By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
I just heard somebody call the Kentucky Senate race "a dogfight."
If it is, it's a Devil Dog against a lapdog.
"Devil Dog" is a famous nickname for fighting Marines. It suits Democrat Amy McGrath, the first woman Marine to fly in a jet in combat.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is a lapdog for Donald Trump and the union-despising, social Darwinist millionaires and billionaires who bankroll the president, McConnell and the other Senate Republicans.
Remember when Trump trashed slain American servicemen as "suckers" and "losers?" The silence from GOP bigwigs--sycophants all--was deafening.
"The so-called Republican hawks — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and... McConnell...have stuck with him through thick and thin,"wroteThe Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin. "They did not condemn him when he first slandered POWs, nor excoriate him for refusing to address the poisoning of yet another political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"They have not denounced his unwillingness to raise with Putin the Russian bounties on our troops. They did not disown him for commuting the sentences of war criminals; they did not rebuke him for slandering troops by accusing them of stealing money in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems there is no insult, lie or exaggeration about our troops too great to prompt these Republicans to declare Trump unfit to serve as commander in chief."
Trump's reported remarks came in November, 2018, after he canceled a visit to the World War I Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Belleau, France. The weather was bad; Trump claimed his helicopter couldn't fly and that the Secret Service didn't want to drive him.
But Trump really didn't go "because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day," Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic.
He also wrote, "In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, 'Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.' In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as 'suckers' for getting killed."
Many of the Marines killed in the battle are buried in the cemetery. It's below the hilltop forest where in June, 1918, charging Marine "Devil Dogs" braved withering machine gun fire to shove dug-in German troops from the strongpoint and help blunt an enemy drive on Paris.
So send a Devil Dog to the Senate and send a lapdog (and his master) to the pound.