While troops may have a right or duty to disobey at times, calling for them to do so is wrong…

Note: a female National Guard member has been killed in the line of duty in the president’s program of sending troops into Washington D.C. The following is not directly about that, other than his policies in that regard are questionable. But she was doing her duty and we have to appreciate that and mourn her loss and the grief it has caused her family.

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As much as I don’t care for President Trump’s manner and most of his policies and politics and his questionable use of the military, it seems plain to me that the Democratic Party members who issued the video advising members of the military that they could refuse, and, in fact, are duty-bound to refuse illegal orders, were engaging in dangerous politics. It is clear they were trying to put pressure on Trump and maybe create a resistance within the military to his policies.

While technically a military member is not required to follow illegal orders, and maybe in some limited cases is duty-bound not to follow them, anyone who decides to disobey faces legal peril.

The following paragraph from a Wall Street Journal editorial expresses the situation well:

The law is clear that service members can disobey illegal orders. What often isn’t clear is whether an order is, in fact, illegal. This ambiguity leaves service members in a difficult position because under the Manual for Courts-Martial, all incentives point toward obedience.

I remember a class on the subject of the Uniform Code of Military Justice during my army basic training at Fort Lewis, Wa. In 1968. An officer told us that we are not required to follow illegal orders. But if you decide an order is illegal, a court-martial might decide otherwise, and you would be in trouble. I don’t recall the example he gave, but maybe something such as summary execution of prisoners, something that on its face seems illegal (and maybe always is). Whatever, you better be right, or you are in trouble.

I was fortunate in that I was not sent to the then ongoing war in Vietnam. There was much division in the nation over that war (as much as there is today over other things, as I recall). But it would not have been right then for opposing politicians and public figures to urge members of the military to disobey orders. Instead of putting the onus on individual troops, they would have and would now do better to take the initiative and use their own power to change policy.

Three years in the military was more than enough for me. I’m not meant for that way of life. But the fact is an effective military is necessary for our defense, and an effective military depends upon discipline. You just can’t have individual troops deciding which orders to follow.

Yes, there are exceptions. One that comes to mind is the helicopter pilot I read about that intervened in the infamous Mai Lai massacre of civilians during the Vietnam War – although not before as many as 500 unarmed civilians, including women and children and elderly people, were gunned down under orders from the high command (which they tried to cover up). Indirectly, one could say, the helicopter pilot was violating orders by bringing a stop to the carnage. (Some may question my abbreviated description – okay look it up, it won’t be prettier).

Right now, it is up to congress to assert its power. It is also up to voters to take some responsibility in their decisions at the ballot box.

Protests, a parade, assassinations, manhandling of a senator…

A U.S. Senator this week was physically removed from a so-called press conference and dragged down to the floor and handcuffed after asking a question. But there’s more to the story. It was certainly a bad look for security forces to manhandle a senator, and really should not have happened. And the senator should not have been condemned by the opposing political party, since he was the one suffering the humiliation.

It should be noted that possibly some of the security agents didn’t realize who he was. The senator is not well known and was not atired in such a way as to reveal his status.

He approached the lecturn. Video doesn’t appear to indicate a lunge as some detractors described his action.

But it was somewhat a game of politics between the Republican Trump administration, that currently holds the cards in national politics, and the seemingly powerless Democrats.

I won’t go into all the details. Certainly Sen. Alex Padilla, one of California’s two U.S. senators, had a right to be incensed at what Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was saying, that is how she was painting the picture of unrest in Los Angeles over the roundup of undocumented workers by federal forces using heavy-handed tactics and trickery. President Trump had sent in military forces without the request of the governor, who in fact, asked they not be sent in or be sent back out. She was calling California officials “socialists” (like everything bad once was called “communist”), when political ideology really had little to nothing to do with the problem and being progressive or even liberal does not make one a communist.

(Well, to some extent, one could say political ideology has something to do with the immigration issue, but the stances politicians have taken change over time because the truth is there is a demand for labor from all political classes, who prefer to keep it underground in order to keep labor economical and avoid enforcement of worker rights.)

And then there was the big military parade in Washington D.C. Saturday, ostensibly the celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the U.S. Army, that just coincidentally fell on President Trump’s 79^th birthday. He’s the one who called for the parade because he wanted to review the troops and military hardware like they do in totalitarian states. He who dodged the military draft (although I might criticize him for that, I have to admit, maybe a wise move during Vietnam, but still…). Personally, I served three years in the army and still managed to escape Vietnam.

A dangerous thing the president did this week is inject politics into an address to troops. The military is not supposed to be a political arm of the executive branch. If it becomes so, then we are no better than a third-world country, a so-called banana republic, or your common totalitarian state, such as Russia and China.

This weekend there has been, and I guess still are, widespread protests across the nation against the Trump administration. But that does not mean he lacks support. You know some folks go one way some the other and some don’t care.

The big world news is the battle between Israel and Iran, with the Jewish state seeming to have the upper hand. Israel got tired and scared of waiting for progress in negotiations to get Iran to give up on creating nuclear weapons and took it upon itself to attack with a wink and a nod from the United States it seems, even though reports indicate that Trump wanted to give peace a chance. But if Israel is successful, you can bet Trump will take the credit.

There’s more: looks like the trend of school shootings has been joined by political assassinations. A politically-motivated gunman killed a state legislator and her husband in Minnesota this past week. He also shot at and seriously injured another political couple there. There have been other recent attacks on politicians, the most notable the attempted assassination of Trump himself during the last presidential campaign.

The example set by the president himself is not good. He talks in cruel and mocking tones. We should not forget that before his first term when he was running against Hillary Clinton he made a suggestive remark to the effect gun rights people could take care of her.

A change back toward a more traditional and civilized approach in our national government can be made but it will take support from the American people themselves. What it will take to make folks realize we are actually losing our democracy or for them to really even care, well who knows? The right personality, the right political candidates (I don’t mean political ideological right) still need the support of the masses.

On the national level, the Democratic (some prefer to say “Democrat” without the tic because otherwise it makes it sound as if it was the only party that believes in democracy, I guess) is nearly without power. It wonders what its message should be to the people. But that’s almost backwards. The people should be supplying the message. And maybe they do but the politicians are too protected in their bubble to hear. Maybe they need to actually talk to folks other than the donor class.

Kind of a rambling post I realize. But so much is going on at once.

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And get this, even though Trump proclaimed he would round up all undocumented workers and send them packing – and you know, if you’re here illegally, then you must be deported – he now is indicating he might be good with leaving some alone, such as hotel workers (he owns hotels) and farm workers (he gets support from big ag). We see how sincere all that was.

Perhaps people just aren’t paying attention, yet, but might Trump become Nixon?

A United States senator from New York hit the nail on the head I think concerning why the public does not seem more outraged at Trump than it is. So many people don’t follow the news and the so-called news they do respond to comes by way of social media, the sources of which are either none or unverified or it’s all outright propaganda anyway – that’s all my paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much what Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was saying.

But as she noted, it will take an uproar of citizens to turn it all around.

Maybe not everyone wants to turn it around – yet. But I think it may begin to sink in with Trump supporters and the ill-informed that something is not good, to say the least.

Attacking social services, including Social Security (by staff cuts and office closures and other means), attacking science (questioning vaccines) and threatening public health care, denying climate change (thus the science that backs it up, not to mention the reality we all experience), attacking the authority of the judiciary (our safeguard to civil rights and fair treatment under the law), threatening our friends and cozying up to dictators – all this is what the Trump administration is doing with seemingly little resistance, even though people express in polls, people including  Trump supporters, their discomfort with some of this.

And the sheer incompetence of some of his cabinet picks is astonishing. You have them openly discussing military operations on an unsecure line, inadvertently even releasing their own passwords. And, you have a director of health and human services with no medical experience dismantling healthcare.

The Trump administration is also pushing legal limits in going after non-citizens, even defying a judicial order.

The administration is also using all the powers of the executive branch legal or otherwise to put pressure on journalists whose coverage it does not like, and lawyers who challenge it.

So far, the opposition party, the Democrats, seem to be in shock and too dazed to fight back effectively.

But there is a force that could put the brakes on it all or bring it to a dead stop. That source is the voters, the people.

I (and others, of course) have noted this before, but it’s worth contemplating.

Old story, but once there was another president out of control. Richard Nixon had won two elections decisively.

What the general public at the time was not aware of was that behind the scenes, Nixon played things pretty dirty. While running for the presidency before his first term, Nixon, the Republican, claimed to have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. The Democrats had no such plan, other than to keep fighting, keep sending young men to their slaughter (when they knew all was hopeless). Nixon likely won the election of 1968 by promising to end what had turned into an unpopular war — sound familiar?. But later we found out that Nixon sabotaged peace negotiations before he became president by secretly asking our South Vietnam allies at the time not to go along with peace negotiations that the Lyndon Johnson administration was conducting, so he could retain his campaign issue (that secret plan for peace). Once in office, Nixon used the resources of government to go after a list of political enemies – again, sound familiar?

But Nixon maintained support among sizable numbers of the public (his shenanigans were mostly behind the scenes) and won a second term in a landslide against a Democrat who pledged to simply withdraw from Vietnam. Nixon called for “peace with honor”, having not divulged what his secret plan was (there was no plan, other than to let more of our troops be killed in hopes of maybe a Korea-type settlement).

Then the Watergate scandal broke. Two enterprising cub reporters on the Washington Post newspaper ran across an interesting item on the police blotter. The story expanded and was picked up by other outlets, such as the New York Times. Over several months it was learned that Nixon had carried out a series of dirty tricks against opponents, including breaking into a psychiatrist’s office of someone who had divulged secret documents that indicated the government had long decided the war was unwinnable. Finally, Nixon’s operatives broke into the Democratic presidential campaign headquarters in what was to become known as the Watergate scandal. Nixon ordered that those responsible be paid off for keeping quiet or for their legal defenses. This fact was backed up by secret tapes Nixon recorded in the oval office. Nixon’s main sin was lying to the public and actively obstructing an investigation into the affair.

As his wrongdoings became public, people changed their minds. And then members of his own political party let it be known they were ready to impeach him (and had the votes for conviction). Nixon resigned, the first and only president to do so.

Back to the here and now. Things are different these days. History never repeats itself, but it rhymes (an old saying). Nixon was never a charisma guy. He was sort of unlikeable. But he knew how to frame issues, and after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon came up with a strategy that appealed to what might be considered the common folk, rather than just the old Republican country club set. And before the Vietnam War became unpopular, he appealed to patriotism as opposed to war opposition. Although a supporter of civil rights in his political career, Nixon came up with ways to slow down desegregation of schools. He also courted evangelical Christians and those who opposed gay rights  and rights for women.

I’ve read that through it all Nixon was never popular among many politicians of his own party. That made it easier for them to dump him in the end.

Here’s the deal, though. I’m not sure that even back then most folks were tied to the news of the day, especially politics (I’m 75, and just note that so any reader will know I might have some clue as to the culture of the time). But the main source of national (and world) news was the daily newspaper and the nightly news on television (only 15 minutes in length, and most TV news stories were prompted by those in the printed press).

There was some form of checks and balances in the news we received.

Newspapers had editors who went over stories before they were published, looking not only for grammar and style but for accuracy, attributions, support for things reported as fact. That is not to say that everything reported was accurate or all was in good faith, but a reasonable and careful reader could make his or her own judgment when comparing what was presented to other reports.

Broadcast was always a different animal. Sure, live coverage of an event by voice, photos, and film or video has the air of authenticity, but that could be manipulated even back in the day (today a lot more so). The main problem, as I see it, is that in broadcast things are condensed and opinion seems infused into a lot of reports. While I don’t think it was always this way, today news reports and opinion pieces on broadcast and now in on-line media often seem melded into one. We don’t necessarily get objective, and therefore useful and accurate, news.

Worse, if not everyone paid close attention to current events in the past, I imagine vast numbers do not now. We no longer have that limited narrative from the three major broadcast networks (you could call that good or bad). It’s now a babel or cacophony of a multitude of presentations online masquerading as news sources. But the intent is not to inform but to indoctrinate or just catch eyeballs to claim viewership, sometimes for advertising dollars, or just some mal intent.

(Yeah, I write this blog, but it is not intended as a news source, but just well meaning comment. I try to be accurate on anything I refer to or imply as fact.)

Even with all of that, it remains that public opinion can still come through to turn things around.

I realize not everyone of course wants to turn things around – yet.

But there may soon come a time.

For those of us who would prefer a turnaround, we must note that in typical Trump fashion, he is toying with defying that law of the land and running for a third term (his second barely underway). In typical fashion he first implies it’s not serious but is dropping hints that, no it is.

He told NBC News Sunday there are ways he could run.