Fiddling with Death is OUT!

My Contribution: there isn’t much I can do at my age to defend the U.S. Constitution against domestic enemies like Donald Trump, his fanatical MAGA cult, and foreign enemies like Putin and that 3rd generation freak in North Korea.

What will Traitor Trump’s Project 2025 mean for the United States military and you?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-project-2025-trump-conservative-blueprint-heritage-foundation/

With Traitor Trump, everything is a projection, and he’s projecting his cowardice onto others, in this case, Gov. Walz.

We Are Asking the Wrong Questions …

This morning, an email landed in my in-box with another unintelligent rant from Michael Moore. During his way-too-long knee jerk reaction to a 90 minute anything-but-a-debate that took place on CNN on June 27, 2024, Moore said, about halfway through, “I’m not a doctor. I could be (and hopefully am) wrong about all this. But I do have eyes. They don’t lie.”

Michael Moore, you were wrong, our eyes are deceived all the time by not showing us accurately what we are seeing. Often there is a disconnect between what we think we see, our brain, and our memories can even revise what we thought we saw.  Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks? and/or Why eyewitnesses fail.

During Moore’s rant about what he saw, there was one name he never mentioned, Donald Trump (if the traitor’s name was there, I didn’t see it after reading the piece once and scanning it three times), who didn’t answer any of the moderator’s questions and repeated all of his fascist lies that have been repeated so many times in the last few years, I doubt anyone has been able to keep count.

After all, Traitor Trump learned from a master: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party about repeating big lies.  “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.

I didn’t watch the original live debate, that wasn’t a debate. It takes two or more people to have a debate and the only person on that stage struggling to debate was President Biden. Traitor Trump repeated his campaign slogans that are all lies and have always been lies going back to the day he came down that escalator in Trump Tower on June 16, 2015.

After the debate, I started reading the reactions and summaries about the CNN disaster that didn’t challenge Traitor Trump’s lies.

As for me, it took an effort to set aside all the panic and criticisms I was hearing and reading about President Biden and wait a few days to learn more and come to a conclusion.  I’ve learned through the decades, I turn 79 in August, that it helps to wait before reacting to something unless it’s a life and death situation like when I was a US Marine in Vietnam being shot at. We don’t have time to think then.

Moore said more shit like, “He’s 81! What do you expect? You’ll be 81 someday!”

Well, Michael Moore, I’m much closer to 81 than you are and I don’t agree with your mindless knee jerk rant.

Then on June 29, I watched this video. That is the day after the debate that wasn’t a debate, and I didn’t see the same Biden from the day before.  By then, I’d seen the worst of Biden’s performance on the 28th

Before writing this post, I also watched an unedited ProPublica interview with Joe Biden from September 2023, nine days before his interview with conservative Republican Special Counsel Robert K. Hur, who had worked in Traitor Trump’s administration before he was appointed to oversee the DOJ’s investigation into classified documents found at Biden’s Delaware home. That was no different than hiring a hungry wolf to guard a flock of sheep.

After watching the June 29th video, I wrote a poem comparing two men, although I have problems thinking one of the two is human. I’ll leave it up to anyone that reads this blog post who I think that one is.

NO NAMES

Two men close in age

One accused of crimes with no evidence

The other

Twice impeached

Guilty of rape

Guilty of fraud

A convicted felon

Two men close in age

One honorably served the people for 54 years

The other

Cheated his workers

Cheated his Secret Service agents

Cheated university students

Cheated his wives

Cheats at golf

Doesn’t always pay his bills

Two men close in age

One never accused of rape

The other

Found guilty of rape once

And 18 women have accused him

Of sexual harassment or sexual assault

One alleged victim was 13

Brags he grabs them by the pussy

Two men close in age

One stands strong with other democracies

The other

Says he fell in love with

North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,

who wants to nuke the United States,

And calls Putin a genius

For starting a brutal war

With a smaller country

Two men close in age

One practices a healthy lifestyle

Also shows off his latest reading

The other

Three years younger, is ten years older

Eating McDonald’s and meatloaf

Drinking 12 brain damaging Diet Cokes daily

Thinking exercise is bad

Has a lethal aversion to reading

Two men close in age

One sometimes gets his facts wrong

And broke 3 of his campaign promises

The other

Does not care about facts

Lying more than 30,000 times in four years

Breaking 55 of his campaign promises

Ranked the worst president ever

*****

Here are America’s Worst Presidents. Traitor Trump was ranked the #3 worst president by the 2022, Siena College’s Presidential Expert Poll, #4 by the 2021 C-Span Presidential Historians survey, and #1 by the 2024, Presidential Greatness Survey.

I also suspect Traitor Trump is allegedly responsible for Biden’s performance on June 28, 2024.  It’s not impossible.

Here’s a link to the post I wrote about that.  Did Donald Trump Sabotage the Atlanta Debate?

How to tell the real heroes from the hero-wannabes.

Like Frankie McGrath, I wasn’t a baby killer

My review of this realistic, historical action suspense thriller will join hundreds of thousands already on Amazon and Goodreads. Still, how many of those ratings and reviews were written by Vietnam combat vets who were there?

Soon after this novel was released, The Women was mentioned in my VA PTSD support group that meets every Wednesday morning. This support group may differ from many since half are women that served in the Air Force, the Navy, with one a Marine, who served in the Middle East. In combat!

Later that day, I saw The Women at Costco and bought a hardcover.

The main character in this novel is a young Army nurse, and the first half of this brutal combat story mostly takes place in Vietnam. Although Frankie McGrath was an Army nurse saving lives in a field medical unit beyond the front lines, and not behind them, she didn’t fight in combat. Yet she was in combat, every moment, awake or asleep. I’m going to explain what I mean soon.

For me, reading this historical fiction became a triggered journey back in time.  And I started losing sleep, waking at the slightest sound. Alert, ready to fight.

Remembering!

And by the time I finished reading, I was angry.

My DD214, a form we get when we leave the military and return to civilian life, had one entry that said I’d gone on one major military operation for a few days during 1966.  Yet I was in combat almost daily after climbing down that net (like the kind used on D-Day during World War II) on the side of a Navy transport ship, jumping the last few feet into a landing craft that took us Marines ashore. As we landed, fighting was taking place not that far from our location on the beach. And a few hours later, the first night we were there, my company was hit before we’d finished setting up our base camp.  We had no wire surrounding us yet, and none of the bunkers had been completed.

All of Southern Vietnam was a war zone. It didn’t matter if you were inside the wire, in a bunker, we were always in the war. No place was safe. We didn’t have to go out on a major field operation to find the war. It found us almost nightly and sometimes in daylight.

Frankie McGraths’ medical unit was inside the wire, protected by bunkers, almost all the time, yet her unit was also under attack, as VC or North Vietnamese mortar rounds dropped in without warning, looking for random kills.

Like me, McGrath has some close calls inside the bunkers and wire. Like me, she lost friends. Like me, she came home to protestors calling her a baby killer. And she shot no one. Instead, she saved lives, even Vietnamese citizens, including children.  She was a nurse.  Not a US Marine rifleman. Not a grunt like me.

Some protestor in the story spit on her once she returned to the States. I’d heard about that when I came home in December 1966, but being spit on didn’t happen to me.

McGrath suffered from PTSD as I did, and we still do. Yet when she went to the VA for help, she was told no women served in Vietnam and she couldn’t have PTSD. They sent her back home.  When she returned to the VA later, after a traumatic episode of PTSD, and tried to join a group of combat vets to share her trauma with, the men told her she couldn’t stay because she couldn’t be a combat vet. No women served in Vietnam. She left again, with no support.

And yet thousands of military women served in Vietnam.

Maybe what happened to McGrath is like what happened to me.

Her being told women didn’t serve in Vietnam reminded me of something someone working in VA-mental health care said to me after 2005.  I don’t remember the exact wording but it was something like, Your PTSD can’t be that bad, since you only went on one military operation.

WTF!

Like McGrath, VC mortar shells dropped into my base camp without warning to kill at random. One time, in daylight, a sniper almost took me out. The round grazing my left ear. An inch further to the right, my body might have been shipped home with a Purple Heart my parents could hang on a wall in the same case the folded US flag arrived in.

Then, unlike McGrath, there were the night patrols and ambushes outside the wire that were not part of a major military operation, that were not mentioned on my DD214.

Or that mad dash with sniper rounds snapping past us while we drove at top speed through the jungle, me in an unarmored jeep with no doors on a one lane dirt road to reach a forward artillery base outside the division perimeter that had been hit hard and needed to be resupplied before they got hit again.  While I was there, they got hit again, a rain of mortar shells and rockets, when one Marine lost his life, decapitated by a rocket.

I recommend reading The Women for the reality it paints and when you finish the story, read the author’s notes, to learn that about 10,000 women served in Vietnam, many just like McGrath.

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of military action suspense thrillers: The Patriot Oath, Never for Glory, and Running with the Enemy, a novel placed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Who started the most recent war in Gaza?

The mind boggling, Orwellian universe where murder becomes a justified act of resistance, where killers are victims of oppression, and rapists are freedom fighters.” 

I have been disappointed and angered at most of what I’ve read in the traditional western media about this latest war in Gaza, that should be called propoganda supporting Hamas.

I’m thinking this way because most of what I read is blaming Israel for the suffering and deaths of Palestinians. Seldom if ever is there any mention of who started this slaughter, Hamas, who is using the deaths of Palestinians for propoganda purposes, Hamas, who dug their tunnels under hospitals and schools, Hamas, and then fought from nearby or from inside those hospitals and schools to draw fire from the IDF, during battles. Hamas.

Recently, as soon as the last cease fire and hostage exchange ended, I read about one Hamas missile battery, those boxy structures on the flatbed of a truck that can be easily moved.

I read that Hamas missile battery fired from inside a Palestinian refugee camp in south Gaza, drawing return fire from IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) who have the technology to determine almost instantly the moment the missiles were fired, where they came from.

Still, the Hamas terrorists that manned that missile battery probably had time to escape the IDF return fire. Those brutal murderers may have also driven off in that truck so they could fill the battery with more missiles and drive to another location near a concentration of Palestinian refugees.

I looked in the western media for reports of that incident, and what I read all used the word “alleged” when mentioning that Hamas missile battery being located inside a South Gaza Palestinian refugee camp, but those news reports did not use the word “alleged” when mentioning the IDF’s return fire. That made it sound like the IDF fired on a defenseless Palestinian refugee camp and not returning fire on a location where Hamas missiles had been fired at Israel first.

It’s easy to slip bias into a news report without lying. In this case the bias is glaringly obvious. Hamas did no wrong. Israel is guilty.

I know who is guilty for every life lost in this latest war against Israel. Hamas.

When the IDF invited reporters into the ruins of schools and hospitals to show them the entrances to tunnels that had been discovered, Tunnels that led deep underground the language in the news reports was biased, casting doubt that Hamas would do something like that. Making it sound that the IDF was lying.

The only recently discovered tunnel that led sixty feet deep to the main tunnel that was big enough to drive a car or truck through, that didn’t have the biased language in those news reports, casting doubt, was the tunnel entrance found outside of the Gaza city near the Gaza border with Israel, a large tunnel leading under the border into Israel. The reporter in that news report was from the AP. Outside the entrance at ground level, no sign of houses or buildings anywhere close to it. Still that tunnel led back toward Gaza city.

Introducing my NEW website and Writer’s blog

This link will lead you to the first post on my new Writer’s blog. The title is Accused of Attacking Trump and Conservatives.

The first paragraph says, “Obvious Trump supporters and/or conservatives have sent me emails, accusing me of being unfair regarding former President Trump and attacking American conservatives. They were referring to my thriller The Patriot Oath.”

The new Website’s link is: Lloyd Lofthouse

The menu to the right of Lloyd Lofthouse has three new pages following links from my older blogs that are still on WordPress, and one of the new ones is the new Writer’s Blog:

iLookChina

Crazy is Normal

The Soulful Veteran

A Writer’s Blog

About Lloyd

Portfolio