I had nothing to say about what might have led Track Palin to engage in this latest very violent episode. I didn't feel it necessary to point out that this was but the latest in a pattern of escalating violent outbursts. I didn't even mention the rifle he held just inches from his girlfriend's face while he screamed "don't think I won't do it," as he cocked it.wesw wrote:just see how rube and scooter delight in kicking someone who has fallen.
disgusting. not much different than woman beating.
I didn't raise any doubts about his military record, because I consider all military service to be honourable, whether in combat or no, and while (a) his service record shows no combat infantry badge, even though he was in a combat infantry unit, and (b) as the son of a governor, no CO was going to risk his career by putting him in harm's way, both make it very likely that he never saw combat, I don't see how that excludes the possibility that he has PTSD or some other war-related psychiatric disorder, so it was irrelevant.
I didn't dredge up the knockdown, drag out brawl that he and his sister and his parents got into over a year ago, over some ridiculous nonsense, or how he went storming up and down the street afterwards with his shirt ripped off, screaming obscenities and giving the finger to everyone in sight. Or the vandalism spree he and his friends went on as teenagers, disabling over 150 school buses, after which his parents packed him off to Kalamazoo for most of his senior year. And how folks back home in Wasilla thought that joining the army right out of high school saved him from having the police come knocking on the door, which was going to happen sooner or later.
Because I have no interest in attempting to ascribe his behaviour to one cause or another. The guy has some serious issues that he will need to work through with either on a psychiatrist's couch or in a correctional facility or some combination of the two. It is certainly unhelpful for his mother to see how much political hay she can generate by turning him into a prop to beat up the president.
It's interesting that the transcript posted by Econoline omits the very part of the speech where she lays out why Obama is to blame. She starts with the allusion to his criminal behaviour, then how much the troops had sacrificed by the time they got home, then how it made them feel to have the president show no respect for those sacrifices or what they accomplished ...
She was smart enough not to lay it out in a straight line and to not quite connect the dots, but it takes willful blindness to miss the connection - it wasn't bad enough that they brought baggage back from the war with them, but they had to come home to a president who almost as much and spit in each of their faces individually, so utterly unappreciative and disrespectful as he is for they accomplished and what it cost them. So for some of them, like her son, that was the straw that broke the camel's back and pushed them over the edge into violent and self-destructive behaviours.
And I would have thought, that as a mother of one of these wounded warriors, for the sake of all of the other mothers and fathers of wounded warriors, that she might have mentioned something about committing the resources it will take to heal them all. Vets should be treated at least as well as illegal immigrants - that's the benchmark she set. No, the thing that's going to cure a vet whose PTSD has put him/her into a violent and self-destructive death spiral is - wait for it - a much more hardline foreign policy across the board, that shows the world that the U.S. is not afraid of sending more and more troops into combat, and seeing more and more of them come home with PTSD. The implication is astounding - that the way a commander-in-chief demonstrates support for the achievements and sacrifices of the troops is by engaging in an increasing number of armed conflicts that put more and more of them in harm's way.
But the crowd ate it up, to no one's surprise.
