Cheese Medal

 

Back in the day there were certain decorations that pretty much every GI considered good shit. As in, you had that in the fruit salad over your left pocket? You'd earned them the hard way.

The Medal of Honor, obviously. 

Given the number of people who had to get killed to get one - about a third of the guys who got one after 1865 (when they stopped being handed out like candy...) had to get killed to score it - that's pretty much Big Casino. That's why you always salute the Medal holder first, even if they're a slick-sleeve private and you're Chief of the Army Staff. 

Yeah, that.

From there on down there are still some pretty well-respected gongs. DSC? Badass. Silver Star? Yup, you had to go there and do that. 

Bronze Star with a "V"? Yeah, you still had to kick some ass (just a Bronze Star, without the "V"? Maybe. The Army did hand out some pretty sketchy BSMs, although we weren't as fucked-up as the USAF...)

The "service medals", like the MSM, were always accepted as a sort of gold watch or annual bonus - you got them for doing your job and being there.

Then you got down into the weeds, where things got kind of hairy.

The "Army Commendation Medal", usually called an "Arcom", was sorta-kinda...I'm not sure if "respected" is the right word. "Accepted" might be better; you usually had to be doing at least decent work to get one, but not always. Remember that units were expected to hand out awards (and still may be, for all I know) and an Arcom was not outside the "doing what you're supposed to do at the time you're supposed to do it" sort of decoration.

Below that it got kind of ridiculous.

 The Army Achievement Medal, supposedly known as an "AAM" but in my service usually referred to as the "Army Acheesement" (from the expression "eating cheese", meaning sucking up to your superiors) or just a "cheese medal", could literally be had for the asking, and for damn near anything. 

A guy in one of my outfits got one for doing an outstanding job of the extra duty he was assigned as punishment.

Nobody respected the Cheese Medal. I collected, I don't even recall precisely, something like seven of the sonsofbitches. They were "worth" more than a worthless DA Certificate of Achievement only because you got a pretty ribbon to wear, but nobody actually considered them anything of value. In fact, NOT having at least one Cheese Medal by the time you made E-4 was considered a general sign of dirtbagginess or overall useless oxygen-thievery.

If you were too fucked up to have blundered into a Cheese Medal after a year or so in service you were pretty fucked up.

Which brings me to Devin Nunes.

Tubby is said to being prepared to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to this gomer tomorrow. 

Why?

I haven't the slightest. Losing in court to an imaginary cow? Being nearly as batshit as Orange Foolius himself?

Now I don't want to kid you; despite being called the "...supreme civilian decoration..." in Wikipedia it's been handed out to actors, musicians, dead baseball stars (Babe Ruth in 2018), and Fucking Rush Limbaugh. The criteria for the award aren't exactly...ummm...strict. 

Andy Griffith has one. So does B.B. King. Poppy Bush got one from Obama, but so did Chita Rivera and she's got way better legs.

Dubya hung one on Mister Rogers. Colin Powell has two of the fuckers, one from Poppy, one from Bill Clinton. Ronnie Reagan slipped one to Louis L'Amour for writing a shit-ton of potboiling Westerns. The guy who wrote Stuart Little - the kids book about the creepy humanoid talking mouse? - got one from JFK, forchrissakes.

But Devin Nunes may be a Wingnut Too Far. You start handing this sucker out to people like Nunes, for doing Devin-Nunes-stuff?

Pretty soon you're in Cheese Medal Territory.

Just sayin'.