A New Low

John McCain spent five and a half years in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, undergoing regular and brutal torture that left him physically incapacitated the rest of his long and distinguished life and career as a true statesman. He never broke.

The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has stated that his Vietnam was avoiding venereal disease during the so-called Vietnam era while his less wealthy and connected peers died or were maimed in that ill-considered and basically fraudulent conflict.

John McCain will be laid to rest today with eulogies from former presidents Clinton and the second Bush. The current president was pointedly not invited to any of the services.

Tradition has it that the nation’s flags will remain at half-staff until a hero like McCain is interred. Flags at the capitol building remained lowered in his honor, but at the White House, at the express orders of Donald Trump, the flag was raised to full-staff after a scant day honoring McCain.

There was no rationale, however weak, coming from the White House, for this breach of an American tradition; Trump simply was getting even with McCain any way he could, even posthumously. Roy Cohn would have been proud of his protégé in meanness and spite. John McCain had crossed Donald Trump in life, among other things casting the deciding vote in keeping Obamacare and smashing another of Donald Trump’s bogus campaign promises of repealing Obamacare his first day in office, as if that were possible.

Trump’s wall is another promise broken, and his vaunted military parade was left to wither away like the stupid and obnoxious idea that it was and is, like so many other of Trump’s delusions, including the so-called Space Force, that will literally never get off the ground.

But vis a vis a the premature and hateful raising of the White House flag, Trump bit off even more than his big, stupid mouth could chew. The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) strongly protested their so-called president openly and clearly dishonoring one of their own.

Many of the millions of Legion and VFW members are Trump supporters – so far – and Trump really had no choice but to reverse course rather than offending this many veterans in this critical election year. Trump never was a match for John McCain, and the Senator triumphed again even from the grave. Trump’s mouth is full of ashes.

And the waters are slowly rising around the thick and fleshy neck of Donald Trump. The seeming endless corruption and scandal that are the earmarks of his “administration” are coming under severe and endless scrutiny on both the state and federal levels.

Trump’s Washington is beyond a swamp. It is a whirlpool of venality, dishonesty, and evil, and Donald Trump is its vortex, sucking in any unwary enough to come within his reach. Good people are ultimately tarnished and diminished by the contagion that is the president. Or, as is the case with many of his coterie, they were not good people to begin with. Like seeks like.

This too shall pass. The flags will be raised and America will survive the catastrophe that is now dimming our reputation the world over. This new low will be but a passing moment in a better history.