disobeying the prez

Contact my congressman over presidential misconduct?  Wait a minute we were talking about him giving me an order that I thought was illegal.  Thinking about it this military analogy is not a good fit.  If your sergeant tells you to take off your hat, I believe you have to take off your hat, but if the prez tells me to take off my hat, I believe I can tell him to go fuck himself, and walk away and that is the end of that. 

This whole thing came about in discussion of the CIA saying it wouldn't waterboard on Trump's sayso, and Trump thinking he is going to be like the CEO of the USA and he can give orders to his underlings and they have to obey him.  In a real corporation you can fire somebody who disobeys your order and hire somebody that will, but the prez can't fire a citizen or even the lowliest civil servant if that person doesn't work directly for him.

I did a little Birch research over the weekend.  That investigation was hard to find, and it was a low level affair operated by a right wing committee of the California legislature, and details beyond that exceeded my fifteen minutes of internet research.  Not that it matters much, the organization was just a paper tiger anyway.  I thought i was making a joke about the Birchers being communistic, but you say there were actually people at the time who accused it of being a communist front, but I have to say my internet research didn't turn up anything like that.

I saw the movie Trumbo Saturday night.  He was a screenwriter who was a member of the communist party who got caught up in that Joe McCarthy thing and ended up out of work and in the slammer,  Of course it's just a movie, and the movie had a slant, but he was a real guy and those things did happen to him.  It was the studios that stopped giving him work, but they were heavily pressured by the government.  Then the government subpoenaed him to appear before HUAC and when he didn't name names they found him in contempt of congress and that's how he ended up in the slammer.  That was a little shocking to me that congress could do that to someone, doesn't sound like due process to me.  Maybe that needs a little internet research.

The Calley case was a little strange.  The pro-war people wanted to prosecute him to show that is was an aberration in an otherwise well-run war, but they didn't want to come down too hard on the guy because they didn't want to offend the military.  You might think the anti-war people would have wanted his scalp, but their point was that the whole war was like Mai Lai so to make a big deal out of this one episode was a distraction and what we should really be doing is ending the war.

I have no doubt that often the little guy takes the fall for the bigger guys, but there was as lot of information that came out in the trial and it looked to me like Calley did this by himself.  Maybe he snapped or maybe he was always like that.  but then you know here is this like twenty-year old guy who has command of like twenty heavily-armed people who are also around twenty, and to them all these people look like the enemy, so you can't be all that surprised that this sort of thing happened. 

Shit indeed happens in a war, and I think maybe the people who are sending an invasive force into another country should take that into account before the ships sail and the airplanes fly, rather than acting surprised afterwards when it happens.