So I came across this the other day and it was so odd that I've been fiddling with it ever since.
The grinning MAGAt there is one Ashli Babbitt, the only one of the treasonous mob shot dead on January 6, 2021 in the failed attempt to putsch Tubby off his golden throne and back into the chair behind the Resolute desk.
At the time if just seemed like just another freakish event in perhaps one of the most freakish days in the political history of the United States.
Since then, however, the wingnut Right - meaning the entire GQP - led by Tubby himself has beavered away to make the woman some sort ot True Christian Martyr cut down in the flower of her youth by communism, immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, or some combination of all the above.
In case you're not a student of Nazi iconography, the title of the post is from Die Fahne hoch, also known as the Horst-Wessel-Leid, the official theme song of the original NSDAP, supposedly written by the original Ashli Babbitt, a fightin' Sturmabteilung street brawler who was given a fatal injection of external lead by his Red Front street brawler enemies. So we've kinda been here, seen that. It's now dangerous and scary because it's Nazis; it's dangerous and scary because it's worked in the past.
Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.
It's that part of the emerging Babbitt the Martyr legend is that she was a veteran of the US Air Force.
Tubby himself has been banging that drum. Dead Ashli was "An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman...” according to the President quondam ex futuris.
Given the tidal level of tongue-bathing the U.S. public gives veterans of any stripe that's not a bad propaganda ploy. Brand your people as Real American Heroes and suddenly any and everything they do is American and Heroic, right?
So I've been kind of following the whole Dead Ashli Saga with a curious and jaundiced eye for a while now but only just this past week came across these two little related items.
1) Babbit had a total of 12 years time-in-service; four active USAF (2004-2008), two AF Reserve (2008-2010), and six in the ANG (2010-2016), all as a "security" specialist, meaning one of the air cops that pull gate guard and provide perimeter security for USAF installations among other things.
2) Babbitt got out as a Senior Airman (E-4), the equivalent of an Army Specialist.
That is intensely weird to me.
I know that it takes longer - it used to take much longer - to make rank in the USAF than the Army. In the 1980s, when I came in the Army if you weren't at least E-4(P) - meaning on the promotable list for buck sergeant - by the end of your first term you were a total spud. After a dozen years in? A decently competent troop should have been at least an E-5 and probably an E-6 - Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in the Army, Staff Sergeant or Technical Sergeant in the USAF.
To still be an E-4 after a dozen years in?
That seems pretty shocking. You'd have to have been either passed over repeatedly - meaning that your unit commander would have to find some pretty big reasons for not just 86ing your ass the next time your re-up date came around - or you had to have been promoted and then busted...also not a good reason to keep you hanging around the dayroom.
The endless Wars on Terror have forced the services to body-snatch pretty hard, though, so it's possible that Warm Body Ashli was better than a hole in the MTO&E, so there's that.
Still.
I find it intriguing in a not-good-way that the Wingnut Wessel of 1/6 turns out to have been - as a "military women" - kind of a pretty poor sort of "military woman".
But, then again...why not? She clearly missed the part in the words she swore every time she re-upped where she was supposed to "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and became, instead, one of those enemies herself and got killed as such.
But the big picture seems to me that, like Tubby himself, wingnut world seems to find some of the sketchiest human beings on the planet to make into heroes. It's taking a street brawling thug and turing him into one heroic martyr, or taking a sad act air force cop and making her into another.
I wonder whether that says more about the heroes, or the sorts of people who make up Wingnut World..?
3 comments:
The Royal Canadian Air Force can be strange about rank.
My cousin maintained air transport flight simulators (of which we had very few).
After 20 years in, he was only a Master Corporal.
The Airforce needed those flight simulators to work for all sorts of reasons and in that generation they were basically custom built hardware devices. Learning to fix them took years. But the TOE said that fixing a flight simulator was a job for a Master Corporal. So, he fixed them as a Master Corporal. For years.
That's why I was unsure; at least during my active time the USAF was reeeeeeal slow to promote - seeing first-termers re-up as E-4s wasn't shocking.
But...12 years? That's way too long to be parked at E-4. So either there was something in her file, or a series of commanders and first-line supervisors looked at her and said "There's no way in hell I'm going to make this spud a sergeant."
And just the equivalent of a buck sergeant, too - we're not talking about anything particularly demanding, here. But, apparently, that low level of supervisory competence was considered beyond Ashli for her entire service.
Which...given how she ended up? Is hardly a shock.
In the Canadian Armed Forces (the thing that I was in, that came after the three services, and before the three services came back again) we had the phenomenon of the Barracks Corporal: one of several guys in the battalion who was useless for pretty much any leadership or field task, but was dependable enough to keep the floors clean and the sheets and pillowcases counted while everyone was out doing other things, and liked it that way.
Of course, that was before the Internet started deranging people.
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