It's a War Out There
They have declared war on us.
Washington, D.C., is now a police state. Sending in the National Guard, President Donald Trump seized control of nation's capital, even the police force. Crime is way down, giving away the lie of his "emergency." Washington's capable mayor, Muriel Bowser, is a Black woman, totally trampled on with brazen disrespect.
Or is it a military coup?
Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, the president's Confederate cabinet generals, are busy at work finding ways to decimate the American people. And we don't really know it yet.
They are like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Take your pick which is which. But they are lethal in their campaigns against us. And we don't know it yet.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy -- not a medical doctor -- just canceled $500 million for research on lifesaving vaccines. He left the national scientific community aghast. This is their lifework. At stake is further development of mRNA vaccines to resist bird flu, some kinds of cancer and future COVID-19 outbreaks.
In his choked voice, Kennedy made brief bogus claims, barely understandable. His blue eyes are made of steel.
Trump says he's a "star."
The black sheep of the Kennedy family is a warrior and a "predator," as cousin Caroline Kennedy warned senators before they voted.
In rich irony, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a doctor who favors seersucker suits, appeared to agonize before he cast the deciding vote for Kennedy. He's a Southern Republican, and his conscience could not overcome that.
Kennedy used to keep raptors. And let's not forget the dead bear he transported over a long distance and discarded in Central Park.
"He doesn't know what he's talking about," Dr. Paul A. Offit, the leading vaccine expert at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, declared. Offit has tried to debunk Kennedy many times and persists in fighting that noble battle.
Vaccines are one of the great advances in medicine, most of us understand. My mother had polio; maybe yours did too. In the 1950s, the vaccine made a wondrous contribution to American life.
Vaccines are right up there with clean public water, a fact proven in London when the dirty Broad Street pump at the Thames River was turned off to prevent cholera.
Smug Hegseth doesn't hide behind fake facts. Our defense secretary makes clear he cherishes the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy. He plans to insult all the Union soldiers buried at Arlington National Cemetery by replacing a maudlin Confederate statue there.
The "Lost Cause" myth, burnished for years, was -- and is -- code for white supremacy.
Arlington Cemetery's property was once owned by Lee as a large slave plantation overlooking Washington. Abraham Lincoln took it over as a "field of honor."
Hegseth threatened "total war" on those who oppose his concerted campaign to resurrect Confederate statues. Many were taken down in recent years, after the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officers.
(Oddly, Hegseth is from Minnesota. He attended Princeton, the Ivy League school for the sons of the South.)
Here are his intemperate words: "Our job is to ensure our enemies know exactly what we will do to them if they threaten us, up to and including total war," he said.
He means it.
No secretary of defense has ever declared war on civilians at home. That alone is a firing offense that tells you just how desperate and dangerous a time it is. But Trump loves the way Hegseth looks in his uniform.
Civil War President Lincoln, after the bloody stalemate at Antietam in 1862, declared, "The fact is the people have not made up their minds that we are at war with the South."
"They have not buckled down to the determination to fight this war through. ... We are in a terrible war that has got to be fought out."
To this day the war for freedom goes on, frozen in marble, as the lofty Lee mansion and the gleaming shrine of the Lincoln Memorial stare at each other from opposite sides of the Potomac River.
Lincoln, a shrewd public mind reader, has a message for us too. You can't win a war you don't know is on -- and we must make up our minds to win.
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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.
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