A Question of Honesty As A Question of Honor And Democratic Morality

It occurred to me this morning that if I'd been at John Kelly's repulsive press conference the other day I'd have been qualified, by his rules, to have asked him questions.  I do know Gold Star families, I'm related rather closely to a couple of them.  I'm old enough to have known a number of families who lost members in WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the more recent wars.  I don't know but suspect that the probability of knowing families of those who died in the military service to the United States rises sharply in inverse proportion to the wealth of the family you grew up in.  I would like to know how many of the members of the Trump regime would have been qualified by John Kelly to have the honor of asking him a question at that press conference.   If he'd limited it to Gold Star families, his own boss wouldn't be qualified.  

If the repulsive Sarah Huckabee Sanders' rule for questioning someone of Kelly's military rank were to prevail,  practically no one in the Trump regime or the Republican caucus in the House and Senate would be qualified to question him.  I would like to know what Sarah Huckabee Sanders qualifications would have been both under Kelly's rules of who was good enough to ask him questions and under her own even more repulsive use of his status for political ends. 

My parents were both veterans of WWII, my father was permanently disabled from the wounds he got in battle, if the VA doctors are correct about what killed him, he died, almost fifty years later, as a result of his battlefield wounds.   He was a marine, though not an officer but he was a marine who believed, absolutely that marines were not some kind of special order of creation.  He liked to joke that the reason he was a marine was because the Army had turned him down after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  

While both of them had some military officers they respected, highly, both of my parents were quite skeptical of career officers in general and both of them were absolutely dedicated to civilian rule.  My father, in particular, had a deep loathing for the way that Oliver North dressed in his uniform to give his lying testimony to the Senate Committee and hid behind it.  He thought that any marine who lied while wearing the uniform was a disgrace to the uniform and to the Marine Corps.  John Kelly wasn't wearing the uniform while he lied about Congresswoman Frederica Wilson but he might as well have been.  If he has the sense of honor he presented himself as having he would apologize to her and to clarify that his behavior the other day was not some kind of assertion of superiority due to his rank in the Marines.  He was presenting himself as a military officer but he was acting as a representative of Donald Trump, a draft dodger who has never served anyone but himself.  A lot of people have bemoaned the diminution of John Kelly, in whom many in the elite media have placed some ridiculous hopes that he was going to turn the ultimate self-server into a public servant. But the man who diminished John Kelly was himself.  I might honor the sacrifice of his family in the loss of his son in battle but ultimately the American military only deserves any honor in so far as it serves The People, the democratic order of the United States and morality.   It's up to John Kelly to regain his status by setting what he did right.   If he doesn't publicly retract his lies, he is the author of his own diminution.