We don’t do that
The president has called a big military parade this weekend in Washington to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary. It is also the president’s 79th birthday, and he enjoys parades.
Early plans speak of 6,600 soldiers across at least 11 divisions; 150 military vehicles, including 26 M1 Abrams tanks and 27 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. There will be aircraft and howitzers. It all sounds showy, militaristic and braggadocious, the kind of thing the Soviet Union did in its May Day parades, and North Korea still does.
We don’t do that. We don’t have big military parades with shining, gleaming weapons driven through the streets.
Sometimes I wonder of the people around the president: Do they know we don’t do this? Have they read any history? Are they like Silicon Valley tech bros who think history started with them?
Maybe they’re thinking that in a world full of danger it’s good to let Iran and China and the rest know what we’ve got, how our missiles gleam and our soldiers march. But that is just another form of never having read a book. If they had they’d know not only that this isn’t how we do it, but also that we don’t do it that way for a reason.
(Yawn!) Another double-standard
If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard [in Texas], that would be a direct attack on states’ rights. [W]e’ve seen Democrats try to take away our Freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. We can’t let them take away our right to defend ourselves, too.
Kristi Noem, February 2024, via Andrew Sullivan, June 2025.
This was how the cabinet secretary who literally doesn’t know what habeas corpus is described sending Marines into Los Angeles:
We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.
She intends to liberate Los Angeles … from its duly elected officials.
Andrew Sullivan, quoting Kristi Noem June 2025.
(Yawn!) Another norm shattered
Of Trump’s speech to the troops assembled this week at Fort Bragg:
The soldiers were vetted so they were all Trump fans; Trump merchandise was openly sold at the military base (including faux credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything”); the speech was crudely partisan; and the president encouraged boos from the uniformed crowd as he lambasted his usual targets — behavior that violates Pentagon rules. If disgrace were a word Trump even understood, it wouldn’t adequately capture the despicably un-American spectacle. But this, in the president’s mind, is not America’s military, but his own.
Who are those masked men?
It is unconscionable that in a free society, those with the power to arrest and detain are not clearly identifiable as such, with their full faces and names and identity visible. Protestors who wear masks are just as anathema to a liberal democracy, and wearing a mask in such a context should be grounds for arrest. But for the state to be anonymous and lethal is a mark of totalitarian societies, not democracies.
And sending masked men — like Putin’s masked agents — to grab harmless foreign students and bundle them into vans, or to raid Home Depots and car washes, is not a serious attempt to deliver mass deportations. It’s designed to tell everyone — citizen or non-citizen — that this is a police state now, answerable to one man alone, and you better keep your head down.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 