But you already knew that.
Here’s where it matters.
From one bullshit statement to the next out of his mouth last night, he showed that he does not understand, and doesn’t really care to understand how the world works, how the military works, or how intelligence works.
He lies with a facility that is breathtaking, but as Fareed Zakaria pointed out, Trump is a bullshit artist, and the truth isn’t particularly important to him one way or the other.
He reminds me of that troop who somehow always talks the biggest shit, but is never around for the work details that make up most of a Soldier’s day, or keeps coming up on sick call at SP time. I wouldn’t trust him on shit-burning detail. He’d steal the JP-8 and the TP. He’s the guy who never does anything productive, whose gear is parade field clean, but lobbies for a combat award when an RPG hits the perimeter wall 600 meters away from him while he was in the line at Burger King. And you just know he’ll be telling stories about how terrible it was “in the shit” to the newbies. And he’ll strut around the mall on leave wearing those stupid T-shirts with skulls and M-4s and “MESS WITH THE BEST, DIE LIKE THE REST” on them.
Every Vet reading this knows the guy, or guys I’m talking about, and every Vet who watched that last night saw the same thing I did. I don’t know how much, if any, it changed anything, but if it did, it didn’t go Trump’s way. Another thing that I know struck people the wrong way was his sticky man-crush on Vladimir Putin.
Other than those observations, and the observation that Matt Lauer is as useless as tits on a boar hog, the Commander in Chief’s forum was an hour of my life that I’ll never get back. Of all the things we could have learned, like what do the candidates think about the new nuclear weapons program, what they want to do about the floundering F-35 program, how they’re going to pay for the VA’s burgeoning expenses over the next several decades, or the Army’s program to recapitalize the ground vehicle fleet, or how we’re going to deal with friends and allies in the early years of the 21st century. Instead we got that crap.
Villago Delenda Est
Preach it, good Sarge. Preach it.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Preach.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Damn. I was a minute too late.
dr. bloor
The whole concept of “honor” occupies a universe with which the likes of Trump are entirely unfamiliar. He’d embarrass a fucking Ferenghi.
Trump is a Godammned moron, but you sir, are a Righteous Boss. Preach it.
Pogonip
I didn’t like it either.
hovercraft
Excellent analysis Sooner.
lamh36
@thedailybeast
Donald Trump gives exclusive interview to Kremlin-owned network Russia Today:
Sooner, I have a coworker, an older white gentleman who’s a veteran. He’s a conservative guy and so I don’t spend much time talking to him about politics. I completely avoid it when talking to him. So somehow or another he ended up bringing up Putin when the conversation somehow got on folks who strong willed.
He mentioned Putin and seemingly with respect “man…that Putin don’t take nothing from no one”… I wanted to say something so bad, but in the effort to more carefully chose my battles, I just ended conversation and left the room.
Omnes Omnibus
Carry on, Sergeant. Carry on.
I had a Brigade commander who, during a staff call, once described something as being “as messed up as three dogs fucking in a watermelon patch at midnight.” I think that describes the Trump campaign pretty well.
JMG
@lamh36: For “conservative” substitute “un-American.” The most salient part of Trump’s campaign is how we see how many of our fellow citizens hate democracy, and want a system where they get to push other people around because they themselves are entitled to it. If he’s elected, there will be both foreign and civil wars before the midterms.
MazeDancer
Thank you for bringing the truth so clearly and well. Several of the vets who were in the audience last night have been interviewed throughout the day on MSNBC. Very impressive group. So unlike idiot Donald.
The GOP going pro Putin is scary at levels almost beyond measure.
Iowa Old Lady
I posted this below too, but it seems vaguely related to honorable behavior to me. David Fahrenthold, the reporter whose been working on the Trump Foundation, tweeted that he’s found 5 charities so far that say they didn’t get the donation the Trump Foundation told the IRS they’d given them.
I admit I don’t know how to make sense of that. What’s likely happening there? Five is too many for it to be clerical error. Is the money going elsewhere?
dmsilev
@lamh36:
Neither did Kim Jong-Il or Josep Stalin.
Mnemosyne
So you’re basically saying that Trump would be a goldbricker?
(Apologies in advance for the offensive Japanese stereotype at the end.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Iowa Old Lady: Probably directly into Drumpf’s pocket. Or being used to pay off the likes of Abbot and Bondi.
Peale
I wonder. How long before he makes congress repeal the law that prevents the living from appearing on postage stamps and coinage. They will be beautiful stamps, I’m sure.
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev: Prezactly. One of the people who Stalin didn’t put up with was Fred Koch, who did business with Stalin in the 30’s. Fred thought he could get Stalin to agree to paying Koch indefinitely for some revolutionary new refining tech that Fred invented; Stalin gave him the heave ho and kept the tech.
Peale
So I assume that the vets who sign on to Trump just assume that the private VA will be wonderful because trump will build them beautiful hospitals.
Pogonip
@lamh36: Vladimir just decided he wasn’t Putin up with any more bullshit!
BGinCHI
Gingrich is a stupid man’s idea of what a smart man sounds like.
Trump is a weak man’s idea of what a strong man sounds like.
ThresherK
Amazing stuff. Well done, SG.
The Dangerman
What gets me, if anyone should be hitting the floor at or near the magical 27% number, it’s Trump. He’s clearly not up to the job – I mean, who’d hire that shit to mop the floors at night…
…yet that asshole’s floor is in the low 40’s. Unbelievable, really.
Iowa Old Lady
@Villago Delenda Est: Like the charity in Kansas or wherever it was that they claimed they “accidentally” confused with Bondi? That makes sense. Given that Trump relies on projection, and calls the Clinton Foundation a slush fund, that’s probably how he’s using the Trump Foundation. Lock him up!
Gravenstone
@Iowa Old Lady:
Trump’s pocket wouldn’t be too much of a stretch as an explanation. Big talk, little to no action from the third rate con man.
RSA
Some of the characters Bill Mauldin described in his accounts of WWII were like this: “rear-echelon bastards” or “goldbricks”. Or Paul Fussell, describing soldiers attached to chickenshit: “behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.”
redshirt
’nuff said!
– Stan Lee
SiubhanDuinne
@Iowa Old Lady:
I haven’t followed the story closely, but the amounts in question strike me as being pretty insignificant (by Trumpian standards) — in the $5,000 range as far as I can tell. If there are five such “discrepancies,” that only adds up to what he gave Pam Bondi, right? I’m not putting this very well, because I really don’t understand it without more connecting of the dots, but it seems like penny-ante stuff to go to the trouble of claiming fraudulently. And yet, as you point out, five is too many for a simple clerical error.
David Fahrenthold is a good reporter, and I think this kind of thing is catnip to a good investigative reporter. As Woodward and Bernstein were advised 40-some years ago, “Follow the money.”
raven
@RSA: Lifer mothefuckers
Anne Laurie
@Iowa Old Lady:
Occam’s razor: The money for which Trump claimed charitable deductions was never actually sent. He’s a tax cheat.
(Yes, I am working on a post. Too many topics, too much new material!)
hovercraft
@Peale:
The most beautiful, classiest stamps evah !!
Feathers
Is this also known as a REFM? AKA Rear Echelon Muther Fucker? I knew a guy who threw that term around a lot.
Anne Laurie
On topic: Thank you for the righteous rant, Soonergrunt, sir!
Mary G
@Iowa Old Lady: I wonder if this is the reason he gets audited every year, and what happens. Yet another reason why not releasing his taxes should completely disqualify him as a candidate.
Thanks, Sooner.
raven
@Feathers: 80% of the people in the goddamn military are in “the rear”. They bitch and moan about Fobbits and Remfs until they need resupply or commo, then it’s all ok. Shoot Move and Communicate.
SiubhanDuinne
This is just a wild guess, of course, but I’m pretty sure I know which of the two candidates would have been able to give reasonable, coherent answers to any of these questions and which would flounder and sputter a squidcloud of word salad.
But it will remain a wild guess, because we’ll never hear any of our fine Fourth Estate asking the questions in the first place.
Excellent post, Sooner.
The Ancient Randonneur
@Feathers: Yep, REMF was pretty common usage during my Asian Vacation.
BruceFromOhio
This, all the fucking way. Thank you, SG.
… damned fine to hear from you, I trust you are well.
geg6
Tell it. Good to see you and being righteous as always.
raven
EB Sledge in “With the Old Breed” will tell you that guys 100 yards behind them had no idea what it was like. “The shit” is pretty fucking small.
Omnes Omnibus
@Feathers: No. REMFs are a general catergory based on job type a location of their posting. As raven noted most military jobs fit that definition. SG is talking about a particular type of soldier that appears everywhere.
sigaba
@lamh36:
Remember that scene from Cabaret when Liza and
David HemmingsMichael York are passing through the living room of her boarding house and the old couple who own the place are listening to the radio about some street gang fight the night before. The old woman mutters, “I wish the Kaiser would return…”Lorinda Pike
Thank you, Sooner. If the Rancid Shitgibbon had even been in the military in a certain era, and out in the boonies, he’d have probably ended up as the asshole second looey who got a frag rolled into his hooch one night. (Yeah, I know it;s wrong, but I know it happened.)
But no one would know his name now, and he wouldn’t be trying to drive us off a cliff as a species for his own self-aggrandizement.
Villago Delenda Est
@Feathers: REMF. I was one fer sure in Korea (I was in a fixed-station Signal battalion, headquartered in Seoul) and depending on precisely how you define “Rear Area” I spent a lot of time at Brigade and Division Headquarters, as a staff officer. But I also was the Signal officer of a Mech Infantry Battalion, and a Signal platoon leader in support of a Brigade headquarters. So I have experience very close to the trenches, and hobnobbed with officers who would be in the front lines.
HinTN
It’s all been said in twenty before me but thank you for the things you said and the way you said them. Hang tough, Sooner.
hovercraft
@The Dangerman:
I think it’s because the right has spent 25 years vilifying Hillary Clinton. There have been two main tropes in the GOP over the last 30 years, Ronald Maximus Reagan was a saint who walked on water, he singlehandedly won the cold war, and Hillary Clinton is the physical manifestation of satan on earth. From the very beginning she was Lady Macbeth, Eve, and Medusa rolled into one. Bill was a horn dog and a draft dodger, but the person who was truly vilified was Hillary. They always saw her as a threat from the day Bill became a national figure, she was smart, liberal, independent, and the embodiment of feminism, the kind of woman who could run for president and be a serious threat. The two for one statement was proof that she had the ambition to run. Just like the honest and trustworthy numbers are baked in from years of repetition have instilled an aversion to Hillary that is almost visceral. The fact that she is getting as many republicans as she is, is what’s astounding, this is the woman they’ve hated for 25 years, and yet Trump is so terrible, that many of them are willing to actually vote for her in order to stop him.
Brachiator
Soonergrunt, I can’t add anything to your excellent observations. I hope you are right when you say that veterans see through Trump.
In a Rachel Maddow hosted after show, some vets interviewed seemed unhappy in different ways with both candidates, but it did not seem that many minds were changed.
One understandable, but sad note was a person who wondered why we would spend any money on immigrants or refugees since there were so many homeless vets.
Schlemazel
@RSA:
In Mauldin’s book he says the worst beating he ever saw a guy get was a rear echelon guy who had brand new jump boots on when he ran into s group of paratroopers who didn’t have jump boots because there were none available.
I wonder how they would have handled Trump with his purple heart
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Iowa Old Lady: The only thing that has surprised me about the Trump/Bondi story is how motherfucking cheap it is to buy a politician. $25,000? In a truly dire situation, I could probably come up with that. Pam Bondi has no clue how much her effort (or lack thereof) is worth, if she’s only charging $25,000 to deep six an investigation that could cost Trump millions.
lollipopguild
Trump does not respect anything or anyone. He will pay Lip Service to certain people-vets- but he is incapable of actually showing Real respect to anything/anyone. Preznut Trump will destroy this country, all that matters is that everyone kisses his ass.
SgrAstar
Sooner, terrific! Thank you.
Mike J
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
That’s way, way, way less than hiring a lawyer to defend you even if you were actually innocent.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Schlemazel: Which is funny, because one of the reasons we won WWII is because we had the best REMFs in the world.
Suzanne
Truth, Sooner. TRUTH.
The terrifying coda to your description of that type of soldier is that it seems like those guys become cops after they get out. I have no data on that, but it feels truthy.
Peale
@Mike J: well, he also donated his resort for a fundraiser. So in his mind, she probably still owes him.
Anne Laurie
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
:Like any good GOP apparatnik, she’d have done the dirty work for free. The $25,000 was just a tip, in appreciation of her services!
Peale
@Brachiator: oh, I don’t really fall for the homeless vet spiel. It’s like we can’t raise the minimum wage because soldiers get paid too little. And can’t have disabled people on food stamps because they just have civilian diseases. I
Ruckus
@raven:
Good buddy was in the Marines, stationed at Da Nang air base 67-68, carried an M16 everywhere with him, never had occasion to fire it.
Sooner, good thread, as always. Glad to see you back.
I’m at the VA every day, at a major facility and I don’t hear anyone talking about Turmp in any positive way, if they talk about him at all.
joel hanes
Even soldiers who lack honor can do their duty.
Duty is a concept beyond Trump’s ken.
Uncle Cosmo
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Wouldn’t surprise you if you’d lived in MD between 1966 & 1973. The ca$h in the “white envelopes” that Lester Matz delivered to Governor & later Vice-President Spiro Agnew, disclosure of which induced the latter to resign the Vice-Presidency in order to escape prosecution, was typically in the low thousands. Some clowns are just cheap whores.
Robin Gittelman
Don’t be shy Sooner. Tell us what you really think. Righteous rant!
Villago Delenda Est
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: As I mentioned in a previous thread, the aphorism is that amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
Logistics is the purview of REMFs. And by jingo, we do have the best in the world. Beans and bullets for the front line soldiers, so they can do their jobs.
Soonergrunt
@Feathers: Worse than a REMF. A Buddy Fucker.
I’ve been a REMF. The troops doing support missions, and staffing offices do necessary work. Most of them are very conscientious and hard working. I couldn’t have survived, let alone taken the fight to the enemy without them.
I’m talking about a kind of guy in every single unit type in the Army, including the support arms. He fucks everybody, shirks his responsibilities, and does everything he can to make himself appear to be a superstar. Very few commissioned officers are like this because they have so many things to do. You see them much more in the enlisted ranks. Most don’t become NCOs, but those that do can seriously weaken the platoon or section to which they are assigned. Most do their 3 or 4 and out, and in peacetime are more of an irritation than anything else, but in wartime they are tremendously bad for morale and readiness.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: How is your post-op recovery coming along?
Chris
I don’t disagree one bit, but I’d just like to add that this seems to capture what the conservative ethos has been at least since 1980, when we channel-surfed past two candidates who’d served in the actual military, one of them at war (George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter) in favor of the amiable dunce whose war service had been limited to making propaganda films, but had convinced himself that he’d been there at the liberation of the concentration camps, played soldier by starting the tradition of the president saluting back, and generally loved to talk tough while doing jack.
Bush the Lesser was that, on steroids. Donny is taking a well-trodden path here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: That is true, but one shouldn’t wear jump boots if one doesn’t have wings and one shouldn’t ranger-roll one’s cap unless one is tabbed.
schrodinger's cat
@Soonergrunt: Long time no see. How have you been?
John Weiss
@Mnemosyne: Well put.
Mike in NC
The past few years have seen an epidemic of police shooting, and often killing, unarmed American citizens. Yet an amazing number of people in this country aren’t concerned. “Hey, they must have had it coming.” These are people that would welcome living in a police state like North Korea. They’re authoritarians. Republicans. Trump supporters.
Mart
Glad to see you posting Mr. S. Grunt; always enjoyed your prose. None finer than this evening.
Jeffro
Great rant! Couldn’t agree more, and have been saying for over a year, that Trump’s biggest, most obvious flaw is that he’s a moron. The narcissism just covers it up.
All the finest minds on the “deep bench” couldn’t figure this out – glad to see that the Secretary and the rest of the Democratic Justice League have got him pegged on all counts!!
Chris
@dmsilev:
This has been making the rounds on Facebook, in the form of a meme that has pictures side-by-side of Vlad the Impaler and Barack Obama at the same age, Vlad in the KGB uniform and Obama as a student smoking (I presume) pot. With some snarky comment about how much more manly the former is.
Because nothing says “manly” like having been an enforcer in the next-worst-thing to the Gestapo, and that’s totally what we should be looking for in a leader.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
And the Kochs reacted by pouring all their resources into a scorched-earth campaign against all things left-wing that’s still ongoing to this day and has been one of the biggest resources for the right wing.
There’s something surreally supervillainesque about it: they’re two of the most influential people in our political system, and what’s guiding them is that they’re still sore about the fact that Joe Stalin wouldn’t extend their daddy’s oil contracts.
Emma
Welcome back Sooner. You, sir, are a strong man’s idea of what a strong man is.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Vlad the Impaler? Țepeș or Putin? Honestly, associating Putin with the historical Dracula is an insult to the long dead guy.
Feebog
Trump is almost exactly a year younger than I am. Spent two years with the Army Corps of Engineers in 66 and 67. No reason Trump could not have served, but chose not to. His choice, but fuck him and any criticism of the military. He hasn’t earned the right to criticize.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: Someone asked me why I, as an officer, didn’t wear jump boots: I pointed at my chest and said “do you see my Airborne insignia? No? None there? That’s why I don’t wear jump boots.”
PhoenixRising
@Soonergrunt:
Indeed. I’m grateful that Trump had the wealth and privilege to get 5 deferments for heel spurs in whichever foot he was limping on those days in 1966 etc. Because in my dad’s unit in the actual factual, he’d have been a danger to the health and welfare of others and I might not be here to insult him.
Villago Delenda Est
@Lorinda Pike: Fragging isn’t just for officers…Buddy Fuckers can find themselves in a world of hurt if they manage to antagonize the soldiers around them enough.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: I avoided them because they were a bitch to polish. Jungles rule.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus: One of my NCOs taught me how to spit shine properly, and yes, it’s a bitch to bring up that mirror shine, but oh so satisfying to march in a change of command ceremony in them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Yeah. Once you got the Corcorans looking right, you don’t bring them out often. Jungles shined up really nice. Today, they don’t deal with that. Our convo is like our old timers talking about the Brown Shoe Army.
sukabi
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: pretty sure the $25K was a down payment, he has also hosted at least one fund raiser for her, the cost charged for her campaign was less than $6K….Don’t know how much was raised, but that would be a great way of hiding a larger payoff.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Well done, Sooner. Good to see you around these parts again.
It’s amazing that the GOP has reduced themselves to slurping the fucking Ruskies. I’d never have thought I’d live long enough to see THAT.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Eh. I’m not that concerned about offending Dracula. More of a werewolf than a vampire supporter, myself.
While we’re on the topic of people who share a name with Vladimir Putin; one of the things about “The Hunt For Red October” that’s gotten better with age is that it opens with the cold-blooded murder of a KGB officer named “Putin.” What a pity it’s fiction.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: My point was that there was an historical Vlad Țepeș. A harsh but fair ruler who is considered a national hero in Romania.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Duly noted. I knew that the character was very vaguely based on a real ruler, and assumed that there had been considerable character assassination, but didn’t know too much beyond that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: By War of the Roses/ Borgia pope terms, he was normal.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s got to be one of the most beautifully strained metaphors I’ve ever experienced. I may have to go lie down now.
frosty
Mauldin had a great cartoon for your troop. In WWII he called them garrittroopers.
The modern term would be “fobbits”.
frosty
@raven:
This was one part of his book that really stuck with me. 100 yards is in the rear? I had no idea.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@BGinCHI:
I am so stealing this for my FB posts.
Would you like to be credited with it?
David Stearns
@Suzanne: Suzanne, good point about becoming cops. Years ago in San Diego, driving a cab, I got to be semi-friends with a SDPD sargeant. I asked him one night why so many street cops reacted like assholes. “We wonder the same”. Look, we put everybody through sensitivity sessions, psych evaluations, etc. In SoCal, you have a lot of ex-service people, and many are ex MP’s or Shore Patrol. They apply to law enforcement, check the box that indicates previous experience, and go to the head of the class. No citizen’s review committe’s or outside agencies overseeing discipline as per civilian LEO. And habits die hard. So you end up with hard-asses on the street.” Pretty cogent response from the sargeant.
PIGL
@Emma: Some honourable members: Here, here!
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@frosty:
When your operational depth is measured in inches, yeah. Amphibious assaults are not like other tactical problems.
On Okinawa, a lot of U.S. Army officers were extremely critical of their Marine counterparts, and thought that they were dull, unimaginative, and poorly trained for the job. They didn’t understand that it was a completely different mindset, not unimaginative, but trained for fighting in which there is no room to maneuver, and a straightforward assault was the only option. They didn’t have to learn how to conduct probing attacks and flow troops to the weak spots; they had to learn how to train men to keep going when a third of their buddies died in the first ten minutes of the battle.
The formative experience for the Army in WWII was Kasserine; for the Marines, it was Tarawa.
Groucho48
@Anne Laurie:
Someone in another thread claimed that this wasn’t the kind of case an A-G pursues anyway. So, perhaps Bondi, who wasn’t going to take it on, figured she might see if she could shake some loose change out of Trump. One grifter grifting another. I’d like to think that’s what happened.
TriassicSands
In the military, Trump would be Milo Minderbinder (from Catch 22). He’d steal the parachutes out of bombers and leave behind a smiley face note informing you that what is good for D&T Enterprises is good for you (and by extension America), when, in fact, only D&T (i.e., Donald Trump) will benefit.
opiejeanne
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Someone checked and she got about $.71 for every dollar that Abbot in Texas got.
Leto
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m a bit late to this, but just wanted to echo: Fucking. Preach.
@Peale: It’s always a binary option with them. We have the ability to do all these things and more. There’s no reason we can’t help the homeless, veterans, people in poverty, those lacking proper access to healthcare/food… It’s not a lack of ability, it’s a lack of will, and it’s been continually demonstrated by one party/ideology for-fricking-ever now.
Gindy51
In Trump’s world, honor doesn’t bring in any money so it means nothing. That’s all you need to know about him, if he can’t turn it into cash he doesn’t care about it.
The Pale Scot
@PhoenixRising:
The Pale Scot
@frosty:
I guess in the jungle. At the Eastern front I’d think artillery had a much longer reach.
hedgehog mobile
Thank you Sooner. Good to see you!
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@dr. bloor:
I would take Quark over Trump any day, and twice on Sunday. Hell, I would take the Grand Nagus.
Jimbo
Fuckin’ A Sarge!
phein55
@raven: That was our motto in Basic:
Shoot, Move, Communicate!
Cooperate and Graduate!
Even in Basic, though, we had guys like Soonergrunt describes. We called them “get overs.”
different-church-lady
@BGinCHI: Nomination for comment of the year. Who seconds?
jdc
@Villago Delenda Est: write ins are moronic