{"id":20499,"date":"2017-05-02T18:14:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T01:14:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=20499"},"modified":"2017-05-02T18:14:36","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T01:14:36","slug":"props-stooges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=20499","title":{"rendered":"Props & Stooges"},"content":{"rendered":"

Military leaders in my time would not have allowed this to happen. I want to believe today’s military leadership was suckered, that they have learned a lesson from this event and will make sure it doesn’t happen again.<\/p>\n

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Earlier today, the president appeared on the White House lawn with members of the US Air Force Academy football team, ostensibly to present the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy. Which would have been fine, except Trump couldn’t resist turning the ceremony into a campaign rally-style event, forcing uniformed representatives of the US military to act as props to a rambling speech on the gutting of Obamacare, defense spending, school choice, jobs for coal miners, construction of a border wall between the USA and Mexico, and complaints about Democrats. At\u00a0one point he actually turned\u00a0to the uniformed cadets to ask their opinion.<\/p>\n

The military can’t allow itself to be used this way. It makes us look like we’re endorsing one political party over another. Intelligent Americans\u00a0will understand the cadets\u00a0had no idea Trump was going to go off script and start talking about controversial and partisan subjects. But many Americans will see this and assume the military’s in lock-step\u00a0with Trump on ideological issues like health care, border walls, opposition to Democrats in Congress, and more.<\/p>\n

It should be obvious to everyone at this point that this president cannot be trusted to stay above the fray, even during a simple award presentation. He’ll turn every official appearance into a campaign rally.<\/p>\n

If I was the US Air Force\u00a0chief of staff I’d issue a blanket prohibition against USAF\u00a0members appearing in uniform on any stage shared with the president, and I’d campaign for other service chiefs to do the same. Question: why hasn’t\u00a0General Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, done this? Let’s hope that after today he will.<\/p>\n

A thought strikes me just now. Wasn’t going off-script and into highly partisan territory exactly what racist conservatives said they feared President Obama would do when he delivered a televised address to the nation’s schoolchildren in 2009?\u00a0Obama could be trusted to stay on script; Trump has proven he cannot. Lowered expectations and white privilege in action!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Military leaders in my time would not have allowed this to happen. I want to believe today’s military leadership was suckered, that they have learned a lesson from this event and will make sure it doesn’t happen again. Earlier today, the president appeared on the White House lawn with members of the US Air Force […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14,8],"tags":[2305,2024,797,2304],"class_list":["post-20499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-military","category-politics","tag-campaign-speech","tag-trump","tag-usaf","tag-usaf-academy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20501,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20499\/revisions\/20501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}