Tag Archives: United States
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?
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.
Josh Kavanagh Thriller Series launched with Never for Glory
He’d give his life for his country. But this time, it’s personal.
Josh Kavanagh burns for vengeance. Parachuting with no backup into a lawless area of southern Venezuela, the Special Ops legend is intent on hunting down the rogue agent who put his wife in a coma. But as soon as he gets feet on the ground, the loyal protector discovers he’s dropped into a trap… and a sex trafficking operation run by the Russian mob.
Fighting his way out and desperate to rescue the victims with minimal body count, Josh plans a daring raid on a remote ranch. But after learning the identity of the mastermind behind the hit on a former lover, the talented operative takes the law into his own hands on a hell-bent solo mission for revenge…
Will Josh’s single-minded thirst for justice finish on the wrong side of a gun barrel?
Never for Glory is the pulse-pounding second book in the Josh Kavanagh thriller series. If you like determined heroes, tough conflict ripped from the headlines, and page-turning action, then you’ll love Lloyd Lofthouse’s pursuit of payback.
Buy Never for Glory to retaliate with deadly force today!
The first thriller in this series was The Patriot Oath.
“Here’s a pull quote from Chuck Yarling’s 1-star review on Amazon. “Once you started reading it, this was one book that was absolutely hard to put down. It has great characters, action galore, and about a group whose mission is to preserve the American republic. That made it hard not to put it my top ten books I read this year!”
“Yes, it was a gem right up to the near-end …”
He fought for his country. Now he’s home and engaged in the deadliest of battles.
Josh Kavanagh eats and breathes loyalty. Wary of how he’ll fit in after a twenty-four-year absence, the Special Forces legend returns to his family’s Montana ranch on an undercover mission. And though he’s anxious to see the high school sweetheart he abandoned a lifetime ago, the dedicated Marine’s greatest concern is tracking down a dangerous neo-Nazi cell.
Juggling unresolved feelings for the woman he left behind, a sister expecting him to avenge her brutal rape, and keeping his own covert activities secret, Josh discovers the threat to the US is bigger than anyone previously thought. And when a member of his team goes MIA and the danger creeps perilously close to home, the talented military man fears he’ll lose everything he holds dear…
With a tangled web of corruption pulling deadly strings, can he blow a conspiracy apart without paying the ultimate price?
The Patriot Oath is the riveting first book in the Josh Kavanagh thriller series. If you like war-hardened heroes, action-packed fight scenes, and powerful political agendas, then you’ll love Lloyd Lofthouse’s gripping adventure.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed … with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”
The title of this post was taken from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in Paris, on Nov. 13. 1787. He sent that letter to William Smith. Those words do not appear in the Declaration of Independence. Those words do not appear in the U.S. Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, and had a major influence on the United States Constitution. Jefferson’s quote about refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots & tyrants was an opinion to a friend, not for the public or justification for a revolution or civil war to replace the government.
In fact, Jefferson “wanted the new Constitution to be accompanied by a written ‘bill of rights’ to guarantee personal liberties, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from standing armies, trial by jury, and habeas corpus.” — THE FIRST AMENDMENT ENCYCLOPEDIA
When Jefferson was sworn in to become the third president of the United States (1801—1809), he took the same oath that is enshrined in the US. Constitution. Every president has taken that oath, an oath that defines what the Founding Fathers thought a patriot should be
There are many in the United States today that think they are patriots, but, because of that Constitutional Oath, some so-called patriots are wrong. They are not patriots. They are anarchists, loyalists (to Trump or another authoritarian), and traitors.
Patriotism is not defined as blind loyalty to an individual, the flag, a religion, or a militia. For instance: The Oath Keepers or The Three Percenters, et al. To these violent militias, nothing matters but defending what they blindly think is their country against anyone they see as a threat, and that means anyone that doesn’t think like them. If we disagree with what they think, they often reply with something like, “Go home. Go back to Russia, or Africa, or China…. Get out of my country.”
Imagine what it must be like to be blindly loyal to someone like Donald Trump and/or the U.S. flag with little or no knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. For those ignorant, misguided Americans, the concept of patriotism tied to the U.S. Constitution would seem alien because not every American takes the Constitutional Oath of Office, and many Americans don’t know what the U.S. Constitution says beyond the 1st and 2nd Amendments, and many also get the meaning of those two amendments wrong.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you’re free to say whatever you want. For some liars, we have libel and slander laws. And writing for the Supreme Court in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States, Justice Holmes argued, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
Just one year after Schenck, United States Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, in congressional testimony, claimed, “A man may say what he will, as has often been said; but if he cries ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, with the intent to injure the people there assembled, certainly his right of free speech does not protect him against the punishment that is his just desert [sic].”
So, deliberately making a false statement that might harm someone, may not fall under the protections offered by the 1st Amendment. Still, the individual making such a false statement is innocent until proven guilty.
“The founders (including Jefferson) required an oath for federal and state officials—absent a religious test—in the Constitution, but the specifics—such as the wording of the oath—were left to the First Congress (1789–1791). In its first act, Congress specified the wording: “I, ______, do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.” This oath was used for all federal officials except the President, whose oath was prescribed specifically in the Constitution (Article II, section 1, clause 8).”
Today, who is required to take the oath to defend the U.S. Constitution against both foreign and domestic enemies?
1. Every President of the United States
2. Every member of Congress
3. Every member of the state legislatures and all executive and judicial officers, the United States and the states. (Again, think of all the Republicans in charge of state elections that defied President Donald Trump’s attempts to find votes that would make him the winner.)
4. Every judge (Think of the dozens of judges that ruled against Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election, even judges appointed by Trump.)
5. FBI agents and other federal law enforcement officers
6. Federal employees, including postal workers
7. Both officers and enlisted servicemembers swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but in the Oath of Enlistment, service members swear they will “obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over [them], according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” However, officers do not include the president in their Oath of Office.
That may not be the complete list.
Most Americans who take that oath also live by that oath, and it doesn’t matter if they are Democrats, Republicans, or independent voters. To millions of Americans, regardless of their political and religious beliefs, their loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution, not to an individual, religion, or private militia. Still, some that have taken the oath never intended to defend the U.S. Constitution. Case in point: On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump told his supporters at a rally near the capital to “fight like hell.” He also told them to march on the capital, and they did. Then they attempted to pull off a violent coup and install Trump as president for life.
I have no doubts that most if not all of that violent mob that attacked the US capital on January 6, 2021, thanks to Donald Trump urging them to “fight like hell” saw themselves as patriots following the flags they carried. But which flag: that mob carried US flags, Confederate flags, and flags with only TRUMP’s name on them?
The real patriots on January 6, were the capital police, risking their lives to save and preserve the U.S. Constitution they took an oath to defend, not Trump’s mob of loyalists, anarchists, and alleged fascists.
Amazon Kindle Countdown Deal
June 1 to 7, 2022
The Soulful Veteran's Blog 