Very little understanding
Richard Spencer, who was fired as Navy secretary for his handling of a Navy Seal war crimes case championed by Donald Trump, has said the president “has very little understanding” of how the US military works.
Coincidence! Trump has very little understanding of anything else, too.
The extraordinary accusation came in an opinion piece published by the Washington Post on Wednesday evening, three days after Spencer was fired. Spencer called Trump’s intervention in the case of Navy chief petty officer Edward Gallagher “shocking” and unprecedented.
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Spencer said Trump had involved himself in the Gallagher case “almost from the start”, telephoning Spencer even before the Seal’s court martial started to ask that Gallagher be moved out of confinement at a Navy brig.
Spencer said he resisted because the presiding judge decided confinement was important. Trump ordered Spencer to transfer Gallagher to the equivalent of an enlisted barracks.
Spencer said he believes Trump’s interest stemmed partly from the way Gallagher’s defense lawyers and others “worked to keep it front and center in the media”.
Shiny. Shiny thing. Must pay attention to shiny thing.
After Gallagher was acquitted of most charges but convicted of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter in Iraq, he submitted a request to retire. In Spencer’s telling, that raised three questions for the Navy, including whether Gallagher should be allowed to retire at his current rank. The military jury had said he should be demoted.
But Trump barged in and said oh no you don’t.
“This was a shocking and unprecedented intervention in a low-level review,” Spencer wrote. “It was also a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”
“Very little” is a euphemism for “zero.”
Also, saying Trump has zero understanding of what it means to fight ethically does a lot to sum him up. He has zero conscience or moral compass or sense that there is such a thing as acting “ethically” in any context at all. He’s psychopathic-level empty of all that.
“Zero understanding”. That’s letting him off light. Trump can barge into a situation he knows nothing about and quickly gain negative understanding for all the reasons everyone here know only too well, but mainly because most situations aren’t actually about him.
I wish I were only joking.
Reality is such a disappointment. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the truth is implicitly understood to be so dangerous to the ruling elite that the memory hole, the constant rewriting of the past (including the re-editing of every individual copy of every written source in existence) performed by the Ministry of Truth, as well as the endless “evaporations” of thought criminals carried out by the Thought Police is of vital importance to keep the Party in power.
In the Star Wars franchise Palpatine is a brilliant mastermind, cleverly pulling the strings behind the scene and anticipating his opponents’ every move in advance while playing both sides of the board in a galactic game of chess to outmaneuver his enemies and make himself the undisputed emperor of the galaxy.
In every conspiracy book or movie (as well as every conspiracy theory that people actually believe in) the forces of evil are only able to get away with their sinister plan by faking evidence on a truly astronomic scale (holograms of planes hitting the World Trade Center etc.) while being more coordinated, more efficient, and better organized than any secret service that ever existed.
In reality, it turns out, none of this is necessary. In fact You can be a petty schoolyard bully, rambling drunken loudmouth, and obvious vacuumhead and with “corrupt crook” written all over Your face, committing crimes in plain sight and telling the most obvious, outrageous, shameless lies a thousand times every day, while – far from covering it up – shamelessly bragging about it on twitter, and apparently there are no consequences as long as You can find a sufficiently large minority of voters who hate the same things/people You hate.
At least the Illuminati – as well as Big Brother, Palpatine, Spectre, Hydra, The League of Shadows etc. – were “worthy” villains (i.e. villains You had to be pretty clever to not be fooled by). As I said, reality is such a disappointment…