Not knowing your enemy

The left continues to fail to recognize the pure evil of America's right-wing. A little after 10 o'clock last night, opinionators on both CNN and MSNBC were saying it would be difficult for Republicans to personally attack Lieut. Col. Vindman, a decorated Purple Heart Army veteran.

As I switched off the television I said to myself, that's just silly. Trump and his evil little cheerleaders love to attack veterans and especially men who served in combat in Vietnam. Rober Mueller most notably, but he is far from the only one.

Before I woke this morning Fox was already sliming Vindman.

I am old enough to remember McCarthyism. I did not understand at that time what was going on, but I watched it in action. The opinionators are too young to remember McCarthyism but that's no excuse for not studying it. What we're going through now is McCarthyism pure and simple.

Epater les bourgeois

The Republican game of keep away when Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper was due to testify to the House of Representatives takes us back to the very beginning of fascism.

Fascism originated in France as the Action Francaise. Its first tactic -- long before the Italians introduced of castor oil and the Germans staged torchlight parades -- was to run wild in the French parliament. The young fascists scoffed at the grave democrats, pulling their mustaches.

A democratic legislature is helpless against such tactics. It does not matter if it can be shown that the rowdies are hypocritical, uninformed or stupid -- and the GOP mob was all three. If the level heads don't react, they lose. If they do react ,they're down in the gutter wrestling with the hotheads.

Either way they are diminished and their institution is wounded.

As I have said before, I do not believe that the Trump fascists are consciously copying the tactics of the French, Italian and German fascists. For one thing, most -- but not all, some probably studied political science -- are too ignorant to know in detail how the French, Italian and German fascists operated.

No, this is a matter of attitude. The same childishness leads to similar conceptions. It is very characteristic that a  schoolyard bully like Trump would come up with this sort of meanness.

The rot in the Republican Party has gone very deep. It wasn't just the 25 most immature members of Congress. A number of others spent Thursday accusing the Democrats of running a 'Soviet' style of hearings.

This is McCarthyism pure and simple.

'i think he clarified it'

I'll say.

The bland, public lie that everyone knows is a lie is a trademark of the fascist in public life. I was reminded of Goering's refusal to recognize von Papen in the Reichstag on Sept. 12, 1932.

The bland pretense that the lie is truth is the  trademark of the fascist spear-carrier.

Snakes on a plane

Going to Turkey to lick Erdogan's boots. I guess Pompeo doesn't really want to be president, despite reports that he does.

Pence ditto.

Trump really has a genius for humiliating people around him.

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Reports say we bombed our own base in Syria, in order to deny munitions to the Turks or the Arabs or the Russians or the Iranians or whoever gets there first. I hope theAir Force aimed this time, but I doubt it.

I am reminded of the burning of the Navy's oil tanks at Cavite Navy Yard as the Japanese attacked Manila. That, too, came under the leadership of a first-in-his-class graduate of West Point. At civilian colleges, graduating first usually indicates smarts, but at West Point not so much.

The lieutenant who torched the tanks at Cavite wondered for weeks whether he would be commended or court-martialed. (In the background as I type this, Adm. Stavridis is saying that the bombing has the flavor of the skedaddle from Saigon.)

I'm pretty sure no one will be commended for this week's attack.

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Wonkette has been rather dull over the summer but the collapse of Trump seems to have perked up the humorists:

UncleTravelingMatt •

If the Kurds are more of a terrorist threat than ISIS, maybe we shouldn't have double-crossed them.

Priorities, priorities

From a Washington Post report on Rudy Giuliani's latest divorce. I don't care about it and read it only because I had thought the split was completed long ago. Can't keep up with the Giulianis and the Kardashians at the same time, I suppose.

For the first time in his life, Giuliani was really rich.

He was merely rich before — the divorce settlement gave Hanover more than $6 million — but now he was raking in serious bucks, commanding $100,000 per speech and private jets to fly in style. His bride accompanied him on all his trips; they required extra accommodations for staff — and an extra airplane seat for Judith Giuliani’s designer purse, which she was unwilling to put on the floor, according to news reports.

The purse, one supposes, flew first class.

The party of geldings

There are more castrati in the Republican Party than there were in the Sistine Chapel choir during its whole history.

History at my doorstep

In the context of arguments about the Second Amendment, RtO has noted more than once that the "well regulated militia"for which the amendment supposedly was written has never existed.

The only effective function that the militia has ever carried out has been to shoot workers on behalf of employers.

I did not know when I bought my house in Maryland that my front door is less than a thousand feet from the site where the first combination of militia firepower and modern technology was used to rob and imprison workers.

The Old Main Line of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road (today CSX) runs along the north bank of the south branch of the Patapsco River. My house is at the top of that ridge. This was the first efficient railroad in the New World.

In spring of 1831, the line was just reaching Sykes Mill (today's Sykesville, although the town was moved to the north side of the river after a flood washed the village away in 1868) about 25 miles from Baltimore. The contractor absconded owing his workers about $11,000; that is, for the entire winter's work. The workers demanded that the company make them whole or they would tear up the work they had done.

The B&O's agent paid over $2,000 in order to get back to Baltimore, where he got a warrant to raise a posse. Only one man (Jerome Bonaparte's ex-father-in-law, as it happened, a director of the railroad)  responded. This delegation approached the 135 workers to "negotiate."


Not to pay the men for the work they had done for the railroad. When the men declined to work for free. . . , I will let Edward Hungerford carry the story from there. It's in volume one of his official history "The Story of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road 1827-1927:

"The time had come for government to show its strong hand. To Brig. Gen. Steuart the sheriff now turned over his warrant, and at 10 o'clock that very evening more than 100 volunteers from the militia boarded a special train bound for Sykes Mill. (This undoubtedly was the first troop movement by train not only on the Baltimore & Ohio but anywhere.) Despite many delays the soldiers reached Sykes Mill at early dawn, found the rioters wholly unprepared for their coming, arrested 50 of them, including Reily, and the trouble was over . . . . A new contractor came in finish Lyon's job.  Whether his workmen were ever fully paid is not in the record."

We can be confident and saying that they were not.

Hungerford also does not say that the militia were drunk but you can but they were. The workers, Irish immigrants, were hotheaded but not daft enough to fight it out with hammers against the hundred drunken soldiers armed with bayonets and muskets.

A riot on the B&O, not the one in 1831, which was not the first and certainly not the last

Book Review 412: Bad Doctors

BAD DOCTORS: Military Justice Proceedings against 622 Civil War Surgeons, by Thomas P. Lowry and Terry Reiamer. 126 pages. National Museum of the Civil War Medicine Press paperback.

In 1861 as the nation headed toward dissolution and war the surgeon general of the army lay in a coma, the result of a stroke. Such was the idiocy of the military mind that he could neither be retired nor replaced.

The tiny scattered army would've had difficulty in any event even with leadership. There were hardly any physicians, no field ambulance service, no system of procuring medical supplies, no hospitals -- really no nothing.

There was not even any agreed concept of standard care. In the United States of those days there were numerous competing systems of medical care, all of them more or less humbug.

By a curiosity of history, the small city of Frederick in Maryland was and is the center of the problems of Civil War medicine. In 1862 and '63, it was the closest considerable settlement to the south of the two bloodiest battlefields of the war, Antietam/Sharpsburg  and Gettysburg. The wounded were collected in Frederick to be treated in numerous buildings suddenly declared to be hospitals.

A small private museum, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, is housed in an old building within walking distance of several of these hospitals. Its staff has compiled some studies along with the exhibits about the conflict. "Bad Doctors" (which seems to be available only at the museum store) presents a curious picture.

About 6% of the surgeons inducted into or hired by the Union Army were court-martialed. "Bad Doctors" presents a precis of the proceedings as well as a few short chapters on extraordinary cases.

Such is idiocy of the military mindset that the famous disasters of medicine in the Crimean War just a few years earlier had no impact on the thinking or preparations of American officers. Combat should have focused their minds, but they still were more concerned with the heinous offense of officers messing with enlisted men than they were with officers who neglected, starved, mistreated or otherwise abused the men they were supposed to care for.

Part of this indifference no doubt can be laid the lack of consensus on what a standard of care was. Thomas Lowry and Terry Reimer note that in one way the Confederate soldiers were better off than the Union soldiers. The Confederacy faced all the problems the Union faced with fewer resources. But that included lack of access to calomel and other poisons that were commonly used as medicines in those days.

Southerners tried to make do by turning to traditional herbal remedies and not far from Fredrick in Keedysville, Maryland, at a branch of the museum, the Pye House which was the headquarters of Gen. Meade at the Battle of Antietam, volunteers are recreating a medicinal garden of the war. Some of the remedies produced there were less dangerous than calomel but not necessarily safe either.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite so many factors working against success, the two American armies, although they were much larger than most armies of former times, managed for the most part to avoid the typhus and other epidemics that have decided so many previous campaigns. The work of the United States Sanitary Commission -- a Civil War innovation hardly mentioned in Bad Doctors presumably accounted for this.

Lowry and Reimer conclude that on the whole Union doctors did a pretty good job considering. The numbers court-martialed for eating with the enlisted men, drunkenness, thievery, treachery etc. was not out of line with the numbers involved in later supposedly more enlightened times.

Whether military medicine really did get better, as they assert, is a matter for debate. My uncle Hugh was badly wounded and France in 1918. The army doctors wanted to cut off his leg. He refused because they were all drunk and he got away with it because he was an officer.

Records of the courts-martials sometimes show that the defendants were heroes, dedicated healers accused of peculation and theft who were actually working outside failed army logistical protocols in order to get enough food or medicine to keep their patients from starving and dying.

At other times, clearly incompetent doctors were forced back on the army by state governors who had great influence on an army organized my regimental volunteers raised in individual states.

At other times it appears that courts martial were convinced that a surgeon was incompetent or ineffective but kept him on because there was no one else. The sample is too small to permit a statistical study but judging by the percentage of colored troops in the army against the percentage of doctors who were in colored regiments and court-martialed, it looks like black troops had a hard time finding even incompetent medical help.

Their death rates, much higher than those of white troops, suggest the same thing.

Here is the book's notation of a surgeon chosen at random: Jacob Quick of the 22nd New Jersey Infantry which shows the kind of information available in "Bad Doctors":

"Refused to attend a private suffering from a 'severe purging of blood,' cursed him, told him to wait until morning. Guilty. Fined one moth's pay. Second trial: cursed and attacked his colonel and stole meat and potatoes. Acquitted."

They had learned at the Museum was that by the Civil War you rock. Battlefield surgery had ended. Soldiers no longer had to bite the bullet Wally sawbones cut off a limb 95% civil War Battlefield surgeries use ether as an anesthetic.

Today the American military has its own medical schools operating within a scientific background that permits of an actual standard of care and a budget that is essentially infinite. It also has responsibility for the dependents of soldiers, which was not the case in 1861-65.

Military medicoes are only somewhat slightly better prepared to handle these responsibilities than in 1861 as anyone who has had to depend on Tri-Care will attest.