bring charges. It shouldn't have been so in doubt that the Arbery family would get justice for their son. 

What I know is, while the judge and the prosecution in this case were excellent (and I look to the Rittenhouse case as I say that), the defense seemed disturbingly wed to the notion that the victim was the one on trial and that calling attention to the racial issue would somehow be beneficial to them. (Although it should have been clear that it was a factor--one that will be discussed in the federal case.) 

It should have been obvious that Ahmaud Arbery should not have had his life taken from him, but one of the comments the defense made me suck in such a gasp--that shamelessness about the dead man's toenails. The disrespect and denigration of a person in death as if acknowledging that, not anything Arbery did, but his appearance alone, could have warranted his death. 

That gasp--that inhalation at the realization that on some level, this expectation of bigotry was considered not an unfortunate bug of society but a feature to be relied on, was something I hadn't fully exhaled until the verdict was read out. How many others were holding their breath? How many others have held their breaths like this for an exhalation of justice that never came? How many times did it feel unsafe to breathe in freedom, or breathe out that fear and misgiving that a Black life mattered? 

The system isn't perfect but it's correctable. I am not big on faith, but I will believe in that. We just have to keep correcting as we go along. 

Where I Defend Kyle Rittenhouse

 

Let me take a departure for a minute from what you know are my stances to acknowledge a handful of things: the overlap between justice and the law is not a perfect circle. A judgement can be legally accurate while still being ethically or morally disappointing at best and supporting a dangerous or untimely precedent at worst. We don't have to love the outcome of the Rittenhouse decision to come away with the idea that the right to self-defense, even if it is broad and subject to conjecture about state of mind on the part of a person who has taken life, isn't something that should be denied someone just because their background doesn't comport with our ideas of the ideal self-defense scenario. 

I'm going to perform a teeth-gritting exercise about what we can know from this case, and I don't think anyone will be happy with it, not even myself. Kyle Rittenhouse is an under-parented kid who thought he was doing something he needed to that he entirely did not. He was on the side, to the best of his teenage education, of law and order. The side where the cops were. He was not any more racist than the people he was surrounded with (you know, regular white folks). He considered the city of Kenosha his community even though he did not live there, because he had family there and had worked there. And he acquired an AR-15 because guns are for self-defense, and he was in a place he competently understood to be dangerous based on his understanding of what he had read and seen on the news, and wanted to also be dangerous. Because self-defense. The thing he went into danger to do. 

To be exact, even if no son of mine would ever, etc., Kyle Rittenhouse looks like he could be my kid. So I get what his sources of information were and the biases he grew up with. And this isn't a privileged kid in spite of his whiteness. He was only privileged in that our laws were so constructed to be very broad with respects to self-defense and the Castle doctrine has, over the years with the help of the NRA and other pressure groups, made the frontier logic of the Wild West, the duty to never retreat anywhere if you happen to be armed, the law of the land. In a gunfight, it privileges the one who lives and can take the stand to testify to his state of mind, As the survivor of a gunfight, Rittenhouse has emerged from a gantlet to arrive at another kind of challenge. 

His lionization by the actually worst people. Like the Proud Boys, the association with which, while Rittenhouse was out on bail, was something not viewed by the jury, and also, it was irrelevant to his case, having happened afterwards. 

That Authentic Grief Dollar

 

Wow, what a-holes.

The original: @nytimes: "Biden, Still Grieving His Son Beau, Finds That Not Everyone Wants to Hear About It"

Now: "In Invoking Beau, Biden Broaches a Loss That’s Guided His Presidency" pic.twitter.com/6IHuzr52q6

— Tommy moderna-vaX-Topher (@tommyxtopher) September 4, 2021

I didn't want to broach this part of The Discourse and all, but when supposedly serious journalists started in on whether President Biden's references to his son were appropriate because they might rub some people the wrong way, I heard Bill Hicks in my head. Something along the lines of: 

The Authentic Grief dollar. That's a good dollar. Lot of authentic grief to go around. Covid-19, endless wars, the opioid epidemic (we really helped that last one along, sir, let me tell you...). But we're not getting positive reactions across the market, so we think you're gonna have to workshop your grief a bit, Mr. President. Just to give it a more broad, universal, generic appeal. You with us? 

And my gut-level response to what that makes me feel about it is very like that of the late Mr. Hicks. Just kill yourselves you fucking fucks. 

The media hovered like vultures over Al Gore's honesty, Hillary Clinton's laugh, Barack Obama's tears and said "Look, they're human. That means they die and we eat." And then both-sidesed people who promoted unregulated fossil fuels in the face of climate change, policies of torture and endless war, and featured columns from people who, with a straight face, suggested little kids could fling their bodies at a mass shooter to stop him. Eventually. 

If it bleeds it leads. The bloodthirsty dollar. Always a great promotion. You know how it goes.

That's right. We have little kids going to school with bulletproof backpacks or with active shooter drills where they pile into a coatroom, but thanks to scum-life mouthpieces, we are supposed to be respectful when ever-growing numbers of kids are getting COVID because god forbid someone's little precious had their freedoms impaired by covering their wee Hummel figurine features with a mask. Because empathy and common sense have been beaten to death in a parking lot for not having the right Q rating.

Leave people's bloody personalities alone (unless they are unrepentant racist rapist narcissistic sociopaths, in which case, report that shit early and often). Report facts. We're fucking dying over here!

Ah the Fear of Death dollar. A very reliable mover. Pretty much our oldest trope....say, can we interest you in a flight to Mars in like, 2037 to escape all this? Some vitamins? A weapon to protect yourself in our future Mad Max Hellscape? 

Fuck. This. For. All. Time. 

Wanton Endangerment

When Louisville called for a curfew and started to prepare for protests, it was pretty clear that there was an understanding that the decision reached by the grand jury regarding indictment of one of the officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor for charges not related directly to her slaying would be, to put it simply, inadequate.

The system in Louisville was ready to prepare for protests, but it is questionable whether the case was fully pursued in establishing how procedure so completely broke down that a young woman was shot dead in her own bed. Managing protests, and finding them more agreeable than performing the basic duty of the full pursuit of justice is a form of wanton endangerment because of the harm it does to the justice system itself by rendering it less credible and more broken with every failure and needless loss of life. And it harms the public by allowing such failures to continue.

Governor Beshear has called for AG Cameron to release an accounting of the evidence so that the public can know for themselves whether this seems just. I'm hung up on that--there are reasons we try people for indictment in grand jury courts, not in public, but knowing what Cameron's office had to work with and how they did it would be instructive, because it is quite possible that a certain minimal result was desired, and certainly a minimal result was obtained. There are valid reasons why prosecutors might take on no more case than they think they can try and win, but here, I just can't help but think there is something incredibly wrong with a result that has people beset upon in their home, possibly not even hearing or being cognizant of any announcement that these were law enforcement, and not being protected by the law.

I highly question the use of a no-knock warrant in the first place, because it seems to me that this would have been better handled in broad daylight. I question how clearly law enforcement announced themselves, and whether the barrage of bullets in response to a shot fired by her partner, Kenneth Walker, was even at that point a reasonable level of force. And I always wonder why, after this kind of force is applied by police, the call for medical assistance never comes quick enough.

I don't know everything, but I know that when people have been marching for justice on behalf of black lives for the past six months looking for some sign that it is understood that they do matter, this doesn't feel like it. And I deeply sympathize with people who feel that results like this mean they too, are just endangered by a system that isn't here to serve and protect them, but operates on the basis of political will and racial bias. Wantonly.

A wanton system is not law and order. A system that assumes people are innocent until proven guilty, and does not treat people as a suspect class because of biased reasoning is the fulfilment of our constitution, it's what all Americans should be entitled to, and it isn't exactly what we have right now. But we should aspire to that, because without it, we do not have peace. We have a breach of faith.

And no, the protesters did not start that. They protest because they want that faith restored, and because they believe justice is a thing that can be achieved. They want faith in a system that has not protected them, and they want it from a system where rubber bullets and tear gas can be fired at them. They love the America they want to believe in and see someday, and keep getting this bullshit. But they still want this American experiment to work.

(And the only price we'd all pay is we get accountable government, which actually is not a price so much as something we all should want anyway.)

They are better institutionalists and patriots than a lot of flag-kissing gun-toters out there could ever hope to be.

The Very Fine People On a Very Particular Side

Imagine for an instant your Kyle Rittenhouse was outside of a movie theatre, or a school, or a shopping mall, or a country music concert, kitted out in that very same weapon, and ask yourself if there isn't something about this picture that doesn't seem half-familiar. This lad showed up very deliberately at a very particular place with a very particular weapon with a definite intention which he in fact carried out.

There just happen to be people who think this was fine. Wasn't he defending himself by shooting people? (Was he anywhere he needed to be? Was he extravagantly armed? Was he not indicating he meant to use his firearm to extralegally defend the people who were there doing it for their actual living--why? Should his youthful behind not have been home instead of looking for the trouble he got? Why weren't the cops enough to protect and serve themselves?)

There's a reason we don't use kids as soldiers or cops. Yet somehow this kid got hold of a firearm and travelled across state lines to stand up for people we expect to be capable of standing up for us, with his underage barely trained ass supporting trained law enforcement? Are we seeing the problem with this?

Absent Good Order or Discipline

Not for nothing, but Richard Spencer’s* “yes, I understand you just fired me” letter makes Mattis’ resignation missive look like a polite Christmas card.

It’s as close to a double-barreled f**k you as one can get in this genre of official correspondence.

*not the Nazi one pic.twitter.com/rDfVre9y7T

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) November 25, 2019

There are multiple stories about regarding the "resigfiring" (the term for when one has been advised to resign in a way that is clearly getting canned) of Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, but I think it's pretty clear from this letter that he is acknowledging that he has in fact been fired: "I acknowledge my termination...." but is acknowledging it because he differs from the Commander in Chief (Trump) on what constitutes "good order and discipline" and what is best for the morale, conduct, and obligations of military code in general.

There is a good aphorism that a fish rots from the head down. An efficient manager or line officer wants to maintain a good standard of conduct among their personnel as an example to one another. When the conduct of any person become so noxious that their own co-workers (or comrades in arms) are frankly alarmed by that person's performance that they report it, it is an issue that is best handled by those who understand that a failure to address poor behavior is tantamount to a reward for bad behavior--it does not broadcast good values, and suggests that comradery is equal to covering up one another's dirt. It makes favorites and scapegoats. It makes a hero of people who do wrong shit and assigns blame to people who point out wrong-doing. It is, in a way, the big dog beats little dog world of Trumpism.

I understand why Trump wanted to pardon the telegenic little girl killer, because this is that kind of swaggering horseshit that passes for machismo in his world. And I guess I understand how go-along-to-get-along humps are going to clap like monkeys that Trump asserted his will. Maybe he doesn't give a damn about why such codes of conduct even exist, anymore than he understands why things like torture and brutality count against the side that uses them. Our first president understood the responsibility he bore for what was committed under his command. I do not think Trump understands that leadership is responsibility: to him, it is a postponement of his own responsibilities and an ability to confer an escape from responsibility or culpability to others. He certainly has people around him who reinforce this view.

He will be dealt an acknowledgement of his own, and I hope soon. He is absent order or discipline.