The Plague Ship Meets The Ship of Fools

The facts seem pretty plain.

Over the last several weeks the COVID-19 showed up aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, CVN-71. Ships, and especially warships, are hothouses for infectious disease; cramped quarters, packed with juicy sailors, little or no opportunity for separation or sterility. Unsurprisingly, the ship's officers' were concerned for the epidemic spread of the disease.

It seems highly likely that the ship's captain requested that his higher permit the carrier to go into port and offload much or most of it's crew to prevent such spread. It's also likely, given the equally-hothouse "wartime" mindset of the current U.S. armed forces, that the higher at whatever level, refused permission.

The captain then mass-mailed a letter spamming his chain of command to, effectively, shame them into allowing him to debark his crew. I have no idea whether the captain knew his message would get out to the general public but I have to think it was at least in his mind, given that presumably he had already gone through his superior and been refused.

The resulting furor allowed the TR to port in Guam and the sailors to be debarked.

The captain was then relieved with cause.

Several days later the Acting Secretary of the Navy made a speech to the crew of the Roosevelt justifying his decision to relieve their captain.

Those are what we know of the facts.

So.

First, the SECNAV was entirely within his rights to relieve the ship's captain. Regardless of the urgency of his request, he did it in such a way as to embarrass his superiors and his service and that, any GI will tell you, is Death for a professional officer. The captain must have known this when he sent his mass e-mail and, I hope, also knew what the likely consequence would be.

Now, that said, the captain's request for evacuation was, to my mind, sound. As he pointed out, despite the ridiculous war footing We the People have allowed our nation to be set on since 2001, we are not, in fact, "at war". There is no mission that must be accomplished that requires the sacrifice of the welfare of the troops. There is no reason to assume that this warship could not have been docked, cleared, her crew tested and the infected quarantined, the vessel scoured clean, and then re-crewed and returned to duty. There is not need to have conducted some sort of amateur biology experiment by allowing an epidemic disease to infect the entire ship's company in pursuit of "herd immunity" or some such notion as was apparently the Navy's intent.

And then there's this.

It's kind of difficult to way what's the slimiest about this little screed that the Acting SECNAV pumped over the ship's intercom system to the crew of the TR. Is it the SECNAV whining about all the hate he's gotten for relieving their captain? Is it the ridiculous boilerplate about how the evil Chinks were tricksy and deceptive but the Navy is always truthful and you can trust us, really, I swear, truly, I-shit-you-not, to care about you? Was it where he called the O-6 "stupid" and "naive"? Or where he claims that he gave his personal word that no sailor would have to die unnecessarily? Or the part where he brings Joe Biden (WTF? Seriously?) into this totally-not-political oration?

Or was it later, when he claimed that he hadn't talked to the POTUS and wasn't ordered to relieve the TR's captain but was, rather, so shit-scared of getting Trumpenrage about the bad press that he shitcanned the captain before Comrade Stalin could drop by and joke with him about how cold it was in the gulags this time of year..?

Or is it now? Now, after the dumb fucking cluck has been beaten over the head with his idiotic blabber and realizes what a goddamn ass he's made of himself:

Jesus fucking wept.

When I was in the active service us grunts would talk about our officers and which ones we'd be the first to shoot in the back if it came to wart. Because although we realized that war meant some of us would die, we also knew that some of our "leaders" were dumber than a bag of fucking hammers and were likely to, if given the opportunity, get us killed not to accomplish the mission or for the good of the country but for some damn, dumb mistake or some ridiculous fuckup they were too goddamn stupid or egotistic to recognize as such. And that getting a better replacement for a dead lieutenant or captain was easier than trying to get the thimblewit relieved.

Well.

Secretary Modly has done his work, as he sees it. And I won't pretend that he didn't have grounds for relieving the captain of the Roosevelt. Every professional soldier or sailor knows what happens when you expose your superiors to public ridicule or wrath.

He did what he felt he had to do and fell on his sword for his crew. Fine.

The real question now is...what should We the People do about a meeching little shitweasel like Acting Secretary Modly?

What should his fate be?

What does he deserve?

And what will become of us if we are not infuriated if he does not - as he will not - receive it?

Update 4/7: The slimy little bastard resigned after being a lightning rod for anger at his sliming an officer who was willing to burn his career to protect his crew and hectoring a crew who are already infested with the Plague.

I'd call it a "happy ending" except Trump will replace him with another sycophantic GOP oxygen-thief. That's what we've got, here in the Plague Year.

Impeachment

After today's release of the investigation into the 2016 election and the despicable performance by the lickspittle who is notionally my nation's chief "justice" officer, the choice of the way forward is brutally clear.

Either the United Stated House of Representatives opens impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump.

Or the United States becomes Putin's Russia, where "truth" is what The Leader says it is and the residents are subjects, not citizens.

Forget the man's obvious senile incapacity. Forget the self-dealing, the lies, the performative cruelty, the emoluments. Simply concentrate on this; a foreign power meddled in the internal politics of this country. The current President knew of it, did nothing to alert those responsible for preventing it, and, instead, expected to profit from it.

Does that excuse the U.S. meddling in other nations' internal business?

Of course not.

Does that justify turning a blind eye to the current Administration's role in what happened in 2016?

Of course not.

And then...consider all the things I've cautioned you to forget. The lies. The corruption. The vile eagerness to run the nation only for the rich, the white, and the notionally-Christian. The brutal vindictiveness. The crass eagerness to embrace Naziism. All the other lawbreaking, including recommending that federal officers break the laws and promising pardons if they do. The reality that the orange sonofabitch thinks he's a king.

If this Congress does not impeach, we might just as we stop kidding ourselves about being a "republic of laws, not men".

It's really just that simple.

It Rains Downright

You who are regular readers here know that I am skeptical of the health of our Republic. Nothing I read, hear or see suggests to me that we are not far along in the process of becoming more of an oligarchy than any time in our history since the late 1800's. The brief spasm of populism and reform that began with the Progressive Movement right after the turn of the century and culminated in the New Deal has become sclerotic, calcifying into a corporatist menage of deal-making, influence-peddling and outright crony capitalism spiced with imperial dream-sauce and marinated in debt and easy credit.

I gave up on the Republicans long ago. Bush 43 wasn't a disease, he was merely the symptom of a group so incestuous, so vapid and crepuscular, so greedy and venal and stupid - exalting their own moronity because it wasn't "effete" and "indecisive", preferring to be decisively wrong rather than delay a moment for reflection - that as a group and as individuals they literally cannot govern. Their hatred and contempt for governance has resulted in hateful, contemptible government. Fortunately they consist of a slowly-dwindling group of white and Christopithocene Luddites, corporate magnates and power-worshippers whose disconnect from the world around them is making them the titanotheres of politics.

Here's a perfect example of the only sort of thing you can expect from them GOP circa 2010:

"Congress is preparing to enact legislation to pass a law with $4 trillion more for more bailouts. Should people who write the financial reform laws be the same ones who helped cause the crisis? Should taxpayers be punished and the big banks and credit card companies be rewarded? The time has come to take a stand. Oppose the big bank bailout bill."

This is a man called Frank Luntz, and what is he urging the GOP to demagogue?

This.

"The House bill would create a new federal agency dedicated to consumer protection, establish a council of regulators to police the financial landscape for systemic risks, initiate oversight of the vast derivatives market and give the government power to wind down large, troubled firms whose collapse could endanger the entire financial system. The legislation also would give shareholders an advisory say on executive compensation, increase transparency of credit-ratings agencies and set aside billions of dollars to aid unemployed homeowners."

This is the sort of thing the 2010 GOP finds detestable. Why anyone making less that 250K/year would vote for this is inexplicable beyond the simple conclusion that the American public is an utter ass.

Sadly, the Democratic Party is a fucking mess. It elected a callow sloganeer based on the mantra of "Change" who is demonstrating more each day that given the people and the factions currently in place inside the Beltway there is no possible "change" that benefits the polity as a whole. The most recent federal budget is almost a parody of the criticisms widely leveled against the U.S. government. Vast, bloated with deficits, and anchored on an immense military expenditure, larger than the largest of the Cold War defense budgets, larger than anything the U.S. has spent on its armed force since 1945.

The "health care reform" bill should stand as a monument to the ineptitude of the Democratic Party, 2010. Gutted and stuffed, eviscerated, leveraged, delayed, neutered, twisted and burned, the resulting mess does too little for too many, and almost nothing to effect the engine driving health cost increase, the pernicious fee-for-service setup and the feckless insurance outfits that can simply pass the costs on to the sucker - I mean, consumer...

And the current legislative setup is neither amenable to minor parties nor are the American people apparently capable of accepting the notion of coalition government.

In fact, given our apparently acephalic acceptance of moron-grade overseas filibusters and a domestic politics that combines the thoughtful gravitas of a schoolboy fart-lighting contest with the frenetic gotcha of a sorority bitch-queen eye-clawing catfight, We the People seem incapable of finding our own ass with both hands and a flashlight.

Christ, what a mess.

No, at the sunset the earth may drizzle dew, but at the sunset of my country's sun it rains downright.