100 Day Update; The Nightmare Continues

In late April I arrived at my local VA hospital for appointments and headed through the lobby towards the men's room when I suddenly came face to face with the framed official photograph of our new Commander In Chief.  I stared at it dumbfounded by the incredibly mean glowering pose on his face.  "What the hell?" I thought.  I could just imagine elementary school children running away from it screaming, "Bad man, bad man!"  Pictures of him smiling are even more frightening. 

As I write this today, on 'Day 100,' much of the news media are mocking his spectacular failure to have accomplished much in his first quarter.  They are wrong.  In his first hundred days, he has unsystematically destroyed much of America's progress of the past 100 years!

Lets start with something easy, like the environment.  In the last week of April he proudly signed an Executive Order selling America's National Parks to the highest bidder in order to turn them into filthy industrial zone mining operations spewing poisonous toxic waste into pristine rivers and lakes.  How he must hate America!

Now, onward to the latest scandal:  Appointing a homophobic pea brain to be Secretary of the Army. The previous secretary, appointed by President Obama, was a brilliantly qualified openly gay man who had previously served as deputy or assistant secretary and acting secretary of several services.  It was an intentional act of pure evil for the new President to appoint a notorious and totally unqualified homophobe.  This is not a matter excusable as being obliviously tone-deaf.   It is a matter of blatant lying in falsely promising to protect LGBT Rights during his campaign for president.   This appointment of a hard core homophobe who has introduced legislation to legalize prejudice in the name of God, is nothing less than hateful.  This is a man who has led the movement to pervert America religion and politics for the purpose of hatemongering.  Those of us who 'served in silence' and those who have recently 'served in Pride,' fought for our Right, our Honor, and our Duty to serve our nation.  Now, all of that has been flushed down the toilet by this Commander In Chief who appointed the worst person possible to lead our troops.  What's next?  There is Congressional chatter about privatizing the VA and or charging veterans for what we earned serving our country.  We must be silent no more!

UPDATE, MAY 5th: The above nominee for Secretary of the Army has withdrawn his name from consideration by Congress for this position.  Our protests work.

Moving on to the military mind of a man who never served:  Every single missile sent to Syria to blow up empty hangers cost over One Million Dollars.  So, that five minute hyper masculinity stunt cost 60 million dollars!  Imagine if that money had instead been spent on packing up halal food for starving Syrian civilians and dropped by parachute over oppressed villages!  You could intellectually point out that 'one food drop isn't going to solve the problem.'  Tell that to some starving kid wolfing down his first mouthful of food in weeks with tears in his eyes.  I was born in a post WWII refugee community in the late 1940s, I kind of remember what it was like, long ago.

The whole operation was not conducted from the serious situation room deep underground below the White House; it was held in his five star Florida country club with bleary eyed security agents trying to find someplace to stand without bumping into liveried waiters serving piss-elegant provisions to the billionaire bureaucrats who have never been hungry a day in their pampered lives.  It was reported that the president bragged of 'ordering the missile strike while eating the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake.'  I suppose its hard for such a glutinous parasite to envision starving Syrian children.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have shot.  I happen to be a hawk when it comes to having a 'real' response to a butcher who sent poison gas to kill innocent children.  Something had to be done.  Shooting off sixty million dollars worth of missiles at empty hangers at an empty air base was a symbolic slap on the wrist that evoked stupid knee-jerk nationalistic grunts of approval from politicians, pundits, and pontificators all eager to stick their noses up you know where.  The 'act of war' was the barbarity of gassing little children to death, not the response of directly taking out those who did it.

Meanwhile, there's the crisis in Korea.  I'm not talking about looming war.  I'm talking about the almost unmentioned vicious crackdown on gay troops in South Korea.  There's a witch hunt on against gay service members there, just like in 'the good old days' here in America, with government agents wasting time terrorizing, interrogating, and discharging in disgrace, our brothers and sisters just because of who they happen to love.  I wonder which world leader might have inspired that official government discrimination!

Finally, let us pause for a moment in memory of the French cop killed in the most recent terror attack in Paris.  He happened to be gay, out, and proud.  Like those of us in uniform everywhere, he patriotically served his country in pride.