What? Trump Struck the Right Notes? Imposs!

It's hard to decide what to do about Donald J. Trump, other than to devoutly hope that either Clinton or Sanders (but not Cruz, for God’s sake!) has his number, because every once in a great while, amidst all his usual garbage that should've been consigned to the Staten Island trash heap, Trump, unlike Cruz, will say or do something that is right on the mark.

For instance, not long ago, in a debate, he actually praised Planned Parenthood, saying that it had done some good work.   And I’m certain that in almost the same breath he said something else that was equally a big no-no among Repubs, but I must’ve been so stunned that my shaken memory couldn’t hold both of those severely unlikely shots at the same time.

More recently he declined to take part in yet another debate that Fox News was anxious to stage, in its urge to make even more easy money due to the ratings boost that that event was sure to bring, and so instead it had to be canceled.  Could it be that Donald J. or one of his leutnants had been reading this blog?  Because shortly before that I had strongly expressed my hope that there would be no more of those things, after a winter filled with them.

Another example was when Trump said that J. McCain was no war hero.   For that Trump was roundly attacked by his kind of people, though not enough that he was forced out of the race.

These kneejerk attackers showed their ignorance of the totality of McCain's military career, and all they knew was that he had been shot down by the Vietnamese and had survived five years in a prison camp, period.  In civilian life you will seldom if ever hear anyone in prison or afterward referred to as being a hero, even if something like DNA exonerates him 50 years later.  But when it comes to the military, for a great many people that one widely and grossly misused word "hero" is usually plenty enough.

What those indignants didn't think about was that it is almost certain that the Vietnamese thereby preserved McCain so that he could become a persistent boil on the American hide in his later years.   It could be said that they saved his life, not just once but twice and even three times, first by furnishing him with the ultimate encouragement to bail out of the latest aircraft that had the misfortune of hosting his reckless butt while they were high over Hanoi and thus removing him from the controls of war planes for good, the second being when a band of Vietnamese removed him from the purview of others who were rushing up perchance to shoot him after he hit the ground, and the third being when those people that he had heroically been bombing sight unseen from above patched him up after he suffered three broken limbs when he finished following his bombs downward, and also by feeding him and keeping him out of the rain and out of serious trouble for the next five years.

None of that is ever taken into account by McCain’s admirers, nor is the mayhem that he wrought upon the U.S. Navy's valuable warplanes earlier in  his career, when several planes were lost while he was essentially joyriding (which I am certain is what his successors a few generations removed regularly do around here where I live, by leaving a naval air station a few hundred miles away and minutes later nearly bursting eardrums by unnecessarily and without warning suddenly thundering directly overhead and thoroughly disrupting the deep peace and quiet of this humble American rural county that never did anything to them.)

It’s interesting that J. McCain contrived to be on the flight deck of the first U.S. supercarrier, the USS Forrestal, when, in July 1967, the absolutely unthinkable happened.  A launcher on one plane parked on the carrier’s flight deck suddenly fired a rocket that hit a second plane, bursting its fuel tank and igniting an enormous fire that ended with the deaths of 134 men and the loss of 21 planes. A newsreel camera recorded the young McCain running around while looking to see what he could do and probably getting in the way of those who had been trained in fighting disasters of that kind, if not one of that magnitude.

Not saying that McCain was in any way responsible for that, but there was the fact that such a dire and unbelievable catastrophe should have followed him there.  And no one can tell me that a lot of the Navy brass didn’t breathe a big sigh of relief when McCain was shot down and thereafter they didn't have to worry about him anymore, for the sake of their highly expensive flying weapons of war, for the sake of his own life while he was anywhere near those planes, and because his granddaddy had been a four-star admiral and his daddy had also been a four-star admiral and in fact was the commander of all the U.S. forces operating in Vietnam during that period.  And it may have been that lineage that accounted for McCain the 3rd even being allowed to climb inside a plane in the first place, after he had painfully disgraced his illustrious ancestors by lagging behind most of his classmates at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Sorry.   I just never saw where any of that ever recommended J. McCain, and I guess Donald J. didn't either, and he was within the bounds of reason to say what he said, though, unsurprisingly, not for the reasons that he gave – something about how prisoners of war can't be heroes or whatever.  But, with wars being the eternally messy events that they are, some could argue that even there he was not 100 percent wrong.

Also, as I've said before, I am still not convinced that Donald J.'s credentials as a racist are impeccable, even if he could be just too natively half-assed for that.  For instance I have a sneaking suspicion that whenever Trump orders that rainbow (i.e, "black") protestors be ejected from his rallies, he could actually be doing that for their own good, precisely because he doesn't trust the likely armed components among his supporters.   The air around him is always filled with non-sequiturs that he can grab, Palin-style, and fling back in response to his critics' shouts, but he has no good answers to their being shot.

Way back in 1927 a young man named Fred C. Trump, who by all indications went on to sire Donald J. Trump 21 years later, was arrested for refusing to leave a KKK parade that led to a brawl in Queens.   In the true Republican credo of Up is Down and Down is Up, Trump steadfastly denied that this happened, and anyway he would never want it thought that that kind of thing runs in his family, and as far as I know, he has yet to say anything along the lines of “All the black people in this country should be sent back to Africa,” as I was once told by a young lady who suddenly went KKK on me after I had thought that she loved me.

 So there's that, too.