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Tidbits - Reader Comments, Announcements AND cartoons - Aug 21, 2025, xxxxxx
President Trump says the Smithsonian is “OUT OF CONTROL.” Why? Because its exhibits dare to show slavery for what it was—an atrocity at the core of our nation’s founding and development. He’s ordered his lawyers to comb through America’s museums, hunting down the “woke” parts of history he finds uncomfortable. The White House promises to “align” exhibits with the president’s sunny vision of American “Brightness.”
When WWII ended, the Germans could destroy the evidence that they were ever involved. Many destroyed any photos of themselves in uniform and that generation knew how to keep their mouths shut. If America survives passed MAGA, it won't be so easy. With digital pictures and the internet, those pics will last forever. Your grandkids will know who you were and which side you were on. Choose wisely.
This cartoon was originally published on Pepperspectives. Click here to subscribe to Pepperspectives, where you’ll learn about the continuing threats to our democracy and the actions you can take to help safeguard it.
Donald Trump and his MAGA goons have yet again manufactured a crisis where no crisis existed. Even though crime rates in Washington, DC, have fallen in recent years, Trump has trumped up a fake crime emergency as pretense to deploy National Guard troops to our nation’s capital. This is just another part of TACO Don’s plan to assert authoritarian control over the United States. We must stand against fascism just as we did 80 years ago.
The United States military has long drawn its strength from something beyond weapons and warfighters: its reputation as a nonpartisan institution. Our armed forces serve the Constitution, not any political party or individual. That principle—once a bedrock of American democracy—is now under siege..
President Donald Trump has repeatedly blurred the line between military service and political loyalty. He has deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles over the objections of local officials. He has staged military parades timed to his own birthday. At Fort Bragg, he used a captive military audience to lead boos against his political rivals.
The administration started purging senior military leadership right from the get-go in an unprecedented sweep—firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Navy chief, and the Air Force vice chief. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth openly mocked Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman on the Joint Chiefs, as a “DEI hire,” and derided military lawyers as “jagoffs” who must be replaced with more compliant officers.
This is not just “shake-up” politics. It is a wholesale politicization of the Pentagon.
This purge, combined with the repeated deployment of the National Guard for political spectacle in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—with red state governors sending additional guard troops—is the clearest signal yet that America’s armed forces are being transformed from a national institution into a partisan one. It is a dangerous development—and history tells us exactly why.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered airstrikes against Iraq on the same day the House was scheduled to vote on his impeachment. Critics accused him of using the military as a distraction from scandal. What preserved the legitimacy of U.S. action wasn’t Clinton’s word—it was Defense Secretary William Cohen, a Republican. Cohen’s reputation for independence and honesty reassured Congress that the strikes were based on national security needs, not politics.
That credibility mattered. Cohen insulated the military from partisan warfare, preserving its reputation as a professional, nonpartisan force. It enabled the president to act abroad without ripping the country apart at home.
Contrast that with today’s climate. Trump has made no effort to separate politics from the Pentagon. Quite the opposite: he is openly reshaping military leadership around personal loyalty. Competence, experience, and nonpartisanship are being discarded in favor of pliant figures who echo the president’s rhetoric. When a defense secretary calls the top officers of the U.S. military “DEI hires” and the president dismisses them as “woke generals,” it is clear the goal is not effectiveness—it is control.
The deployment of the National Guard to Washington for political theater, the spectacle of military parades doubling as campaign rallies, and the purge of the Pentagon’s senior leadership—these are not isolated moves. They are pieces of a strategy that treats the military not as the nation’s shield but as one man’s stage prop.
History shows the peril in this. Once the military loses its reputation for independence, it loses the trust of the public—and the ability to act credibly at home or abroad. The U.S. armed forces must be seen as serving all Americans, not one political movement.
The danger here is not abstract. Civil-military experts warn that impartial militaries are the firewall that separates democracy from authoritarianism. Once military promotions and deployments are seen as partisan, trust evaporates. Soldiers become pawns in political battles, and the public comes to view the armed forces as an extension of one man’s campaign. History shows where that road leads—and it is not toward freedom. In nations where leaders politicized the armed forces, those forces quickly became tools of repression rather than defense.
Which brings us to the most chilling question of all: Is Trump normalizing military occupation of American cities?
The answer appears to be yes. Presidential memoranda used to justify the deployments are deliberately vague, written so broadly they could be invoked almost anywhere, anytime. Already, Trump has floated the idea of sending troops into New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland. His advisor Stephen Miller has openly framed the interventions as punishment for “big blue cities.” This is not about national defense. It is about political dominance.
Congress, the courts, and the public must push back now. If presidents are allowed to invent emergencies to deploy troops domestically, bypassing governors and local authorities, then we have abandoned civilian control of the military in everything but name.
If the military becomes another partisan weapon, America will have surrendered not only its security, but also the constitutional order that generations of soldiers swore an oath to defend.
August 21 is also the date George Jackson was shot and killed in San Quentin.
xxxxxx should never forget to include that. His actions — and those of people who followed his teachings and example, such as at Attica— marked a historic change both for the prison movement and black and progressive activists around the globe.
I’m hardly the first person to make the point that another country could not do more damage to the US than what is being done from within, but it did occur to me a long time ago that this was the case. If you were an evil dictator trying to destroy and take over the US, you could hardly to a better job than eliminating scientists and medical researchers, healthcare infrastructure, highly qualified military officers, basic corporate and environmental regulations, and economic data statisticians — to name a few. You’d hobble the government financially by plundering it. And you’d eventually put troops in the streets to intimidate the public and quash civil unrest.
Please join us on zoom on Sunday, August 24 at 10 am for a special meeting on the dire crisis facing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Please register in advance for this meeting.
The co-editors of the Palestine-Israel Journal will speak with us from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Ziad AbuZayyad and Hillel Schenker receive the Outstanding Contribution to Peace Award at the 2012 International Media Awards Ceremony for their work as co-editors of the Palestine-Israel Journal.
Ziad AbuZayyad is a former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (1996-2006), former minister of state in the Palestinian Authority (1998-2002), and deputy chairman of the Political Committee of the Euro-Med Parliament (2004-2005). AbuZayyad resides in Eizariah (Bethany), a Palestinian suburb of East Jerusalem.
Hillel Schenker is a member of the Policy Working Group (PWG), and served as Vice Chair and Chair of Democrats Abroad – Israel (2008-2016). He was involved in founding the Peace Now movement and served for many years as spokesperson for the Israeli branch of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Schenker resides in Tel Aviv.
