Trump turns the U.S. into a Ghoul Nation

Thanks to Trump, the United States has become a ghoul nation. Actions taken by this administration seem to be guided by a sinister side of Trump, especially one that feeds on ‘dead bodies.’ The word ghoul is also applicable in the derogatory sense when referring to a person who delights in the macabre, or is indifferent to someone else’s death. Has Trump expressed any sorrow or concern for anyone who has died or been killed on his watch? Not at all.

          Everyone, from CPO William Ryan Owens the Navy SEAL killed in Yemen less than a week into the Trump presidency, the four Green Berets, ambushed and gunned down in Niger on October 4, 2017, to the three U.S. Special Forces soldiers killed by an IED, November 27, 2018, near Ghazni in Afghanistan produced no reaction from Trump. Not one tweet from him about their sacrifice, and in most cases, Trump couldn’t even bother to be at Joint Base Andrews when the bodies were flown home. Ghouls are unconcerned with death.

        Just a few days after 7-year-old Guatemalan Jakelin Caal Maquin died in Border Patrol custody, 8-year old Felipe Gomez Alonso, also a Guatemalan died just before midnight Monday at a government facility in Albuquerque NM. CBP says it doesn’t know the cause of the boy’s death. Records show he was sent to a hospital, diagnosed with a cold, sent back to Border Patrol care and began having seizures soon after arriving there. He died later that evening while being transferred back to the hospital.

Trump supporters are secretly thrilled that these little sub-humans are now dead after illegally entering US territory…and it’s all their parent’s fault. If the immigrants hadn’t entered the U.S. through the desert they wouldn’t have lost their child. “Go die on someone else’s dime” is the Trump supporter’s attitude regarding the children’s deaths while in U.S. custody. There is no sympathy except for how it makes Trump look. That’s where their ghoulish sympathies lie.

A U.S. military report was released in December 2018 stating foreign civilian casualties during U.S. Drone strikes have dramatically increased under the Trump administration. Last year, Trump ordered all caps removed (in a simplified manner, caps were to be the maximum allowable number killed during U.S. actions hopefully restricted to maybe a dozen). Drawing on Defense Department memos and collateral damage assessments, so far in 2018, almost 3,500 civilians have been officially reported as killed - but governments in the countries where the strikes occurred claim the number is substantially higher and that the Trump administration is deliberately under-reporting the civilian slaughter. Meanwhile, the Trump administration pedals it as the price paid for America's freedoms. Ghouls do not care about collateral damage deaths.

In mid September 2018, Yahoo News is the first to report on a release that shows the Trump administration had transferred $13 million from Childhood Cancer Research and over $16 million from Head Start in order to give it to ICE for the supplying and construction of more detention centers and holding facilities for immigrants and their children. Why help kids when you can incarcerate…and possibly accelerate the death of…illegal immigrant children? Only a Ghoul nation would do this.

Even though FEMA has admitted fault for the thousands of pallets of now-undrinkable bottled water left on a runway in Puerto Rico as CBS reported in mid September, FEMA confirmed that it moved the bottled water in a cost-saving measure as a part of its effort to provide “the maximum support to disaster survivors, while also being mindful of our responsibility as stewards of taxpayer dollars.” Leaving it on the runway for months saved FEMA money and Trump gave their effort an A+. The supplied-and-lost-water could have saved some of the lives of the almost 3000 Puerto Ricans who died as a direct result of the effects of Hurricane Maria in the fall of 2017, and the inadequate response of the Trump administration. Trump denied the death toll from Hurricanes Maria and Irma in a series of tweets stating "3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths." Trump then blamed Democrats for the figures, "to make me look as bad as possible." It is always…ALWAYS…someone else’s fault, never the Ghoul that was directly responsible for making the tragedy worse.

The world judges the United States by what Trump does. We will pay for this for generations…long after we’ve paid for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%.

How Trump Can Further Show Just What an Extraordinary Military Commander He Is

               There’s a caravan walking at about 2 to 3 miles an hour through Mexico at this moment made up of primarily impoverished families who are escaping the violence and lack of job opportunities in the Central American countries where they are from. Donald Trump is insisting at his rallies, at press conferences, and at brief encounters with reporters outside the White House, that they are a brutal invasion force. They are still over 800 miles from the southeastern border of Texas, but the general direction suggests they are heading toward California which is over 2000 miles from their present location. (They are near a strange place in Mexico that Fox’s Lou Dobbs called ‘Juar-ll-daaaaaaa.' I haven’t been able to find it on a map of Mexico either.) At the rate they are travelling, it will take them at least 2 weeks to a month to reach the U.S. if they come here at all. But to Trump, the danger is now, today, immediately, so he has told Defense Secretary James Mattis to send armed troops…5000, 5200, 10,000, no 15,000…to meet the threat. That’s more than the U.S. has deployed in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS.

If you don’t look too closely, the men in that caravan are…(maybe they’re Middle Eastern, who knows?)…of military age, strong and virile (but unarmed, except for some rocks they might be able to throw). Reporters actually travelling with the caravan describe them as mostly thin, underfed young fathers, and teenage boys who are desperately trying to avoid being forced into joining a gang. Trump along with Fox news claims the women are being cowed into marching in the front of this invasion force in order to form a human shield for those men. And even worse, the women are keeping their babies close to themselves, and the young children nestled around them to provide an extra layer of bodies for the mass of terrifying invaders behind them, and those kids are riddled with diseases like smallpox, leprosy, aids, tuberculosis, and even STDs. According to Fox news hosts, Fox news guests, and many Trump supporters, they are all being paid by billionaire George Soros or the Democratic Party. How do they know? They say it is just so obvious and hinting that members of our own congress must also be going down there and urging them on, encouraging them to sweep into the U.S., and make sure to vote for Democrats…so they can rip health care away from law-abiding white Christian Americans, take over our cities, take away all our jobs…and kneel when the National Anthem is played!

These are the dangerous invaders Trump is warning about

From the Oval Office Trump admitted that “nobody knows for sure” whether there are gang members, ISIS soldiers, or Middle Eastern terrorists in among the caravan, but it’s possible…anything is possible. Why he doesn’t say that their pockets are all stuffed with millions in gold coins and they are coming to give it to Americans, free…is unknowable. But isn’t’ that also possible if anything is possible? He says he “tries to tell the truth” but the qualifier is he “tries”, not “does.”

If Trump really thinks this is truly a dangerous invasion force, why doesn’t he use the same tactic that has worked so well for him in the past? The tactic that makes disreputable news anchors wax poetically about how beautiful their launch is, how their use makes him appear more presidential to certain members of Congress, how Ivanka thinks it makes him…I mean, how Melania thinks it makes him more manly and desirable, how the use of them showcases what a strong, powerful, forward-thinking leader he is, all from the safety and comfort of one of his golf resorts?

Launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at them.

Trump insisted that Syria, a country far, far away and no threat to us, deserved to have cruise missiles launched at them…twice. If they were a threat, how much more is a threat just 2000 miles away and getting closer to our border? Since Trump is using the language of war, why not use our weapons of war? Just don’t distract him with a beautiful piece of chocolate cake or he’ll forget at which country he was supposed to launch them. We don’t need to wake up and find we’re now at war with Uruguay because Trump can’t tell the difference between that country and Mexico.

Not just cruise missiles either. Trump has no problem having our military and CIA launching missiles from drones over countries we are not at war with. If U.S. Predators and Reapers can send Hellfire missiles into wedding parties in Pakistan and schools in Yemen, then he can ignore Mexican sovereignty and launch missiles at the migrant caravan, too. Yemen, Pakistan, Mexico…what’s the difference?

But he mustn’t stop there. The world needs to see how tough Trump is. So send U.S. carrier groups into the Gulf of Mexico and down the Mexican Pacific coast to launch air attacks on the caravan. Maybe Trump can even ask for help from the Saudi Arabian Air Force which has lots of experience blowing up kids on buses and in schools in Yemen using U.S. weapons and hardware Trump sold to them. They’ll be able to show our pilots how and where to lay down ordinance to cause maximum damage. U.S. submarines can be included to add their missiles and firepower to the defense of the nation from this dangerous hoard of…poor people trying to escape the same war-like setting in their own countries.

Our F-117s, F-35s, A-10s, B-1s and B-2s can gain valuable experience dropping bombs on them or flying in low and slow and machine gunning them as they are strung out along Mexican roads. Sure, there will be some collateral damage and unintended casualties of Mexicans who happen to be too near a drop zone or target area, but innocent dead Mexicans is the price we have to pay to be free. Last year, Trump claimed he authorized our military in Afghanistan to drop a 21,000-pound non-nuclear bomb called a MOAB onto a suspected terrorist site. It was never confirmed that it was, but that’s immaterial. Plus, two innocent Afghani civilians were killed by it. However, dead Afghanis mean about as much to Trump as dead Mexicans. He can do the same to these violent migrant people. With a blast radius of over a mile, a MOAB will kill a good one-quarter of the first wave and make the rest of them think long and hard about wanting to come to the U.S. for anything.

                   Monkey see...monkey do!

It is certain Trump’s base will love this idea. Nothing makes them happier than to think Trump is killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of non-white, non-English speaking people. They get giddy with the thought that, even with the massive tax cut that added $1.5 trillion dollars to the national debt - and there’s now GOP talk about gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to make up for some of that debt - that there’s still plenty of money laying around to throw at a military solution to the immigration issue…specifically these immigrants. What difference does a few billion dollars added to that deficit make if Trump can get a couple thousand dead immigrants out of it?

And as a last resort, if any of them do happen to reach the Rio Grande or the New Mexico, Arizona, or California border, and if they can be goaded into throwing a rock, Trump has ordered the 15,000 deployed soldiers there to consider that a weapon and then can now shoot-to-kill the migrants. Because in Trump’s way of thinking, a hand-thrown rock is as lethal as an AR-15 and deserves the return fire from one. That is what happens when you don’t serve in the military and make wild assumptions based on your feelings.

Military genius such as this can only come from someone who avoided service altogether with five draft deferments, suffered from a painful bone spur (or spurs…who knows for sure) in his foot, has never spent a day in the military, but overcame all that, and, using his vast military school background, has deployed the world’s mightiest military force to kill unarmed immigrants walking toward our southern border. We see this in every great military leader down through history. Leaders like…………..well, they must be there because how else would we know how great a military genius Trump is?

Remember, on June 16, 2016, Trump told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News that “No one is bigger or better at ‘the military’ than I am.”

If these migrants really are part of an invasion force, show us you are up to the task of defending the nation by the application of your Constitutional and presidential powers to stop them. Here is your chance to prove you understand it, Trump.

We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident: The US respects no border but its own

            

          In a brazen early morning assault, a special commando unit from what appears to be the PLA slipped into Silicon Valley, destroying a computer business employing several political refugees from the People’s Republic of China, killed over a dozen civilians in the building including six Americans, kidnapped one Taiwanese scientist, and stole high-tech hardware before withdrawing. The U.S. Western Military Command seemed unaware as to how the Special Forces-type group got into the country, although survivors of the attack state two large helicopters were seen lifting off shortly after the raid. The area has been cordoned off by Military Police while Army intelligence officers and FBI agents sift through the debris from the attack. One officer confirmed that two survivors heard Chinese commands being given to the soldiers involved in the assault.  

         In an unrelated report, a large Chinese Jin-class submarine was sighted yesterday 15 miles off the coast of California near Ano Nuevo State Park.

         China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said the U.S. was resorting to “alternative facts” in order to pin the blame on China. He also added that his country had the right to defend itself against American imperialism and intimidation wherever it occurs, and charged the U.S. with cyber-invasions of the PRC and conducting its own state-sponsored terrorism.     

Chinese Jin-Class Type 094 submarine

            If the above account had actually happened, what would be your reaction? Alright, then when is it okay for the United States to conduct Team America: World Police-like invasions of foreign countries?

           On January 25, 2017, President Trump, with son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon urging him on, joined by Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Michael Flynn, and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. at an informal dinner approved sending Navy SEAL Team 6 into Yemen on Sunday, the 29th, with a mission to seize cell phones and laptop computers used by Al Qaeda operatives. As it turned out, virtually everything that could go wrong did after inept planning and a series of misjudgments ended with the elite unit pinned down in a withering 50-minute gun battle that also wounded at least three other members of the squad and destroyed a $75 million dollar Osprey aircraft. Wednesday night the Pentagon acknowledged that the mission also killed over 20 Yemeni civilians, including many children. The account from Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, confirm the death of the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda leader who was killed in a 2011 drone strike. Chief Petty Officer William Owens was killed in the raid, the first member of the military to die on Trump’s watch. Of course, Trump hailed his first counterterrorism operation a huge success, claiming the commandos captured “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world.” A statement by the military’s Central Command Wednesday night said that the recovered materials may provide some initial information helpful to counterterrorism analysts. But the statement did not provide details, and they declined to characterize any discussions with Mr. Trump prior to the mission.

I will not let George Bush or Barak Obama off the hook either because when in office they both ordered raids into sovereign nations, including Syria, Libya, and Pakistan. The U.S.routinely violates the airspace of nations all over the world with Reaper, Predator, and Global Hawk UAVs or drones as they are most commonly known. Hundreds of innocent people have been killed in missile strikes that our CIA and military blithely refer to as "collateral damage." In other words, their lives don't matter. Yet we are not at war with those people or with the nations where they live.

Who gave the U.S. permission to flaunt the rules of war? To treat other countries as though they were nothing more than our doormat? And to send U.S. combat troops into harm’s way when there is no declaration of war against those nations?
         Does China have the right to do the same thing to us? Does Russia? Does Mexico?

This raid was conducted under the authority of a man who avoided military service in the mid-1960s by claiming he had a bone spur in his foot and when asked in 2015 which foot, he stammered and then said “It’s in the records. You’ll look it up in the records.” I still vividly recall breaking my left hand playing football when I was 15, but Trump can’t remember which foot had such a painful bone spur that he was able to use it as a reason to stay out of the military? He is also on record as claiming those who are captured in wartime are not heroes. He likes "people who weren’t captured, okay", that his Military School background gave him better military training than men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan,  that “no one is better at the military” than he is, and – a slap in the face to all veterans - on the Howard Stern show in 1997, compared his sexual escapades of the 1980s to a war experience and made him “.feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

What if Owens had been captured instead of killed? What would have been Trump's response? 
         This is what happens when you don't read intelligence briefings.
         Remember him; Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens. He is just the first to die due to Trump’s bumbling, amateurish and dangerous mishandling of our military.

Like it or not, Syria is NOT our problem

What is it with the American government, its covert services, and military? Have we done such an admirable and praiseworthy job in Afghanistan, and left a stable, peaceful, and democratic situation behind in Iraq, that we now want to put that same expertise to work in Syria? And drag other unwilling nations into the quagmire with us? Has the summer heat finally gotten to our politicians and military leaders? I’m asking a lot of questions in this post because our politicians and military haven’t.

Why do we need to stop Assad? We don’t do jack about Kim Jong Un in North Korea. We don’t do diddley about the daily killings in Somalia, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Look how Ahmadinejad is no longer considered a big threat. He’s still making the same noise as before, but we now just consider him a loon, even though his regime has killed hundreds of Iranians. But let Assad gas his own people, (like Saddam did to the Kurds in 1988 while we stood around with our thumbs jammed up our sphincter…Hell, we even helped him.) and suddenly, Obama grows a pair and threatens to take our military into another mess.

Haven’t U.S. politicians learned anything? Do they understand what George Santayana meant when he said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”? This is the information age, and we’re swamped with information technology, so It’s not like the facts and statistics from past U.S. misadventures isn’t available, in an easy-to-read second grade level format (which is the right level for our Congress and administration), So how are they missing the warning signs to stay clear of Syria? Does the president think he has a great relationship with Vladimir Putin and can talk the Russians into staying on the sidelines? Didn’t John Kerry learn anything about the misapplication of the U.S. military when he served in Vietnam? Are Syria’s friends in the Middle East (and there are several) just going to lets us walk in and beat up Assad? Does our military think that we’ll only lose a few thousand of our men and women in uniform when we go up against a well-armed military with state-of-the-art Russian hardware, unlike those backwoods tribal yahoos armed with second-rate black market weapons in Afghanistan that have cost us a couple thousand casualties? Those Afghani bumpkins have been easy to subdue in the past ten years; so no doubt, the Syrians will be a pushover.

Oops, wrong target!

We’ll play it safe and initiate combat by using our Predators and other drones to selectively take out the people who are deemed the biggest threats…which has worked so well in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan with no collateral damage to come back and haunt us. And when that doesn’t resolve anything, we’re going to put U.S. troops on Syrian soil…to do what? How will we tell friend from foe? And getting involved in Syria’s civil war will benefit us how? How many American lives is this effort worth? When were we given the badge, and the task, to be the world’s policemen? Team America: World Police was meant to be a crude, funny movie, not the way the U.S. really operates. And naturally, with our superpower status and vibrant economy, we’ve got plenty of money to pour down the Syrian rat hole.

Those who think we as a country need to ‘man up’ and get involved in the Syrian mess should be in the first invasion wave and put their money (and their lives) where their mouth is. Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida), if you REALLY believe we need to go into Syria to stop Assad from killing his own people, I want to see YOU in uniform, leading the troops in the front line with your bayoneted rifle poised to kill the first Syrian who challenges you. And take John Kerry and Obama with you!