Devoid of Decency: Dishonoring the Gold Star

Memorial honoring Gold Star moms in Yonkers, NY

In the wake of his ongoing efforts to hurl insulting cheap shots at the Pakistani-born parents of a U.S. Army Captain who was killed in combat while trying to shield his men from harm, Donald Trump is on a downward spiral.

It's been six days since Khizr Khan called Trump out in front of a national television audience from the podium of the DNC in Philly, yet Trump seems determined to engage in a war of words with a couple still grieving the loss of their son.

Most presidential candidates would've simply apologized or better yet moved on to change the media narrative.

But instead Trump has stubbornly dug his heels in, refusing to yield.

Determined to characterize two Gold Star parents as enemies, rather than as heroes as depicted by the memorial pictured above by sculptor Richard Masloski.

What could possess Trump to attack loyal Americans who eloquently expressed an opinion (albeit in front of millions of people) that scorched Trump's paper-thin ego?

Trump is the same guy who received no less than five deferments starting in 1968 that kept him from serving in Vietnam, including one for a bone spur in his heel that later miraculously healed on it's own once the war ended.

Same guy who kicked off the first full week of the presidential campaign by joining his son Eric in making remarkably uninformed comments about sexual harassment of women in the workplace.

To top it all off, he further demeaned himself in the eyes of millions of current and former U.S. servicemen and women, as well as civilians, when he accepted a Purple Heart medal given to him by a military veteran / rabid supporter and then had the temerity to joke:

"I always wanted to get the Purple Heart; this was much easier." 

Did you really want one Donald? 

You went to military school in the 1960's where you distinguished yourself as a ladies man and an athlete, then when the draft was instituted you got your rich daddy to find a doctor who wrote you a note claiming a bone spur in your heel prevented you from serving in combat.  

According to a Snopes.com article, a reporter named Katy Tur claims the man who gave Trump the medal says it was actually a copy - whether it was or wasn't, the damage has been done.

Unfortunately for Trump's delusional sense of false grandeur, the fact that Purple Hearts are only awarded to those seriously injured in actual combat is no laughing matter, and former U.S. Marine Will Fischer quickly recorded a brief Youtube video response in which he explained the kind of horrific physical, mental and emotional injuries that warrant being awarded such a distinguished honor.  

Lately there are any number of political observers, news analysts and influential figures asking the question on the minds of many Americans these days; when is Donald Trump finally going to have his "Senator Joseph McCarthy" moment?

At a campaign event in Omaha, Nebraska for Hillary Clinton on Monday the world's third-richest man, Berkshire-Hathaway Chairman and investor Warren Buffet, posed that very question before tearing into the concocted myth of Trump's acumen as a businessman.

McCarthy, the junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin for whom the term "McCarthyism" was coined by political satirist Herb Block, was already growing increasingly unpopular with the American people for his obnoxious wide-ranging campaign to uncover the scores of Communists and homosexuals he alleged had infiltrated various branches of the U.S. government; including the Army and State Department.

Boston lawyer Joseph Nye Welch

The Army-McCarthy Senate hearings were convened in 1954, just one of 150 different hearings McCarthy held in a two-year period.

By that time, Americans, including some U.S. Senators, were loosing patience with McCarthy's toxic mix of false patriotism, grandstanding and innuendo.

30 days into the hearings the tide shifted forever in a testy exchange.

Army legal representative Joseph Nye Welch, a plain spoken Harvard-educated defense attorney born in Iowa (pictured above), grew fed up with the unchecked absurdity of the hysteria-driven anti-Communist atmosphere fueled by McCarthy's excessively aggressive questioning and vilification of innocent people, he famously asked the now-disgraced Senator "Have you no decency, sir, at long last have you no sense of decency left?"

It was a long overdue moment, and one that effectively branded McCarthy for what he was and heralded the start of the end of the long dark nightmare of paranoid Communist witch hunt fervor that stained America's post-World War II reputation - and ruined the lives of so many decent citizens.

With each passing day, and the subsequent litany of verbal gaffes uttered by Trump, I keep wondering which one is going to finally put him over the edge and stamp him as the monumentally unqualified disaster of a presidential candidate that he is. 

After listening to his demented hate-filled fear mongering and paranoid delusional rambling at the Republican National Convention, I thought maybe that kind of exposure to the mainstream mass American audience might be the moment.

But it wasn't, where is the modern-day Joseph Nye Welch who can publicly denounce this obnoxious, intellectually vacant, preening faker?

Speaking of the horror show that was the RNC, reporter Matt Taibbi offered some pretty searing first-hand insight into the RNC and Trump's speech in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. 

As Taibbi observed of Trump's bloated closing night acceptance speech:

"When we finally pulled the lid off this guy, there was nothing there. Just a cheap fraud and TV huckster who got in way over his head, and will now lead his hoodwinked followers off the cliff of history."

It should now be perfectly clear The Donald has no decency left; if there was ever any to begin with.