Boorda, Clinton and Williams: The Decline of Honor and the Rise of Rascals

The Nation’s Capitol, and the Nation’s military services, were rocked by word that Admiral Jeremy Boorda had taken a gun from his home, stood in his front yard, and ended his life.  It was 1996.  Boorda had heard that Newsweek magazine was following a lead that that would accuse him of wearing two service medals reflecting Vietnam era service to which he had no proper claim. Although Boorda served in the Navy and was stationed within the Vietnam area on ship, his ribbons included the “V” for Valor a designation typically reserved for awards in the theater of combat. Boorda stopped wearing the “V” on his ribbons when a military historical group began seeking information on his Vietnam era service via requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. 

Conspiracy theorists will chasten me for not understanding how this was a murder and an act done to hide deeper, darker secrets.  I beg their indulgence, because the point here depends upon the accepted narrative.

Boorda’s raft of military ribbons and medals reflected the rise of an enlisted man to the highest rank in the United States Navy.  His, by available information, was a career of dedication and service to the Navy, and to the Nation. That a man would suffer under such pain of feared humiliation for the Navy, for his family, and for himself, that he would end his own life may be odd to some.

If you grew up -- as did I, my siblings and many friends -- in a military family, it makes perfect sense. 

Duty. Honor. Country. 

These were more than just words.  These were ideals very familiar to us.  We saw, then, our fathers doing their duty. By their service, both they and we sacrificed for our country.  By distinguished service, they honored themselves and the Nation they served. 

We also experienced the pain of seeing failings in these principles. 

Our dad, who retired as a Colonel, spent his last duty years as the Senior Courts Martial Judge for the Navy’s Piedmont District.  Never one to bring his war stories to the dinner table, by the time he served in that post, I was old enough to have awareness of the more notorious cases being over which he presided. Murders, assaults, drug dealing, the occasional “conduct not becoming an officer and gentleman” (my recollection is that charge arose when one officer conducted an affair with the wife of another officer while that second officer was deployed).

We had also, of course, followed the news coverage of the My Lai massacre’s aftermath, including the prosecution of Lt. Calley. So we had our understanding of duty, honor and country given full relief both by their exhibition and by their omission in the lives of the military men and women among whom we lived, by whom we were raised.

Duty.

Honor.

Country.

I think it likely that the high personal toll of those ideals weighed heavily on Admiral Boorda’s mind. I regret that the toll was so high. I acknowledge, however, his determination that the threatened exposure of an alleged false claim of entitlement to certain military honors could only be soundly answered by the act of suicide. Of course, he was wrong in that. Suicide was not the only answer, nor was it an answer at all. The Nation, one that then was prepared to tolerate a President using an intern for oral gratification in the Oval Office, would have embraced him forgivingly given an appropriate acknowledgment, resignation, and removing himself from the National stage.

As it turns out, we have a rather high tolerance for high jinx from persons of position, prominence and wealth. To prove the point, simply contrast Admiral Boorda’s wrong – wearing Vietnam era service ribbons to which he was not entitled – with the bold, and bald-faced, lies of Hillary Clinton and Brian Williams.

Brian Williams now seemingly pays the price for having enhanced his resume. Williamshad claimed that, during coverage of the war in Iraq, he was aboard a helicopterthat was forced to make an emergency landing after it was hit by enemy fire.

Williams' tale of danger enhanced an acknowledged danger that no one would have reasonably disputed. Iraqi forces might well have fired on US Military aircraft. There was no need to add the embellishment, or to misreport the fact of his near presence to such danger. Still, without any seeming necessity, he did just that.

His fall came suddenly, when one who knew the pertinent facts stepped forward and contradicted Williams’ established claim. NBC’s news division has suspended Williams without pay for six months. Wags and pundits predict that Williams will not return to his former position.

Then there is the curious case of Hillary Clinton.

On several occasions, Hillary Clinton embellished her telling of the tale of avisit she and daughter Chelsea made to Bosnia back in 1996. As the storygrew wings of imagination, Hillary recounted how she and Chelsea were forced to run from the plane that just landed bringing them to Tuzla, Bosnia,to ground cover.  This mad dash was, Hillary claimed, made necessary by the presence and actions of a nearby Bosnia sniperwho firing on them.

The story had a ring of plausibility to it.  After all, Bosnia, Serbia, we all sort of remember, was deeply involved in some crazy violence and fighting.  Who would doubt the specifics of such an instance when it was so well matched to the generally understood fact that life in these countries, during a time of significant national turmoil, was quite dangerous? Unfortunately for Hillary, witnesses, including the entirely objective witness of the camera, showed that hers was a tale of danger as entirely cut from whole cloth as any Nancy Drew mystery. Ultimately, she was compelled by obvious and overwhelming fact to walk the story back from the precipice of patent prevarication.

Unlike Williams, Clinton’s deliberate lie on a topic where a lie was completely disconnected from any claim of necessity did not result in swift dispatch from the public scene. No. The former First Lady and United States Senator became the Secretary of State under Barack Obama. Imagine the sniggering up the sleeves as foreign ministers underwent prep with their aides for meetings with Secretary Clinton. Just cogitate on what it meant to have this Nation’s international interests guarded by a reputed liar. How unreliable could any assurance she made be thought to be by those invited to place their trust, their nations’ futures, on so shaky a ground as Clinton’s veracity and memory.

So Admiral Boorda, in a terribly sad act, committed suicide as a way, as he understood it, to preserve the honor of military service. Brian Williams tendered a weak apology for his misremembering of the details of an incident due to the “fog of war.”  Hillary Clinton walked back the danger laden details of a trip to a war ravaged Nation.

In the end, our losses from the lies and dishonesty are disproportionate. Admiral Boorda need not have committed suicide, and could have remained a strong reminder of the equality of opportunity that military service in the United States provides, having risen from enlisted typist to Admiral. He could have continued to provide a resource of understanding about our Naval service, its organization and operations.  Instead, he died on his front lawn at the Navy Yard, and left only the sad legacy of a suicide.

Neither Clinton nor Williams appear so moved by notions of duty, honor and country that anyone appears concerned that a suicide watch would be necessary now, for Williams, or back in 2008, for Clinton. Clinton’s glide path to power appears undisturbed by her open exposure as a liar.  What becomes next of the meteoric Williams’ career will be revealed by time.

Our loss of Boorda is just that, a loss to the Nation. Our despatch of Williams into the Hall of Television Shame seems like no loss at all. That we might even have the opportunity to vote against Hillary Clinton despite her lies about Bosnia, when no need to lie existed, says much about how little honor, duty and country seem to matter any more.

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry?

With our good friend, Lou Sharp, my wife and I spent more than a few Friday or Saturday evenings at Kate's Irish Pub in Springfield.  Those were nights when the music was live and "professional" (as opposed to open mike nights earlier in the week when the music was live and often just as good).

One staple performer, Dave Berry, would presage his transition from the family portion of his show to the bluer, adult portion with his rendition of "Alice, Who the Heck is Alice."  Some of you would recognize the song if I changed the word "Heck" to something that rhymed with "duck."

As I read the news, day after day, now some seven years into Obama's public campaigning for President and subsequent election to that office, I hear Dave Berry, leading the crowd over and over again, only in my head, an enraged crowd is yelling, "Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry?"

Well, let's see:

He's the President whose administrtion praised the Oklahoma mosque that sheltered and taught a black man whose moment of fame came in beheading a grandmorther whose apparent crime was not to express submission to Islam.

He's the President that leaves open the borders to those traveling from Ebola-plagued corners of Africa, resulting for the first time, in American history, in the presence of Ebola-infected patients in American communities and hospitals.

He's the President that can erect a second, interior fence to insure that he's protected from would-be invaders, but REFUSES to erect the authorized border fence to protect us from actually-are invaders.

He's the President with the erasable red crayon for drawing lines on the world stage, whose word is not a bond, not even a post-it note kind of bond that will stick unless it gets wet or a good wind comes along.

He's the President who figured out how to turn 3,000 American military casualties in Iraq into proof of a wasted venture by preferring immediate disentanglement to appease home supporters over stabilizing that nation.

He's the President that allows Federal law enforcement agents to export guns to Mexico in a hare-brained scheme allegedly to track their re-importation to the USA, but which resulted in those weapons being used to murder more than 100 people, including American federal law enforcement officials.

He's the President that sides with al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups ... in Libya, in Egypt, in Syria, and elsewhere.

He's the President whose rocket-running in Libya was covered up with the blood and death rattles of America's first openly gay US Ambassador and three other Americans.

He's the President whose administration called the murder of Americans aboard a stateside military base "workplace violence, not terrorism," despite the cries of Alluah Ahkbar by the murderer during his rampage.

He's the President that led the USA apology tour, bowing and scraping before tin-pot potentates and has been leftists around the world.

He's the President that promised you could keep your healthcare insurance and your doctor, then signed a law that took away your healthcare insurance and your doctor, then signed an executive order to protect some of you from immediately losing your healthcare insurance and your doctor to prevent an election annihilation of the Democratic Party in 2012 and again this year, but who will allow that healthcare law to have full effect and take away your healthcare insurance and your doctor after the November 2014 election.

He's the President without a record of accomplishments to which he could point when seeking office, having no record of private accomplishments in business, industry, science, research, education, philosophy, or any other field.

He's the President without a paper trail, setting aside one sophomoric editorial from his college days, he is that wonderment of wonderment, the man without evidence of a college transcript, a law school transcript, an employment record.

He's the President who lied about his origins to get a scholarship for foreign students (after all, Obama is a native-born American, right? so how does he qualify for foreign student assistance?)

He is not a cipher, as in a zero.  Because, while a zero adds no positive value to anything to which it is added, Obama brings NEGATIVE value to everything he touches:  he is the hair in your soup, the odd smell of sulpher in your tap water, the dent on the hood of your new car, the flat tire on your way to work, the unsettling call in the middle of the night bearing terrible news, the drop in your stocks, the theft of your identity.

He is the autocrat de fe.  He is a veritable dictator whose targeting of political opponents and uncooperative military officers and private industry makes Richard Milhouse Nixon look like a playground piker.  No mere tosser of taunts, the Machiavellian Obama turns loose the dogs of the IRS and the DOJ on those who express opposition to his ideology and his policy.

He tends the American garden the way rabbits tend your garden, eating what is not his, trampling what he does not own, leaving ruin in his wake.

Under his liar's tenancy in the White House, the number of permanently despairing unemployed Americans has breached 92 millions -- including 55 million American women, the numbers of hungry Americans dependent of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance from the fedgov has past 45 million on its way to 50 million, and the number of uninsured Americans has grown, not declined, as the abomination of Obamacare forces private employers to discontinue private health plans because what was a perfectly fine plan as far as employer and employee were concerned does not satisfy the standards set by a law that Obama had to sign into law to discover what was in the law.

Obama is the light at the end of the tunnel.  No.  Not daylight.  The train heading toward you at seventy miles an hour with a drunk in charge.

Now you understand why I have dreams of a nation rising to its feet and thundering its refrain, "Barry, Barry, who the heck is Barry?"

Sadly for America, Barry is the President.  Barry is the man who should realize that Speaker John Boehner is "his best friend."  Of course, as Barry's friend, Boehner proves himself no FRIEND of America or its People. The President of the United States is worse than a cancer. A cancer will kill you. But Barry will kill you, your family, your future, your hopes, dreams and aspirations as he works like mold, like termites, like disease, to destroy everything with which he has concourse.

All the while, Republicans in the US House of Representatives leave this disease, this whirling dervish of destruction, in power.  They have the power to stop the government until Barry submits. They have the power to put the asterisk of impeachment next to Barry's name in the history books as a testament to THEIR rejection of his decidedly incompetent, decidedly evil, and decidedly destructive policies, yet, with Barry's best friend Boehner at the helm, THEY DO NOTHING.

I hope you're getting the rhythm of this song.   I want it pounding in your brain.  I hope that before too awful long, you'll join in and sing that refrain:

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck is Barry.

Not in a drowsy drunken slur, but in the indignant, demanding and revolutionary tones of those who drove a wedge between the English Crown and our prized liberties.  The time is coming when what can be tolerated from that useless defecation in the White House will be surpassed.  In the absence of concise Congressional action to TERMINATE the Obama presidency, it may fall to the hands of good people, you, your families, your friends to POUND away at the tyranny until it falls to the floor.

Then, with derision, and slight remembrance, but soothed anger, we can go back to a more desultory refrain of

Barry, Barry, Who the Heck was Barry?