Thoughts on Mark Kelly

The Trump administration is starting what can really only politely be called a vendetta against Democratic Senators who have made a public statement warning service members against carrying out illegal orders, and Senator Kelly is in the crosshairs because he's still in the reserves.  Now part of it is simply petty; the Secretary of Defense commenting on how Kelly was wearing his awards.  OK, Hegseth, are you trying to prove your career is about chicken manure?  

More significantly, as a young skull full of much, I tried (and failed) to get into the service academies, and one of the things I and others asked was something that was clearly on our minds as we'd learned about the history of the Vietnam War; what are cadets being taught about the proper response to situations like My Lai.

The response was not tense at all--the officers we were talking with had clearly been taught well that there are cases where the lowliest private gets to ignore the commands of someone with stars on their shoulders.  

And that is the thing that troubles me about Trump's response to Kelly et al.  Hegseth at least ought to make clear that Kelly has a point, and his main response ought to be something like "Senator Kelly, precisely what examples do you have in mind here?".  The fact that he does not do this is, in my mind, very damning about the culture he's trying to create in the Department of Defence.  It's as bad, really, as a Naval Academy graduate ignoring the Honor Code ("We will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those among us who do.") to help Michigan steal a national championship.  (OK, I shouldn't care about concussion-ball, but the fact that Stallions so blithely ignored that code suggests to me that it's not as big a deal at Navy as it used to be)

And really, the example that I've got in mind is the Trump administration hitting speedboats with missiles instead of apprehending them.  Now it is possible that this is difficult, and it is possible that the boats would go up in flames anyways.  But that said, hitting them with a missile destroys witnesses (the drivers are generally poor people, not drug kingpins) to where the drugs are being made and shipped, and of course puts the cargo into bazillions of gallons of water.  

So at the least, it's poor criminal justice, as well as poor international relations--apprehend the wrongdoers, yes, and let the world know who's sending drugs to the U.S. and Europe, absolutely.  But get the evidence.

And since you don't have evidence to justify the action that we know of, it's at least closer to My Lai than I would care to be associated with.  Perhaps a judge will sign off on it, but I still don't like it, and if nobody objected to the action, that troubles me a lot.