Sunday, July 4, 1976. The Bicentennial., additional Labels.

Two examples of exactly what's wrong with this country.

1.  Standards decayed to the irrelevant level.

I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. 

If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy.

 J. D. Vance.

Vance is probably correct.  Watergate wouldn't have taken down Nixon today.

Watergate was inexcusable.  Nixon should not have been pardoned.  He should have been tried, convicted, and served jail time. That failure, combined with the failure to push traitorous Southerners after the Civil War, have helped give us Donald Trump.

What Nixon did give  us was Jimmy Carter.  Ford couldn't survive his association with Nixon and inflation.  Carter was not a good President, but he was a decent man.  That meant a lot.

And, and James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel, James David Vance, JD Vance should remember this.  While Carter as a one term President, the then youthful Democratic Party swept into power in that election and reset the country's middle meter to the left.  It remained there for decades.  Right now Republicans are pointing towards New York and saying "look, the Democrats are commies!" Well, the swing to the left and the right wing histrionics about it were exactly what occurred in the 1973 time frame, brought about by the corruption of Nixon, the Vietnam War, and economic distress.

A failed war.  A failed economy.  And corruption.  

Sound familiar Republicans?

2.  They actually feel Trump is a prophet

There's a reason why Donald Trump is still here. God's will is that his work is not done. By the way, our president knows that.

House majority whip Tom Emmer.

Hitler survived 42 known assassination attempts.

Nobody knows the mind of God.  As I earlier noted here, Donald may be our Attila, whom early Medieval Christians regarded as the "Scourge of God", Flagellum Dei.  Medieval Christians, whom Protestants latter slandered as being ignorant, were clear eyed enough to attribute Attila with being allowed to proceed in destruction as a punishment for their sins.  If Trump's luck with surviving assassination attempts has been due to the divine, given that he's a completely unGodly man, that possibility should be at least considered.

But beyond that, and this is truly scary, the far right Evangelical branch of American Protestantism is actually treading upon what essentially amounts to a new fringe religion, something that is well within the country's historical culture.  The 19th Century was full of them, with a collection of religions that proclaimed themselves founded on the teachings of Christ but lead by a new latter day prophet whose message departed from the Christian gospel.  In the 20th Century we've seen a few more.

A new book by journalist of the New York Times holds that those in Trump's cabinet believe that he's endowed with nearly an otherworldly foresight and is always right in spite of all the evidence that he's demented and was never very smart.  Like Communists in the mid 20th Century, they'll excuse any failure as temporary or a simple misunderstanding.  Molotov even excused Stalin's imprisoning his won wife.  Hardcore Communist, we might note, have a similar mindset to radical false religious prophets, and their adherents do as well.

Normally the further these movements go, and the longer they last, the more disastrous the fall.  

The 25th Amendment Watch List, Seventeenth Edition: The Doctors are In.

 May 19, 2026

Last edition:

The 25th Amendment Watch List, Sixteenth Edition: The Addled.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Agriculture, Ethnicities, Hypocrisy, Mental Health, Politics, Predictions, Racism, Stupidity, The Madness of King Donald, Venezuela

Downfall. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Twelfth Edition. He's insane, we all know it, and he's in power. This will get much, much, worse.

Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.  One man worried his cabinet who planned around a possible mental collapse that didn't come, the other is having a mental collapse and his cabinet is doing nothing.

We later learned that in 1973 as Nixon came under increased pressure due to Watergate, his aids feared he would do something rash.  Nixon was reacting badly under the stress.  He was lashing out.  He was drinking heavily.

Of course, in the end, he resigned.

Donald Trump, who like Hitler doesn't drink, is visibly collapsing before our eyes.  He's obviously been in a state of mental decline for a decade now, and its increasing.  He was heavily impaired when elected, making any rational person wonder why he was elected to the office, other than that people the weird insurrectionist feared that Joe Biden's dementia was too advanced to allow for him to hold office again, something that history should not forgive Biden for.  Even that doesn't really explain it, as Harris was the alternative in the end, for people who play along with the two party system nightmare that actually doesn't have to exist.

A major difference between late stage Nixon and late stage Trump, other than that Nixon was not insane (a major difference) is that Nixon was surrounded by sane, if not always admirable, advisors.  Trump is surrounded by sycophants.

That's a huge difference as we now know that Nixon's advisors consulted amongst themselves about his mental state. They were worried about it.  None of them were as deeply loyal to Nixon at all costs as Trump's sycophantic advisors are to him.

Many, including me, have wondered how it is that Trump's cabinet hasn't acted to replace him.  Heather Cox Richardson, in one of her video shorts, has provided the answer.  The people surrounding Trump have nowhere else to go.

In Trump's first administration his cabinet included sane people.  Trump didn't know how to take office and in fact his natural laziness kept him from really ever fully forming a government.  That natural laziness came into effect when he was elected a second time.  He was kept from acting like a king in his first term as his advisor wouldn't let him, and he didn't like that.  In his second term he wanted people who would slavishly do what he wanted without question, and he got them almost exclusively.

If you look at the current cabinet you can see that, with perhaps two or three exceptions, it's wholly made up of people for whom Trump is their only chance. Some may be rich, but wealth is credited much more than it should be as allowing for intellectual independence.  People lavish praise on Trump not because they believe it, but because they are his willing concubines and have prostituted themselves to him.  Some of these people are outright dim.  Some have just sold their souls and know that when Trump falls, they fall with him, as Richardson has noted.

Why these people are in this position is another matter.  Some got there as they believe in Trump.  Others were placed their by forces supporting Trump, knowing that he was too lazy to actually do the work to pick competent people.  The Heritage Society, for example, saw Trump as a hollow vessel they could pour their radicalization through.

Trump's cabinet, therefore, is much like Hitler's.  Where was Goebbels going to go?  And Trump's true followers are much like members of the German SS, who fought to the bitter end.  They didn't see a future, literally, in a post war Germany where they figured they'd be killed, if not by the Allies, then by the Germans.  MAGA still shows up like the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, the French SS unit that went down fighting in Berlin.  They thought the alternative to that was a bullet in the back of the head.  Real Trump loyalist show up as they fear that if Trump fails, or more likely when he does, they're era is over.  And like the SS in Berlin, they fanatically hope that Der Fuehrer will pull off a miracle, which he won't, or that they'll be saved by some mysterious outside force at the last hour.

That won't happen either.

Many people have wondered how the Germans were so cowed by a leader who was sending them into a disaster.  It can't be said that Americans are.  Only 30% of Americans actually support Trump.  Probably an equal if not larger number outright hate him at this point.  If the election was held today the Republicans would loose both houses, and in November when the election is held, they will.  

But here's the dangerous thing.  Between now and November the leadership of the US is in the bunker and Der Fuehrer is insane.

I've long held that Trump would be removed in 2026 by the 25th Amendment.  I hadn't considered, however, the points Richardson raises.  He still might be but as she notes if Trump goes down, they all go down with him. They're a bunch of cowardly sycophants and they do not appear to be willing to save their country any more than Goebbels was.

Still, even in Hitler's cabinet not everyone was unquestionably loyal towards the end.  Himmler actually serious considered trying to cut a separate deal with the Allies and effectively remove Hitler via a coup.  There was even one SS member in the July 20 plot.  It remains possible, but only barely so, that the cabinet will vote to save itself.

We know that at least a few people in the cabinet likely are willing to do that.  J. D. Vance is one.  Marco Rubio another.  Both of them hope to be President and neither benefits from going down with Trump.  I've long thought they were playing out this string until they could act.  But two men alone won't get it done.  There's likely a few more, but only few. None of the ass kissers in cabinet meetings are amongst them.

Which brings us to this.  Over the next few months things are going to be extremely bad.  Trump's mental state is declining so rapidly it's difficult to gauge.  He's going to pull out of the war he joined with Israel which will be a major defeat he can't disavow.  The economy will not rapidly recover and he can't blame that on Biden.  He's lost the Hispanic vote and he  won't be able to get it back.  The Arab American vote which dimly voted for him is lost as well.  The people who are left in his cabinets who openly support him increasingly look like outright kooks.  The financial flood to his family is not being ignored and is very likely to result in post Trump criminal prosecutions, maybe of Trump himself.

And yesterday, a judge made clear that his obscene bordello on the Potomac addiction to the White House will never happen.

He's a desperate, and demented, man.

Trump, from now to November, will try to steal the November election.  He's already trying.  And he'll do every odd thing imaginable or never imagined to try to deflect attention form his failure.  There will be no limit to what he will try.  Invasions of Cuba and Greenland are possible, with Cuba almost a certainty.  Deals with Russia, or China, or whomever.  Attempts to cancel the election, or seize the polls are probable.  Ignoring the courts a near certainty.

The 25th Amendment should save us from this but might not.  Impeachment of Trump should occur, but will not, unless there's a massive post November shift in Congress.

Instead, expect things to get worse and worse.  And expect the few members of the administration who aren't willing to go down in the bunker to start resigning.  Vance can't, Trump being removed or dying in office is his only hope of being President. Rubio can, and he will, likely before November.

April 6, 2026

Trump's mental status is collapsing.

That post, posted on Easter, read like something a drunk man would post, and frankly but for the fact that we believe Trump doesn't drink, this post would receive that speculation. 

This post has renewed public demands for invocation of the 25th Amendment, and it should.  Trump is insane.  The reference to God in Arabic is insulting to Muslims, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with Iran or its leadership.

We're committing war crimes under the leadership of a madman.

I'll note I'm not the only one whose concerned.

I'd originally posted that yesterday as a standalone, which I've taken down as I've posted it here.  But what I'll note is that Klungman doesn't say what a lot of us are thinking.  Trump is, in my view, edging up on using an atomic bomb.

In normal times, which these are not, there'd be sufficient people around him to probably put a halt to that. Now there aren't.  The cabinet appears to be nearly complete flunkies.  We'll know this is true if Trump remains in power this week.  The military is being stripped of those who oppose rationality.

We not only live in dangerous times, we live in times in which the most powerful nation on earth is governed by a madman.

At this point anybody running in the fall with an "Endorsed by President Trump" (this means you, Delgenfelder) is absolutely unqualified for office.

By the way, the man whom Evangelicals and some others routinely praise as a great Christian spent the day riding around in Washington DC and visiting one of his golf courses.  No attendance at church.

cont:

Today is a very special day. It's a day where we celebrate Jesus. It's a day where we celebrate religion. It's an honor to be the president. Our country is doing so well. We've broken every record in the stock market. We've broken every record in our military. And what about the rescue?

Donald Trump in an Easter speech.  He's insane.

cont:

If I had my choice, what would I like to do? Take the oil, because it's there for the taking…Unfortunately, the American people would like to see us come home. If it were up to me, I'd take the oil. I'd keep the oil. I would make plenty of money.

Trump. What a morally bankrupt human being.

cont:

I'm polling higher than anybody has ever polled in Venezuela. So after I'm finished with this I can got to Venezuela. I will quickly learn Spanish. It won't take long. I'm good at language. I will go to Venezuela. I'm going to run for president.

Trump again.

There are a pile of these from today.  Trump is bat shit crazy.  Supporting him at this point is criminal, and not invoking the 25th Amendment is as well.  He's completely, utterly, insane.

April 7, 2026

Today we have the news that the insane Donald Trump, in addition to declaring his intention to run for the Presidency of Venezuela (don't discount that with any of the numerous excuses his apologist give for his bat shit crazy statements, we should assume he means it), is defending his statement about keeping Iranian oil on the basis that he's "a businessman" and "to the victors, go the spoils".

Today we're promised a full slate of war crimes.

We offer here a bit of a note.

Often people with a psychotic criminal drive they cannot control hope for intervention.  Trump is so out of control right now there's more than a little reason to believe that he's hoping for the same.  He has no way out, he's lived a life of utter depravity.  The 25th Amendment and hope supervision get him out of the mess he's created, and frankly away from a host of people he probably doesn't like.

Cont:

Even this threat is immoral.  

If carried out, it's murder.

Only the immoral will support a thing like this.  Donald Trump is a deranged monster.

April 9, 2026

Having learned that being a demented madman didn't impress Iran, he's back at it again with Greenland.

This man needs to be removed from office now.  The 25th Amendment needs to be applied immediately.

Last edition:

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Eleventh Edition. He's insane, and we all know it. Somebody close to him is watching it.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump, Mental Health, Saudi Arabia, The Madness of King Donald, United States and Israel v. Iran

Split Screen

This past week gave us a tragedy which shows how divided, by way of the country's reaction to it, the United States really is.  Oddly, it gives me a little hope that we're now at the point where we're going to start the process of overcoming it as well.

I'm writing, of course, about ICE agent Jonathan Ross's killing of immigration protester Renee Nicole Good.

Body cam footage of Renee Nicole Good seconds before she was shot by ICE Officer Jonathan Ross, a ten year veteran of ICE.  Prior to ICE, he served with the U.S. Border Patrol from 2007 until 2015, and before that he served in Iraq in the Indiana National Guard.  Contrary, therefore, to my suspicions, he wasn't a new or green officer.

Or, at least, I'm writing about it, somewhat.  What I'm more particularly writing about is the reaction to the killing and the instant polarization surrounding it.

Let's start with the killing itself and what we actually know if it.  

Good was killed by Ross on January 7, 2026, a few days ago.  ICE was operating in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a quite liberal Minnesota city in which ICE was undoubtedly wholly unwelcome.  Donald Trump has used ice in various municipalities, but he's sent it into liberal bastions as what may be regarded as a sort of taunt.  ICE, moreover, has acted like a pack of Brownshirts everywhere it's gone.  Not only as militarized police, but as Sturmabteilung, stormtroopers really, for Trump.

Good was there as a protestor, and she was blocking their way with her car.  To the extent we know much about her, she was a classic Minneapolis lefty.  Apparently originally from Colorado, she was graduate from Old Dominion with an English degree, she was a poet.  She had a daughter who was 15 years of age and sons who were 12 and 6. While not alway so identified, she presently identified as a lesbian and was "married" to another woman.   

On January 7, what was known to Ross was none of this at all, other than that she was blocking the road.  Another ICE officer went to confront her in the typical heavy handed ICE fashion, a fashion that no trained municipal force, and I've worked a lot with municipal police forces, would have used.  A trained municipal force would have, rather, simply walked up and said, "ma'am would you move your car?"  Based on her last words, she would have.

ICE, however, does't operate that way.  Like SA in German streets in the early 30s, or, if you prefer, like strikebreakers at Ludlow in 1914, they hit or strike first and ask questions later, having been given license to do just that. 

Colorado National Guard, many just newly recruited, breaking up a crowd with the flats of their sabers, Ludlow, Colorado, 1914.

This always leads to the loss of innocent life sooner or later.  Good had no legal right to block ICE, but what she was doing is a time honored, and mild, form of protest.  

Good appears to have turned her car wheel to the right, in compliance with ICE's wishes, but not in compliance with being drug out of her car, which an ICE agent was stupidly, but typically, trying to do.  I wouldn't have done that either, and frankly I have actually been in a vehicle, by accident, at the wheel, in the midst of a huge urban protest.  I wouldn't have gotten out my truck in that for anyone, including the police.¹  Ross, inexplicably, got in front of her car.  He drew his sidearm, and as she moved forward, armed as he was with a 9mm, a fine police weapon, he shot her three times, exhibiting the training that's carried over from the Armed Forces where the anemic 9mm is a known complete dud, necessitating multiple shots to kill.²   As a police weapons, supplaning the old .38 revolver round, which doesn't kill either, it was perfectly adequate.

Shot three times, she died, probably instantly.

There's a lot to break down here. ³ 

The thing, however, it reminds me of, is Kent State, in 1970.

Student Alan Canfora waves a black flag before the Ohio National Guard shortly before they opened fire at Kent State, May 15, 1970.

Which might give us a slight bit of hope.

For most Americans today Kent State doesn't mean anything at all, or if it does, that's because they're a student of history.  For some of us yet, however, Kent State is both a prescient moment in history, and a personal memory.

I was only seven years old or so when Kent State happened.  I feel like I can remember it, but that may be a false memory.  In 1970 we had a television and my father and mother watched the news every night.  The television, which we had only had for two years, was by that time located in the kitchen, moved from the living room in our 1958 vintage house which was not designed to house a TV.  It seems to me that I can recall this event from them, but I might not be able to.   Having said that, I can remember seeing some of the rioting of the 1960s on television, and seeing Jimi Hendrix on the news on the last morning of Woodstock, so my memory goes back to my early years.

Kent State was a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War and in the ushering in of the liberal 1970s.

The real lynchpin in the decline of American support of the Vietnam War was the Tet Offensive of 1968.  The American military reacted to the Tet Offensive brilliantly and completely crushed the North Vietnamese effort.  NVA and VC gains were temporary and despoiled by atrocity.   Only in Hue did the NVA hang on, and to their everlasting discredit by their horrific actions against the civilian population there, which should disqualify the current regime in Vietnam from evcen existing.  But in spite of that, the American public was shocked and horrified, feeling, really, betrayed by promises and assurances broken.

Much like some are now about the end of "forever wars" when the regime that promised the end to them kills Venezuelans for some reason, and then entertains oil executives in the White House shortly thereafter, while also acting as Putin's agent, for one reason or another, in making claims against a NATO Ally.

1968 saw the American public abandon support for the war in Vietnam, but not for the American soldier. A new Republican President came in promising to end the war with a secret plan.  Richard Nixon was going to make things better in some vague, undescribed, way.

The war hung on and 1970 arrived.  By that point college campuses were solidly opposed to the war.  The working class, in contrast, remained behind it, sort of, with it supplying the troops.  University students who didn't want to serve in Vietnam found ways towards deferrements, with people like Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, finding ways not to serve. Working class people, on the other hand, largely served, and in many instances joined the National Guard and ARmy Reserve, something that rich people like Donald Trump would not condescend to do.

This was the situation in Kent, Ohio, in 1970.  Often missed in the analysis of the terrible events that happened there, the students at the university were neither serving in Vietnam, or serving in the National Guard.  Those in the Ohio National Guard were from the town.  Blue collar men who didn't go to college, and because they were in the Guard, were not in Vietnam.  They were likely in the Guard as they didn't want to go to Vietnam, although that wouldn't univerally work for everyone who joined the Guard, contrary to what's commonly imagined.⁴

The Cold War National Guard was trained for the Cold War, not riot patrol, and in 1970 it would have had a lot of older soldiers in it who had served in World War Two and Korea.  Even when I joined the Guard a little over decade later we still had one soldier who had served in World War Two, and a lot who had served in Korea.  Soldiers do not make very good policemen as they aren't trained to be police and are trained to react to a threat with aggression.

Perhaps for that reason, it's always surprised anyone familiar with this role of the Guard that the Guardsmen at Kent State had been issued ammunition  That alone would have predisposed them to believing that they were going to need it.  What occurred such that they used it has never been clear, and there are of course conspiracy theories associated with it.  What's clear is that rocks were thrown and shooting started.  Allison Krause, age 19, an honors college student and anti-war activist,  Jeffrey Miller, age 20, a psychology student who was participating in the protest,  Sandra Scheuer, age 20, a speech and hearing therapy student who was walking to class, and William Schroeder, 19, a psychology student and ROTC member, also walking to class, were all killed by National Guard bullets.

It's the reaction to the event that causes our long winded recollection of it here.

In 1970 Americans were still divided over the Vietnam War, but the mass of American people had pulled away from strongly supporting it. The 1968 Tet Offensive had been an American tactical victory and a NVA disaster, but the public was so shocked it no longer supported the war or trusted the Government.  In the 1968 Election the Democrats paid the price and Republican Richard Nixon, with a "secret" plan to end the war came into power.

If Nixon ever had a "secret" plan to end the war, we don't know what it was, but it quickly became pretty unmanageable for him.  His basic strategy seems to have been to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese, and let them fail, which he ultimately did, but in trying to get breathing room to do that he ended up having to occasionally expand the war or the war's violence. The Kent State protests were over the invasion of Cambodia, which had just occurred.

Young college bound people had turned against the war.  Middle Americans, however, were hoping in Nixon to find a way out.  Kent State turned a lot of those people against the war as well.  Americans moved to the left.  By 1972  and 1973 they'd moved substantially to the left.  The collapse of the Nixon Administration with Watergate brought a wholescale distrust of the Republican Party that had come in to power as it was perceived that the Democrats had no solution to the war.

Sort of like Donald Trump and the GOP coming in as it was perceived that Biden was senile and Harris a bad candidate, and they were all responsible for COVID era inflation. . . 

The shift was massive.  Large elements of the American population went from weakly opposing the war to strongly opposing it, and strongly backing an increasingly left wing Democratic Party. The military, both active and reserve, was held in open disdain.  Law enforcement also was.  The active duty military would not recover its reputation for well over a decade and the Guard for two decades. Contempt for policemen remained widespread into the 1980s.

On the other side, however, right wing Americans backed cracking down on protestors and what happened at Kent State, regarding the use of arms as justified.  I can remember this still being discussed in the 1980s.  The right's hard drift in this directly helped shit it out of politics for the rest of the 1970s.  The pre 1973 Republican Party never fully recovered and in order to come back into power in 1980 the Republican Party had to seduce Southern Democrats who were hardcore right wing populists, thinking that they could control them.  The entire event went a long ways towards giving us the modern Democratic and Republican  Parties.

We are starting to see history rhyming right now.

Donald Trump was elected in no small part because most Americans eligible to vote, don't.  He's massively unpopular with large elements of the American public.  While his supporters do not like to acknowledge it, and some cannot believe it, the majority of Americans do not like or support him.  Trump himself, who is not a smart man, and whose been coddled by wealth his entire life, can't grasp why he isn't loved.

But there is no doubt that the Democrats helped bring his rise about due to ignoring many issues that we've referenced here for years.  Immigration is certainly one of them.  In reality, even though nobody wants to portray it this way except for those on the Republican hard right, most Americans have had enough of largescale immigration.  Frankly, most Americans would like to see the country have a smaller population than it does.  It's not just illegal immigrant that upsets people, it's immigration.

People wanted something done about that, but they did not want the Sturmabteilung in their cities, just as people wanted an end to the Vietnam War, but didn't want to bomb Hanoi and invade Cambodia to get there, and they didn't want National Guardsmen killing college kids on campus.  In short order, they'd make it pretty clear that they didn't want a President who covered up a paranoid breakin, although they did return him to office in 1972.

We're seeing the same thing now.

People don't want militarized police at all, and they don't want masked policemen patrolling their cities dragging people out of cars. They don't want men who have been trained as part of ICE special units shooting women in the street.  No amount of excuses as to why this occurred are going to matter at all.  Middle American started shifting this past week, which it already was doing.

The right in turn is making the classic mistake on doubling down on the shooting, trying to justify it.  The officer had PTSD, we are told in which case he shouldn't have been there and in which case it means, implicitly, if he had fully had his faculties he wouldn't have shot.  The shooting was justified as it wouldn't have occurred if she wasn't there protesting, which is true but is true about every government act of violence wherever it occurs, from Tehran to Kent State.  The film shows he was justified, just as, we were told at the time, the film at Kent State, which is in fact much more dramatic, shows that the Guard shooting was justified.  No, it shows the opposite.  

And finally, and not too surprisingly in our current era, there's the character attacks, which nobody who has participated in this discussion here has engaged in.  Renee Nicole Good was a lesbian flake.  She was woke. Well, she was a lesbian and she may have been a flake, but that doesn't mean, as is implied by those statements, that it was okay to kill her.

Nixon's managed to get elected, and handily, in 1972.  Part of the reason for that is that the Democrats, as they tend to do, just flat out botched the election.  They botched the election of 1968, and they did it again in 1972, although their 1972 candidate was better than 1968.  Had they run from the center, Nixon may well have lost.  It was all unraveling already however, and by 1973 he'd bring himself down in scandal.

Before he finally resigned, those around him were extremely concerned by his mental state.  He was drinking heavily and impairing himself accordingly.  Trump's becoming impaired quite rapidly by dementia.

Trump is unraveling, politically as well as mentally, right now.  Americans are already upset by his continual weirdness, and a man elected on the promise of no more wars seems really eager to start them, while openly admiring some of the worst foreign powers that exist.  Sending Guardsmen into the streets, as he has done, has been no more popular in 2026 than it was in 1970, and the same thing is beginning to occur. A National Guard that worked hard to avoid the errors of the 1960s and recover its reputation is finding it besmirched, and ironically by one of the very people who didn't serve in the 1960s.  ICE and the Border Patrol, which most Americans had no opinion on before 2025, are regarded, and rightly, with suspicion.  Now they're going to be disdained.

If there's any hope in any of this, it's this.  The country did get over the events of the 60s and 70s and start to recover, although it would really take into the mid 1980s to do it.  Looking back, almost everyone agrees that both sides were too extreme at the time.  Part of the reaction in 1970s was that Americans didn't want a government that would kill American kids, and after the completion of the Nixon regime it didn't want one that foreign kids either.  We're probably headed in the same direction.

Footnotes:

1. In my case I happened to accidentally drive right into the middle of a Nation of Islam protest on Martin Luther King Blvd in Denver.  It was large and I was the only person of my demographic on the street, and was driving a pickup truck with Wyoming plates at that.

I'll say, however, that the protestors were very gracious.  I could see them looking at me, but as Wyomingites often find, I was protected in part by my cluelessness.

2.  People hate it when this is stated, but the 9mm is a worthless military round.  

A military sidearm serves one of two purposes, use or ceremony.  If its to be used, it actually should stop the opponent immediately, keeping in mind that an armed combatant in war is a much different target than those the police normally face.  Most of the time when a policemen uses a firearm a single bullet from a light weapon will stop the opponent who is much less motivated than a soldier in war.

For that matter, in most trained police forces the first resort anymore is to a taser, not a sidearm.

9mms were a Continental European round in armies which at first used pistols as sort of a gentleman's thing.  Officers carried them, and rarely used them. By World War One that had changed, but the 9mm had set in.  By World War Two any soldier who had the option to carry a .45 ACP rather than a 9mm did, which is why you see British Airborne so frequently armed with M1911s.

The 9mm hung on, however, and by the 1980s those armies used them had gone to the multiple shot, "double tap" technique, acknowledging its deficiencies.  The round spread to the U.S. at the instance of NATO which wanted the service to play nice on this topic.

3.  Ross wasn't green, so that doesn't explain what occurred.  What might, however, is that he's seen too much service, quite frankly.

4.  For much of the Vietnam War the National Guard was hard to get into.  

The history of this isn't very well remembered.  The Vietnam War was a big war, for the U.S, from 1965 until 1972.  Contrary to what's popularly imagined, the majority of soldiers who served in Vietnam were volunteers, which is in fact somewhat complicated by the fact that people facing conscription often volunteered prior to being drafted.  Conscription itself had been in place since about 1948, after briefly terminating after World War Two.  Setting that aside, the U.S. had conscription pretty continually since 1940.  Most men expected to be conscripted form 1940 forward and therefore, for that reason, they planned on military service as an aspect of their immediate post high school life.  Those going to college and university obtained deferrements, up until the late Vietnam War period, which were just that, deferrements.  They entered the service after they were done with university, which was the case for my father and two of my local uncles.  Usually, although not always, that meant that they entered the service as officers and chose their branches, none of which was the case for men who were simply conscripted.  Added to that, as conscripts only served two years, the service often assigned them to Reserve units following their active duty service, which was the case for one of my uncles.  Indeed, men who were part of ROTC units often found that they were assigned to hometown Reserve units rather than active duty units, which was often to their frustration as it mean six years of Reserve duty rathe rather than two years of active duty.

As a lot of working class men who didn't intend to go to college didn't want to do two years away from home and disrupt their post high school lives, the Guard and Reserve were already popular options before the Vietnam War.  That meant that it was nowhere near the case that men who were in the Guard were avoiding Vietnam.  At the time a hitch in the Guard for an enlisted man was at least four years (it might have been six).  Therefore, men who joined the National Guard as late as 1965 and prior to the Marines being deployed at Da Nang were still in the Guard in 1969.  The war itself did not really start being unpopular until 1967 meaning that somebody joining the  Guard in 1967 was still it at least until 1971.  And the war would have had no impact on retention as the service was never going to call up anyone who had completed Reserve or Guard duty.

This does not mean that nobody joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam.  I know at least one person who in fact did just that.  But getting into the Guard was hard.  Getting into the Reserve also was, although I know one person who joined the Reserve in order to avoid going to Vietnam.

People who really wanted to avoid joining the service, however, were better off finding a doctor who would qualify them as medically unfit, or, up until the end when conscription deferrements changed, staying in university.

Finally, contrary to what people imagine, some Guardsmen in fact served in Vietnam.  Not many, but as the war went on some Guard units were called up and deployed to the war.

Related Threads:

In Memoriam. Renee Nicole Good.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Homicide, In Memoriam, police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Zeitgeist

Additional Labels:

Split Screen, additional labels.

The upcoming show.

 Next week, when the House votes, we’ll find out how many “bad, or very stupid” Republicans serve there. Predictions are that it will pass, despite Johnson’s opposition. Should the bill pass the Senate, which is not assured, it would put Trump in the position of having to veto it to block the files’ release. Given that he campaigned promising to unlock the vault on all things Epstein, it will be fun to watch MAGA react. Trump has seemed like Teflon until now, but this scandal is sticking.

Joan Walsh, The Nation.

That indeed will be fun.

What's in these files?

Or, more accurately, who?  

I have my theories, but I"m going to hold  them to myself.  I'll make one prediction, however.  A President desperate enough to try to keep these from the public, is desperate enough to have them scrubbed.  Remember the missing minutes from the Nixon tapes?

Saturday, January 4, 1975. 55 MPH

President Ford signed legislation making 55 mph the maximum speed limit across the US.

Nixon had done the same earlier as an executive order.

Last edition:

Friday, January 3, 1975. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment

Labels: 1970s, 1975, actors and actresses, Economics, Grand Canyon National Park, Havasupai people, law, Native Americans, North Vietnam, Racism, television, The Law of Unintended Consequences, USSR, Vietnam War

Blog Mirror: September 8, 1974: President Ford Pardons Former President

September 8, 1974: President Ford Pardons Former President Nixon

If Nixon had faced prosecution, and had been convicted, and had served time -- even if it was just "house arrest," being confined to his house in San Clemente, California, with only occasional visits from family, and no one else, for a few years -- the message would have been sent to every President, and every would-be President, thereafter: Do not do things like this, because you will get caught, and you will be punished.

Ford's pardon of Nixon sent the opposite message: As President, you are above the law. Or, as Nixon told David Frost in his 1977 interview, "Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal."

Absolutely correct.

The pardon of Richard Nixon set us up for Donald Trump.

Last edition:

Saturday. September 7, 1974. Independence for Mozambique.

Labels: 1970s, 1974, Communism, Mozambique, Portugal, Portuguese Mozambique, Socialism, Zambia

Friday, August 9, 1974. President Nixon Resigns.

Lex Anteinternet: Today In Wyoming's History: August 9, 1974. Presi...: 

Today In Wyoming's History: August 9, 1974. President Nixon resigns and the 60s end.

Today In Wyoming's History: August 9: 1974    Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States following the resignation of Richard M. Nixon.  Ford has a connection with Wyoming in that his father was part of a family that had shipping and commercial interest in Wyoming and Nebraska.  Ford was born on Omaha Nebraska as Leslie Lynch King, and his parents divorced almost immediately after his birth.

Nixon departing the White House on August 9, 1974.

Just the other day I posted an entry here titled Growing Up in the 1960s.  In that I defined the 60s as ending on this date (which I was a day off on, for some reason), when I stated:

So I was in school in the last three years of the decadal 1960s, but in reality I was in school for most of the 1960s, as the 1960s really ran from our commitment of ground forces to Vietnam until Nixon's resignation on August 8, 1974

For whatever reason, that we were near the 45th anniversary of that date, didn't occur to me at the time (the original linked in post here was obviously from five years ago, now we're at the 50th).

Under the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling on Presidential Immunity, I frankly think Nixon could have stayed in office.  Of course, the Court at that time wouldn't have reached that horrific result.

Last edition:

Monday, August 5, 1974. Inescapable conclusions.

Labels: 1970s, 1974, Cartoons, Crime, Richard Nixon, Watergate