OK, it’s been about a week since the last time I updated my blog, and the world is changing. I’m about fourteen hundred words behind on the month, so this particular entry is going to be a long, protracted mess as I try to recover my word count and get back to “keeping it real”.

Last time I posted, the US was trying to come to terms with death of George Floyd, a man who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since then, there have been daily protests, not only over his death, but others who have died at the hands of police. Those protests have lead to even more conflict. One of the more heinous of those events was the clearing of Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. Foreign journalists were assaulted, and peaceful protesters were hit with tear gas and rubber bullets. Initially, the park service denied that they had used tear gas, but since then, they have admitted that they used chemical deterrents and apologized for lying about it. Of course, that didn’t keep the Attorney General from denying it. Kind of crazy.

In Buffalo, a 75 year-old-man was pushed backwards by a couple of officers, and he fell, slamming his head onto the the concrete sidewalk. The video showed he was bleeding out of one ear. The two responsible parties have been suspended from the police department, and 57 other officers resigned from that response team in protest. I’d be curious as to how those officers explained their actions to family members, and how they rationalize in their own heads why the suspension of those two officers was wrong and why they shouldn’t be singled out for disciplinary action.

It’s pretty crazy out there. IN Lawrence, there was a peaceful protest downtown, but since then, it has been discovered that one of the protestors participated in the march, did not wear a mask, and has since been discovered to have been a carrier of the coronavirus.

I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen with the spike. The news has been pretty good this week, actually, as far as the number of reported fatalities. The number of new cases, however, is going up. There has also been some interesting reporting on the Florida and Texas COVID-19 fatalities, as those states have reported fewer than average COVID-19 fatalities… but in Texas, the number of pneumonia-related deaths have quadrupled for the same period of time. I’m going to guess that if they were to take a closer look into the actual cause of death in those patients, there would be a need to make an adjustment to the death counts.

And then there was the Atlantic interview with General James Mattis that came out in the Atlantic magazine this past week. The article can be found here.

I might have to subscribe to The Atlantic magazine.

Anyway the article is a scathing indictment of Trump and his administration by his former defense secretary.
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James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution

In an extraordinary condemnation, the former defense secretary backs protesters and says the president is trying to turn Americans against one another.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG JUNE 3, 2020

James Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Donald Trump’s Syria policy, has, ever since, kept studiously silent about Trump’s performance as president. But he has now broken his silence, writing an extraordinary broadside in which he denounces the president for dividing the nation, and accuses him of ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens.

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“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” Mattis writes. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.” He goes on, “We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

Mike Mullen: I cannot remain silent

In his j’accuse, Mattis excoriates the president for setting Americans against one another.

MORE STORIES

• History Will Judge the Complicit

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis writes. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

He goes on to contrast the American ethos of unity with Nazi ideology. “Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was “Divide and Conquer.” Our American answer is “In Union there is Strength.”’ We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.”

Adam Serwer: America’s racial contract is showing

Mattis’s dissatisfaction with Trump was no secret inside the Pentagon. But after his resignation, he argued publicly—and to great criticism—that it would be inappropriate and counterproductive for a former general, and a former Cabinet official, to criticize a sitting president. Doing so, he said, would threaten the apolitical nature of the military. When I interviewed him last year on this subject, he said, “When you leave an administration over clear policy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as much opportunity as possible to defend the country. They still have the responsibility of protecting this great big experiment of ours.” He did add, however: “There is a period in which I owe my silence. It’s not eternal. It’s not going to be forever.”

That period is now definitively over. Mattis reached the conclusion this past weekend that the American experiment is directly threatened by the actions of the president he once served. In his statement, Mattis makes it clear that the president’s response to the police killing of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests, triggered this public condemnation.

Read: The Christians who loved Trump’s stunt

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” he writes, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

He goes on to implicitly criticize the current secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and other senior officials as well. “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate.’ At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

Here is the text of the complete statement.

IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH

I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

From the July/August 2020 issue: History will judge the complicit

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 41 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Eliot A. Cohen: America’s generals must stand up to Trump

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

From the June 2020 issue: We are living in a failed state

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

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By the way, you should subscribe to magazines like The Atlantic, too. I don’t make any money off of my blog, but writers like Jeffrey Goldberg should be compensated for their work. Patronize their advertisers, too.

Also, John Kelly, another retired Marine Corps general and Trump’s former Chief of Staff reinforced the sentiment of Mattis in this article.

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President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff and Homeland Security secretary John Kelly said Friday he agreed with former Defense Secretary James Mattis’ criticism of Trump and said “we need to look harder at who we elect.”

Asked about Mattis’ statement by former White House communication director Anthony Scaramucci, Kelly said, “I agree.” 

Kelly told Scaramucci in the live-streamed interview that Trump did not fire Mattis, despite Trump’s tweets claiming he had fired his former top Pentagon official. 

“There is a concern, I think an awful big concern, that the partisanship has gotten out of hand, the tribal thing has gotten out of hand,” Kelly continued. 

In a statement released Wednesday, Mattis blasted Trump as a threat to American democracy for dividing the country and forcibly clearing mostly peaceful demonstrators  for a photo op.

Nicholas WuUSA TODAY

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That’s just part of it. Also in the news this week… the NFL. Commissioner Roger Goodell came out and admitted the the league was wrong in their approach to Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest when he took a knee during the national anthem. That must’ve rubbed some folks the wrong way, but the truth is, there was nothing wrong with Kaepernick’s protest. It was protected freedom of speech under the Constitution. He was very clear about his protest and why he was protesting in that fashion. But, once again, people did not want to accept his explanation, and those that needed to manufacture a reason to despise the man did just that.

I think part of the league’s statement has to do with the fact that they expect a lot of players to be taking a knee this fall. Might as well get out ahead of it.

That’s what I’ve got for now. I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.