We were just really lucky here on the coast - it was 85 degrees outside with a mild and refreshing breeze continuously off the ocean, so both Paris and I survived. Tomorrow may be another story.
It seems to me that John McCain did some organizing with Saint Peter and the scores of U.S. Marines up there in Heaven, and Trump is finally getting his comeuppance.
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| Marines at the Battle of Belleau Woods: ' And when he gets to Heaven to St. Peter he shall tell: One more soldier reporting Sir, I have served my time in Hell.' | |
A History lesson for y'all - BTW, I just found out Juan Cole is battling cancer...light a little candle for him if you can:
~ From Informed Comment - 09/03/20 With video go to the link, original & full Atlantic Report
contained within:
By, Juan Cole
"Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic reported yesterday on what he was told by four members of Trump’s entourage about the president’s 2018 visit to France. He had been scheduled to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, but it was raining and he made excuses.
Goldberg’s sources told him that Trump asked of World War I, “Who were the good guys in this war?”
He added that Trump said of the cemetery visit, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
He later called the more than 1,800 marines killed at Belleau Wood “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.
Social media is aflame with Marines and relatives and friends of Marines reacting angrily to the revelations. Belleau Woods or in French Bois Belleau is a storied battle in the history of the Marine Corps.
Being a historian, I thought I would underline its importance with a couple of accounts. One is from interviews with a veteran who had fought there. The second is by a war correspondent who saw the first day of the campaign with his own eyes.
Col. Michael C. Howard of the US Marine Corps wrote,
- “On 27 May 1918, German Gen. Erich F. W. Ludendorff, bolstered by the massive flux of troops from the Eastern Front where Russia had been knocked out of the war by revolution, launched a devastating offensive.”
He explained that the Germans reached the outskirts of Paris in only four days.
Gen. John Pershing had been pressed to just put the US Marines under French command, but insisted on them retaining their independence. The US Marines stopped the German advance and then went on the offensive against them on June 6, 1918.
Howard explains,
- “More Marines were killed in action and wounded this first day (1,087) than in all previous Marine Corps engagements combined.”
That June, the Germans deployed mustard gas against the Marines, with devastating health effects for those who survived. Howard briefly tells the story of Cecil Key, who was blinded and suffered burns from mustard gas, but eventually recovered his sight and lived into the 1990s.
In the article, “MARINES CONTINUE DRIVING ENEMY BACK,” The Associated Press reported on June 7 about the Marines’ offensive on the previous day, the costliest for the Corps up until that point in history.
- “The one point where the objective was not reached was on the right of the attack in the Belleau Wood. The fiercest fighting was continuing there . . .”
“The marines in their forward sweep took strong ground on either side of Belleau Wood and cleared out the ravine south of Torcy, which linked up the line with Hill 142, which was taken yesterday morning. This gave them a strong and dominating position for a continuation of their attack. Their total advance was approximately two miles on a three-mile front.”
The captured German soldiers displayed poor morale, saying they were glad to be out of the fighting. But they had nevertheless fought determinedly, AP reported:
- “the marines dashed into them yelling like Indians and plying bayonet and rifle. One marine who was taking back a prisoner ran into two German officers and 10 men. He tackled them single-handed with his rifle and bayonet, killed both the officers and wounded seven of the men . . .”
“The marines advancing in the Belleau Wood region went forward in four waves in open formation. The men in the first wave were for the most part armed with rifles and bombs, while the rear waves were equipped with automatic rifles. With them came squads of machine gunners lugging their collapsible guns. They crossed the open space and toiled up the slope bent over like gnomes. The trenches the marines passed over were clearly visible from below but they hardly deserved the name, for they were simply lines of little holes, big enough to hold a man, while barbed wire was lacking. There was some, however, interlaced among the trees of Belleau Wood but the marines pushed their way through it . . .”
“On all sides the guns were flashing, some of them stationed right in the field, while others were hidden in the woods. Looking down into the valley only a mile away, the village of Busseires could be seen on fire. As the correspondent watched the scene the clouds of white shrapnel smoke over the village of Torcy also became brownish and flames appeared in that town.
The artillery fire that preceded the attack lasted an hour and was of especial intensity for five minutes preceding the time when the marines went over the top . . .
It appears that the marines in going in forestalled an attack the Germans had planned . . .”
This was only the beginning. As with most battles in that horrible war, the campaign ground on for months. It wasn’t until October 29 that American newspapers proclaimed that the Marines had all of Belleau Woods (“for the sixth time”). The New York Times headline on Nov. 2 was, “TIME BOMBS LEFT TO KILL AMERICANS: Infernal Machines Ingenious, Some Exploding Long After Germans Have Gone.” The improvised explosive devices or IEDs in Iraq were not exactly a new technology.
Goldberg quotes a general close to former chief of staff John Kelly, who said that Kelly became convinced that Trump could not understand actions that were not transactional. People who lose their lives fighting for others are in his lexicon “losers.” Non-losers are out for themselves and get rich, apparently.
The White House is denying Goldberg’s story. But Goldberg was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and a defender of far-right Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, so he isn’t exactly a bleeding heart liberal. If even he is pursuing leads on a story that reflects so badly on Trump, it is because the story is true.
Long-time readers know that my father served for two decades in US army, mostly in the Signal Corps, and I grew up on military bases. GIs were my friends and mentors. They were in a potentially dangerous occupation, and their eyes were open. They were successors of Cecil Key at Belleau Woods, who suffered mustard gas burns there for his country. The only one short-changed is Trump, who cannot imagine self-sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself. It is a stain on the escutcheon of the presidency that Trump occupies that position."
Note: Trump is such a coward, he would never say it to their faces.
~~~~~
Oddly, we were just talking about this this morning:
Trump popularity with Military was already Cratering before Belleau-gate
By, Juan Cole
"Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Even before some whistleblowers among the generals went to the Atlantic magazine with their complaints that Trump disrespected US war dead, the president was in trouble with the military.
I suspect that yesterday’s news will have caused Trump’s standing with the military to plummet further.
A new opinion poll from the Military Times earlier this week reported that Trump’s favorability rating among US military personnel had fallen to only 38 percent. It had been 42 percent last year this time, and stood at 46 when he was first inaugurated. I made a little chart (read right to left) to show the shrinking blue approval and the ever heightening orange disapproval.
I don’t show it here, but the new poll actually found that 42 percent strongly disapprove of Trump, so the fifty percent disapproval is mostly hard disapproval.
Biden wins the military vote 41 to 37 if the election were held today, according to the projections in this poll.
Trump won the military vote 2 to 1 against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The bias of the military toward Republicans is not an eternal fact of life. I wrote way back in 2004,
- “let us take the officers in our military services, who have grown increasingly rightwing in the past thirty years. Polling data show that in 1976 only one third of military officers said they were Republicans. By 1996 two-thirds of officers identified with the GOP, and only ten percent were Democrats. This development is truly worrisome. Would President Bush have been so successful in pushing his joint chiefs of staff to put away their objections to an Iraq campaign last summer if he knew two thirds of his officers had voted against him? Did not the open contempt many in the armed services expressed for Bill Clinton weaken our democracy?”
Back in 1994, the execrable Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina warned President Bill Clinton that he “better watch out” for his safety if he were to visit one of the then six military bases in that state.
It is kind of cute that many Republicans a quarter a century ago were embarrassed by Helms’ outburst and were afraid this sort of talk would make them look like extremists. That was before the GOP became the bastard child of Frankenstein’s monster and Medusa.
I call Helms execrable for many reasons. One is that Camel brand cigarettes put advertisements at the back of Thai school notebooks, trying to hook K-12 students on cancer-causing tobacco. When the Thai government intervened to stop the ads, Helms threatened Bangkok with US sanctions.
But I digress.
That Trump may be reversing the long-term trend toward a Republican military is heartening, and the revulsion in the officer corps is even greater than among enlisted men.
Some 59 percent of officers have a poor opinion of Trump, and 50 percent have a very, very, very poor opinion of him. That statistic tracks with his unfavorability rating among the general public.
Why the military dislikes Trump so much is not hard to guess. Many in the military really hated his decision in October of last year to pull US troops from the Kurdish regions of Syria and then to feed to Turkey’s megalomaniacal Tayyip Erdogan the Syrian Kurds that had been US allies against ISIL and fought side by side with US special forces to Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan.
Likewise, when Trump erratically just blew away the Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport on Jan. 3, the Iranians struck back at Iraqi bases hosting US troops with missiles, something CIA director Gina Haspel had predicted to Trump.
The missile strikes caused concussions for about 100 US service personnel. Concussions can be severe and can have severe health consequences. Trump dismissed this injuries as “light,” clearly because he was afraid people would blame him for provoking the Iranian strikes.
The US military is well trained in geopolitics, strategy and logistics, and considers China and Russia much, much greater challenges than they do dinky Iran. Trump does not share their priorities.
As for his increases in the military budget, that is mostly corporate welfare for the arms firms. US military personnel are still poorly paid under Trump, just as they have been all along. But, as Trump obviously does not understand, a lot of people in the military aren’t all about money."
~~~~~
Bravo Juan Cole.
Update/edit 09/06/20:
Let's see if I can do this because it is 97 degrees here, we're dealing with ancient electric lines, have had one black out and the computer is sketchy - it went down for hours and hours. However Governor Bonilla has some very good news regarding solar power, I'll be back with that. One battle at a time.
First off, here is where the famous saying "Retreat Hell! We just got here!" comes from:
"Retreat, Hell ! We just got here"
Next, looks like that is exactly what Goldberg is saying and doing as he flips off fatass Trump:
The Atlantic's Editor-In-Chief Says Calling Vets 'Losers' Is Just the Beginning - with video
Updated 3:49 PM ET, Sun September 6, 2020
* Way to go Goldberg, kick his ass.
end edit.
~~~~~
UPDATE/edit : 06/09 :
1. I read this morning that the White House is attempting to walk back Trump's Monday attack on the Pentagon.
Walk back my ass, it is a mad scramble in the White House as Trump melts down, determined to hold on to power at any cost:
~ From Democracy Now !:
Trump Lashes Out at Pentagon Following Report He Called U.S. Soldiers “Losers” and “Suckers”
"In the U.S., fallout continued over reports last week that Trump referred to U.S. soldiers who died in war as “losers” and “suckers.” On Monday, Trump told reporters top Pentagon officials don’t like him because he wants to get the U.S. out of “endless wars” that benefit weapons manufacturers. Last year, Trump bypassed Congress so he could sell $8 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Recently the U.S. said it could start selling F-35 jets to the UAE following the normalization agreement it reached with Israel. According to a former DHS official, Trump berated a marine general in the Oval Office, demanding he award a contract to a particular company building the wall on the southern border."
2. And, already people are following Trump's advise to break the law and vote twice:
~ From the New York Times via MSN:
In Georgia, Officials Are Investigating Hundreds of Cases Of Double Voting
By, Stephie Saul
- Note: This is very scary, and maybe we need to start asking ourselves what exactly are we going to do should Trump secure the election by urging people to vote twice? Him being a gangster we shouldn't be surprised...remember how the Mob would buy Judges and use the names of dead people to vote to insure their candidate would win? Same thing, same method.
"A week after President Trump suggested that voters in North Carolina should cast two ballots — one by mail and another at the polls — the authorities in Georgia are threatening criminal action against 1,000 Georgia voters who did just that.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, announced at a news conference on Tuesday that investigations were underway in 100 of the state’s 159 counties after the discovery of 1,000 instances of double voting in the state’s June primary and August runoff elections.
“We will prosecute,” said Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, noting that double voting in Georgia, considered a serious felony, carries a penalty of one to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. While calling attention to the double votes could add fuel to Mr. Trump’s unfounded claim that mail voting opens the door to fraud, Mr. Raffensperger noted that double voting hadn’t changed the outcome of any races.
The scenario Mr. Raffensperger described appeared to be identical to the one suggested by Mr. Trump last Wednesday, when he told reporters in Wilmington, N.C., that voters should test the integrity of the state’s election system by voting by mail and then subsequently appearing at the polls in person.
Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the nation’s voting system by suggesting it is insecure and riddled with fraud — contentions that experts reject — endorsed Mr. Raffensperger in the 2018 election for Georgia secretary of state.
There is little evidence supporting the president’s contention that mail-in voting is prone to voter fraud — in fact, a number of studies have concluded that in the United States, all types of voter fraud are rare.
Elections officials nationwide have said that Mr. Trump’s suggestion to check the integrity of the system by voting twice created confusion among voters in an already stressful election year. It was the most recent of many statements he has made suggesting that the integrity of the country’s elections is threatened by voter fraud, accelerated by mail voting during the pandemic.
It was not clear how many of the 1,000 instances of double voting under investigation in Georgia involved intentional efforts to vote twice, or whether those cases involved people who, unsure of whether their absentee ballot had been counted, voted again.
Mr. Raffensperger said that was part of the ongoing investigation, but added that proving “intentionality” is not required under the state law.
“At the end of the day, the voter was responsible and the voters know what they were doing,” Mr. Raffensperger said. “A double voter knows exactly what they were doing, diluting the votes of each and every voter that follows the law.”
Mr. Raffensperger said he knew of one voter, in rural Long County, Ga., who had been “bragging” about having voted twice. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had reported multiple irregularities there.
Elections officials in Georgia and elsewhere say there are systems in place to prevent a second vote, with votes immediately recorded in poll books and voters flagged if they have already cast a ballot.
Mr. Raffensperger said that, despite safeguards, 1,000 voters slipped through the cracks in an election that was plagued by a shortage of poll workers, long lines and problems with adjusting to new machines.
Mr. Raffensperger insisted Tuesday that the “system worked.” He did not explain exactly how the double voters managed to slip through but blamed “the human element” and said he would work to improve training of poll workers.
Mr. Raffensperger is also fighting efforts by public interest organizations to extend the deadline for delivery of mail ballots to county elections officials, saying an extension would make it impossible to certify the election by the Nov. 20 deadline."
~ Note:Christ, send in the Marines.
Another black out yesterday for hours which made Paris sick, she didn't have her fans or A/C. We're supposed to be getting high Santa Ana winds today, but at around 3:00pm, nada. So if we get them, it means more black outs.
stay safe guys !
end edit.
~~~~~
" If the Army and the Navy
ever looked on Heaven's seams,
They would find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines."
Semper Fi Dudes
- ~~~~~
~~~~~