torture

Freedom And The Call


POST 1157

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Executive Summary


> What do you suppose we’re missing?

> Freedom: Who’s getting more and who’s getting less?

MISSING

Click me – first see Note #4 below

I just finished reading Kenneth D. Evans’ book MISSING. It’s the story of his father, Donald Evans, during WW II, both as a fighter pilot and as a horribly abused POW held by the Germans for over a year.

He and our millions of European theater troops were returned to America after V-E Day. They rode on Liberty ships, the very slow transports that had been used to bring food, ammunition, fuel and more to war-torn Europe for years.

Donald Evans wrote in his notebook:

“My heart swelled with pride and gratitude when we came into view of the Statue of Liberty. I feel so grateful for the freedoms that I fought for. I can’t describe how wonderful it felt to finally step back on American soil. For me – the war is finally over.” – page 446

Liberty Ship SS John W. Brown – click me

Evans’ story is, at least in part, that of 16 million Americans during those terrifying days of combat, the soul crushing ordeals and then at last the blessing of coming home. Surely, all those boys felt what Donald Evans felt upon seeing the Statue of Liberty and at long last planting their boots on our ground. They knew what they had done and why they had done it. We today are the lucky ones living in the freedoms secured for us by their sacrifice and courage.

I fear that such pride and gratitude as that of Evans and his fellows-in-arms may largely be things of the past, as we’ve made draft dodger Bone Spurs our president and integrity and courage have been supplanted by today’s spineless hypocrisy and rank cowardice. We’ve celebrated cruelty at least as far back as George W. Bush’s torturing of prisoners. Now our officials sneakily pledge loyalty not to our Constitution, but to a man who lies to us at least 8,750 times per year (that’s a lie every 59 seconds for 4 years), who enacts retribution on those who oppose him and who grifts constantly. You can now buy a dinner with Trump for a million dollars. Choke on that.

Many of our citizens apparently believe that making death threats to fellow Americans is a patriotic act. Our nation’s leaders being obsequious to dictators and abandoning our friends are now reasons for self-congratulation and chest puffing.

So, some seem to think, are abandoning our vets, letting our poor children starve and abandoning the sick and malnourished everywhere, even as meds are cheap and food rots in warehouses. So is cutting support for the education of our children, for protecting our nuclear stockpiles and for abandoning protection for our kids from paralysis from polio and death from measles. Apparently, all that and more is now patriotic and we are at liberty to enjoy those “freedoms.”

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times labeled what’s going on as, “the deconstruction of a once-great superpower.” And it’s happening in plain sight.

What do you suppose Donald Evans and his buddies, the guys who risked their lives, some of whom lost their lives, protecting the promise of America would say to all that? Let’s take that question one step further.

What do you suppose our hollow performative, chest thumping, flag waving extremists and our jellyfish legislators would risk their lives for? Would they man a post just 1/4 mile from the front line, sail into battle in the belly of a warship, fly a warplane with missiles being fired at it, risk torture and death solely for the promise of America?

Said a different way, what is it that so many Americans are MISSING?

Freedom

Click me – first see Note #4 below

From the introduction of history Prof. Timothy Snyder’s book On Freedom:

Traditionally, some people have regarded themselves as free because they exploit the labor of slaves and women. Those who believe themselves free because they dominate others define freedom negatively, as the absence of government, because only a government could emancipate the slaves or enfranchise women.

We no longer have slavery in this country and women have incrementally gained most – but amazingly, not all – citizenship rights, but that doesn’t mean that domination has been eradicated.

Donald Trump and his co-president Elon Musk are on an illegal rampage of domination and destruction of our government, unchecked by Congress, on the promise of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. That name sells well to the American people, but the fact is that they chainsawed their way to mindlessly harming our public servants and accomplishing almost nothing positive. They are finding essentially no waste, fraud or abuse. They have claimed benefit to our country in the hundreds of billions of dollars, only to have it revealed that either there were no actual savings or that the amounts have been exaggerated by a factor of 1,000 or more.

A reasonable deduction is that their efforts are fraudulently labeled and that what they are doing has nothing to do with saving tax dollars. Pair that with Trump’s tantrum about Congress having ordered the hiring of 82,000 new IRS agents to catch tax cheats and bring money into the federal till, and you can see that none of this has anything to do with waste, fraud and abuse. It has to do with destroying government – the “deep state.”

What that has to do with freedom is that crippling our health related functions makes sure that you won’t be free from the next pandemic, that your children won’t be free from measles, polio or smallpox. You won’t be free from financial institutions ripping you off, nor will you be free from nuclear disaster or from grave danger on a commercial airplane flight. And this story gets worse.

What our markets (Dow, S&P, etc.) hate more than anything is uncertainty, like on-again, off-again tariffs. After that comes anything that will negatively affect corporate profitability, like tariffs.

The Dow has dropped nearly 2,000 points since Trump first announced tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. What that means is that the prices of various stocks have gone way down, allowing billionaires, our oligarchs, to swoop in and buy those companies on the cheap. Later, the market will recover, stock prices will be back up and the rich guys will have made a killing. You’re not free to do that because you don’t have billions of dollars to invest.

That scheme will further concentrate American wealth in the wallets of the same 1% that has dominated us for so long. That sounds like a lot of freedom for rich guys, but not much for you and me.

The destruction of our government and the manipulation of our markets for the benefit of rich guys is exactly what Trump told us he would do. Those promises, those chickens, have come home to roost (bringing no eggs). We are all poorer and less free.

All of this grift and fraud is about Trump stealing our country from us.
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Back To What We’re MISSING

Here it is in quiz form:

Q: What do you suppose those guys, standing at the rail of a Liberty ship sailing past the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor would say to all this Trump fraud, theft and destruction?

A: They’d say that what Trump is doing is everything they went to war to fight against, what they risked their lives for and what thousands of their buddies died for.

Make no mistake: This is personal, because those guys included your father, grandfather or your great-grandfather. We dishonor all of them if we fail to answer the call of duty to our country today to restore our values and our republic.

Thanks FL for this.

REBEL!

Coming Wednesday: Ukraine Dream Sequence 2 – What we wish had happened.

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JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

No Rationalizing Allowed


Reading time – 4:05  .  .  .

Arguments abound about whether to prosecute Donald Trump once he’s out of office for his alleged extensive and nefarious lawbreaking both before and since becoming President. He may be Dear Leader to his MAGA nation followers, but in the eyes of the law he is, at best, a suspect in numerous felonious activities. What are we to do with this?

If Trump is indicted and prosecuted for his many crimes like extortion, multiple counts of obstruction of justice, money laundering, tax fraud, bank fraud and so much more, his angry followers will become yet more enraged and our national divide will surely widen. Some of the hot heads may commit violent acts including vandalism and maybe murder. After all, they are well armed and many believe that the Second Amendment is their Constitutional protection against the evils of government encroachment and is the right tool to use when they feel aggrieved. They may believe it’s their patriotic duty to violently overthrow the government, having been told repeatedly that anything that looks different from Trump World is unpatriotic. Use your own imagination to conjure what red-faced angry people might do if their cult leader is indicted. Preventing such dangerous events is a strong argument against prosecuting Trump. I think, though, that it fails to persuade and is, in fact, negotiating against ourselves. Here’s why.

Richard Nixon was clearly guilty of obstruction of justice of the congressional investigation into the Watergate “Plumbers,” the burglars who broke into the Democratic National Headquarters in what was labeled a “third rate burglary.” Nixon finally left office when Republican senators told him the jig was up and he had to resign or he would be impeached and removed from office. In other words, he was so plainly guilty of having broken laws that even Republicans couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him, so he resigned. That was good. It was also the beginning of a lot of bad.

In a tortured piece of logic that flew in the face of the rule of law, Gerald Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in  .  .  .  ” That logic was:

”  .  .  .  the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States. The prospects of such trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”

In other words, jeez, some people might become upset over Nixon being held to account for his criminal acts, so we should simply do nothing. So much for accountability.

Do you really want Presidents to have one of these?

Ford took a lot of heat for that pardon and was defeated in the next election, but Nixon went on a tour to rehabilitate his public image so that he could be seen as an elder statesman, rather than the felon he truly was. And that surely cranked up the get-out-of-jail-free card that we’ve issued to all tenants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since then.

Reagan negotiated with the Iranians before his 1980 election and persuaded them not to release our people who were being held hostage. He convinced the Ayatollah with promises favorable to Iran, to hold the hostages until after the election so that Reagan would more easily defeat Carter. That’s illegal, but there was no accountability.

Reagan had his fingerprints all over the Iran-Contra crimes. As close as he got to being held accountable was a reporter calling out to him as he and Nancy walked across the White House lawn from Marine 1. He cupped his hand to his ear and mouthed, “I can’t hear you,” and the scandal slipped off him as though he were coated with Teflon. No accountability.

When he was president, H.W. Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra criminals, which was doubly interesting because Bush was part of the criminal conspiracy and the cover up, so he benefited from those pardons and escaped accountability.

Clinton lied to a grand jury and got away with it. Of course, the circumstances were muddy because Ken Starr had spent 4.5 years looking under every rock for anything Clinton had ever done that might be indictable and found nothing but illicit sex in the Oval Office, which isn’t a crime. So, Starr set up Clinton by forcing him to embarrass himself by telling the truth or lying.

W. Bush got away with the torture of prisoners and lying us into 2 wars. Torturing was and is illegal. I don’t know if lying to Congress to get us into wars is illegal. It sure ought to be.

W. Bush and Cheney got away with awarding massive, no-bid contracts to Halliburton.

Obama got away with refusing to prosecute CIA people who did Bush’s torturing.

And now we have Trump violating the law over and over.

The point is that none of the perps has been held accountable , resulting in violations becoming so ordinary that we no longer expect anything to be done, other than some partisan gnashing of teeth. Refusing to hold wrong-doers accountable guarantees we’ll have more and worse wrong-doing in the future. As horrid as Trump is, I fear the felon who follows him even more.

If Trump is allowed to get away with his noxious crime spree, we can be certain that some future President will do far worse, safe in the knowledge that there will be no accountability. And in our refusing to act properly and hold leaders accountable, invoking any of our rationalized reasons in the manner of Gerald Ford, we are eliminating – demolishing – the rule of law and our very democracy that we say we hold dear.

Caving into threats from MAGA cultists would amount to that very thing. In fact, it amounts to caving in to terrorists. Absurdly, any argument against holding Trump accountable now is caving into the fears of our imagination.

Perhaps you share my preference not to have terrorists running our country. Perhaps you agree with the Founders who refused the divine right of kings and declared that this nation will never have a king. It’s why they set us up with presidents instead. Indeed, read the Declaration of Independence, specifically to review the list of abuses of power of King George III, who was never held to account except by losing a colony. That’s what we will have and perhaps far worse if we neuter the rule of law.

If we want accountability from our leaders, we must hold them accountable. No rationalizing allowed.

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Ed. note: We need to spread the word so that we make a critical difference, so,

  1. Did someone forward this to you? Welcome! Please subscribe and pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) Use the simple form above on the right.
  2. Engage in the Comments section below to help us all to be better informed.

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The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. Sometimes I change my opinions because I’ve learned more about an issue. So, educate me and all of us. That’s what the Comments section is for.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.

JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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