Big Red Car here. Sunup not quite here but it will be shortly and it will be bringing the warmth of a Texas winter.
So, Donald Trump skips the Republican debate in Iowa and instead stages a veterans event raising $6,000,000 for veterans?
You OK with that?
Let me be a bit as crass as Trump — I am perfectly fine with rich people giving money to veterans but I am more than a little pissed off with the way Donald Trump used veterans as a personal imprimatur.
Let me tell you about that.
What is a veteran, Big Red Car?
Veterans are the guys described by George Orwell thusly:
“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
We are a free nation only because our Continental Army and state militias, under the command of General George Washington, wetted their bayonets with British and their mercenaries’ blood. Our country was literally created by fighting men. The Nazis and the Japs were defeated by Americans who took the fight to those bastards and kicked their asses.
The Boss’s father was one of them and The Boss is a veteran of the combat engineers.
We owe the existence of our nation to the sacrifices of veterans.
All vets are not created equal
All veterans are not the same. Some men and women served in combat arms units, combat support units, combat service support units. Not everyone was in the infantry, the combat engineers, armor or artillery.
Some were in the finance corps or the adjutant general corps — the folks who pay the army and the folks who administer the paperwork.
The Big Red Car doesn’t get why someone would go to a place like VMI or West Point to serve with a typewriter. [Big Red Car doesn’t like Military Police either but that’s a story for another day.]
Donald Trump
It is particularly offensive to the Big Red Car to see someone like Donald Trump, a Viet Nam Era draft dodger whose protestations of “bone spurs” kept him from serving, pimping veterans and using them for shallow political purposes.
Make no mistake, this is not a diagnosis made by an Army doctor at a pre-induction physical; this is a diagnosis made by a civilian doctor to keep Donald Trump from being drafted and then subjected to a pre-induction physical.
There are a myriad of jobs which could be undertaken by a soldier which do not entail marching and thus even a person afflicted with bone spurs could serve. If they wanted to.
Donald Trump was not prevented from serving. He sought not to serve.
Faux warriors
The Big Red Car is tired and exhausted by men whose personal narrative does not match their bellicosity.
Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Phil Gramm — all guys who avoided the draft at great effort and who subsequently were willing to employ the military to undertake actions they personally found to be odious.
The Big Red Car calls them “chicken hawks” — too chicken to serve but once in office they exhibit hawkish tendencies when it comes to the blood of someone else’s son.
Bottom line it, Big Red Car
These type of men want to be associated with the manliness and honor and nobility of veterans and by that association reflect a bit of that same honor upon themselves.
It is called “stolen valor.”
They are cowards and they want to appear not so cowardly by pimping veterans.
There it is. Skin it back and let it stink.
They are pussies who want to associate with better men and thereby camouflage their cowardly behavior.
What can be done, Big Red Car?
If you really want to return the service of veterans, then make the fucking Veterans Administration system work. It is a shit hole of corruption.
Make the VA work for veterans rather than against veterans.
Spare me any more chicken hawks, please.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car. And my Boss is a freakin’ veteran.
