The American people will soon prove their mettle or not

We are all afraid. I am oftentimes very anxious about using my own voice because the retaliation is real.

— United States Senator Lisa Murkowski admitted to a summit in Alaska

Standing in the Canadian Cemetery at Beny-sur-Mer it is difficult not to be overcome by contempt for the cowardice of Lisa Murkowski and her colleagues.

Canadian Cemetery in Beny-sur-Mer

She will receive no praise from me for being a truthteller. She is as faithless towards her oath to defend the US Constitution as is Donald Trump.

He assails it with malice, while she and her colleagues abandon it with their faithlessness.

The truth of the matter is that America’s elites are rotten to the core.

They are feckless.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer hides her face in the Oval Office

They are worthless in a fight over principle because the only principle that they truly care about is self-interest.

Let us be clear about something.

Those that have not measured up will not measure up.

The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Frank Murkowski raised a coward in Alaska. Nepotism sent her to Washington, DC, where, combined with other cowards, she appeased malice, and created the greatest crisis in the United States since the Civil War.

Susan Collins is the Trump collaborator from Maine. She helped seat his vicious Cabinet, and wants to serve another six years in the United States Senate. If she is re-elected, that would bring her total to 29 years in the Senate.

In a different era, a Maine senator named Margaret Chase Smith appreciated that there was something worth fighting for that exceeded fear of a mob or a tyrant. She stood alone on the Senate floor to deliver a speech entitled “A Declaration of Conscience.” In it, she criticized national leadership and called for the country, the United States Senate, and the Republican Party to re-examine the tactics used by the House Un-American Activities Committee and, without naming him, Senator McCarthy. She stated the basic principles of "Americanism" were:

• The right to criticize;

• The right to hold unpopular beliefs;

• The right to protest;

• The right of independent thought.

There are no such Republicans today.

With regard to Murkowski’s anguish over the consequences of her fear, they should be acknowledged as deeply true.

Isn’t it refreshing to see a politician give a straight answer?

The epidemic of fear is among the main drivers of the American crisis, yet it is rarely acknowledged.

It is not spoken of.

It is not covered in the media with very few exceptions.

Why?

It is amongst the most important stories in American history.

The land of the free and the home of the brave has been turned into a land where an innocent man can be snatched off the street and sold to an El Salvadoran gulag, and bravery has become a political liability.

Yet, with a few exceptions, the fear — once creeping — has settled like concrete on America’s corporate media, where each capitulation has brought new aggressions, fueled more malice, and sparked new fears.

The obvious was ignored.

The trivial was celebrated.

Disaster approached

Catastrophe arrived.

I discussed this at length with McKay Coppins when evaluating the fighting character and stamina of Mitt Romney, and the degree to which fear broke and silenced him.

Romney loved the comforts of his family and 25 grandchildren too much to make an American stand. He protected his family and met his fears head-on by obviously bowing to the reality that denouncing Trump now has a cost. It is not one that he is willing to pay, though he once looked in the mirror and saw a president.

Lisa Murkowski’s confessions of fear are a sign of conscience wrapped in a distress signal, but the fear, distress and/or dishonesty of America’s coward class are nothing new.

Fear is rampant amongst the faithless because in this moment all they can see is loss.

Their loss.

Fear is spreading for two reasons.

The first is an absence of love, and the second is a lack of leaders.

There is a lack of leaders in America’s boardrooms, C-suites, university board rooms, big law firms, and across the entirety of America’s profoundly corrupted political leaders — perhaps the worst in the nation’s history.

Overwhelmingly, corporate newsrooms are run by cowards. The anchor chairs are primarily filled with punch-pulling mannequins, who aren’t on your side and have no connection to America, the American people or anything beyond their vanity.

What is it that you see when you watch a Scott Jennings panel on CNN?

News?

I see an obscenity.

I know it is brought to me by a man named David Zaslav, who pays himself $52 million per year. He will no doubt be partying at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend in an inferno of cynicism and bullshittery that may be unmatched at any other location on Earth, save Davos.

Jeff Bezos is a coward. Every single one of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts would have held him in complete contempt, none more so than Alan Shepard and John Glenn — the yin and yang of the original seven.

They would have despised his lack of grit and toughness, and utter lack of moral stamina.

Bezos is no astronaut, and neither is his Botoxed Star Trek creature of a fiancée.

He did, however, destroy The Washington Post, and that will be carved in granite on his headstone.

Amongst the most pathetic cowards breathing American air today are Bezos’ editors, and in particular, the British Will Lewis.

Recently, he gathered his reporters together to praise them. It seems, according to the excellent Oliver Darcy, that they have amassed 100 scoops in the Trump era.

One hundred scoops. LOL.

It seems to me that they are missing the story.

There is no story where there is no bravery — only propaganda. That is what comes at the American people non-stop.

Standing in Normandy, surrounded by the markers of sacrifice and courage, it is not possible to reconcile the abandonment of the principles that free people must never abandon — lest they lose their freedom.

The grandchildren of the men and women who stormed the beaches, and then marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge have abandoned the legacy of great men and women.

There is a scene that plays out at the end of “Saving Private Ryan,” where Matt Damon’s character, now an old man, kneels at the gravesite of the Tom Hanks’ character, Captain Miller, who laid down his life to save Ryan’s, and says to his wife, “Tell me I’m a good man.”

It is a shattering scene.

I did not need to kneel at a gravesite in the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer to know the answer to a question about whether the American people measured up.

They did not.

When the question comes about whether we share anything in common anymore we surely do.

We all own this Titanic moral failure together.

Rahm Emanuel put it perfectly the other day when he said that the Democratic party needs “to get clean with people, own what we did wrong.”

Pete Buttigieg had it exactly right when he said that coming out of this we need a better politics:

The head of our country’s government is in the early stages of consolidating total power. We must of course reject this, but that is not enough. We have to respond by creating a different and better kind of American politics than we have seen before.

Yet, a fearful people will not reach the shining city on a hill.

They will not climb the mountaintop where King saw his prophesy.

The achievements of the American soldier, sailor, airmen, Marines and Coast Guard sailors buried in Normandy do not belong to this generation of Americans, who are unworthy of those sacred places.

What was a place of deep American pride during my first four visits has become one of deep shame.

Normandy is now a place where an American can go, and experience shame.

It is a place where the betrayals of our creed, principles, ideas and ideals can be met head-on.

It is a place where the epic ugliness of Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt and Pam Bondi can be reckoned with.

It is a place where the abominations of the Trump family and the un-American selfishness of their retainers can be squared.

It is a place where the coward can be measured against the patriot, and where the people who have the most in American society can be judged against the sacrifice of the 20-year-old who laid down his life so that they could have one.

It is a place where American ingenuity and genius can be measured against American entitlement and sloth.

It is a place where the fascist Donald Trump can be seen with perfect clarity, and so can America.

America is a place where an innocent man can be smeared as a terrorist from the White House by a petulant child wearing a cross.

America is a place where dissent is punished, and senators are terrified of a tyrant.

America is a place where cowards rule.

Cable news ratings are collapsing because of a design flaw in the coverage.

Washington, DC-based media sees the world in a stilted way.

The coverage presumes politics is upstream from culture. It isn’t. It’s downstream. That’s the fundamental disconnect, and why people are tuning out.

The American people will soon prove their mettle or not.

There was a quote from “Yellowstone” Governor John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, that struck me as deeply true when applied to so many leaders atop media, politics, technology companies and other giant corporations. Here it is:

Cowards rule the world these days with coward customs and coward rules. To succeed today all you have to know is how to blame and complain. I truly believe it is survival of the unfittest these days.

When this matter is resolved an American may go to Normandy with pride.

No American has a right to express gratitude to the gravesites of the people to whom we failed by both forgetting what they did and why they died, but failing to preserve for our children what we were given.

They gave us a chance to make the world better.

A generation of Americans gave people like Lisa Murkowski and Lindsey Graham their votes and trust.

They betrayed everything for nothing.

They gave the world Trump and stole America.

American greatness is real. It is buried in French soil. I can’t help but wonder if it skipped a generation, but then I remember something that I cannot forget.

I am an American, and what is being taken by Trump does not belong to him.

It belongs to me, and though he is more powerful than me I cannot back up or blink. I will not under any circumstances, for any reason, until the end no matter what the price may be. I know I am not alone.

We cannot relent. We cannot fail, but understand that we will not be rescued. The Warning will never, ever flatter power to seek its favor.

A terrible thing was done to the American people in 2024. In order to rescue the country from the abyss it must be faced by Democrats.

Joe Biden has decided that it is urgent for him to re-engage in the debate.

I find it ridiculous, as I do his cover-up. It produced the obscenity at hand.

The most important question for the opposition in this country is going to be the choice of an opponent to restore America. They must be able to tell the truth.

The first test will be about the sins of 2024. Any person guided by the power magnet under the table is unfit.

Any person who hides their face from fright is unfit.

I’m sick of unfit politicians.

I hope you are too.

I have never been more disheartened than I am standing in France.

I am on my way to the gravesite of Lafayette.

I hope I am not the first to tell him what Trump has done to what he and his friends left us.

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