I’m cheating on my Project365 a little bit, this is not a photograph I took yesterday, as all of my other photographs have been taken the day before they were published.  But it is a photograph that I took, earlier this year, and set aside for today.

A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life wrote a blank check made payable to
‘The United States of America ‘ for an amount of “up to and including my life.”

(FYI, while I have served in the military and am technically considered a veteran,
I do not think of myself as one in the traditional sense.
I was never deployed nor am I a combat veteran, and hold those who are in the highest esteem.)

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It’s almost mind-boggling that there are people in this county who are more than willing to write that blank check to Uncle Sam, yet we’ll kick them out of the service because of their sexual orientation.  There have been items in the news about a US District Court somewhere overturning Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, followed by the Obama administration filling an appeal, and some nonsense about polling the military and figuring out how to repeal it in an orderly manner.

I’ve recently discovered The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan and while the volume of stuff he posts can be overwhelming, there is a ton of good stuff there.  This was posted yesterday:

Adam Serwer opines:

During the Bush years, liberals complained about his “imperial presidency,” and so the idea that Obama should simply end the policy by fiat would seem hypocritical. But the use of an executive order to end a policy a majority of Americans, including conservatives, want to end, is no more undemocratic than Republicans’ use of procedural maneuvers to thwart an up or down vote. Republicans holding the legislative process, and the fundamental rights of gay and lesbian servicemembers, hostage to their own homophobic prejudices, would still be the greater act of tyranny.

Yglesias puts this debate in context:

Filibustering defense appropriations bills is politically risky. And to do it in order to support a hugely unpopular position on a related issue is a giant risk. It’d be one thing if 60% of the public was on the Republicans’ side about DADT. But it’s not. Instead this is a 70-30 issue that cuts against them.

But not only are they getting away with the filibuster, they’re turning their obstruction into a political winner by forcing the progressive community into circular firing squad mode.

Several days ago there was a reference to how Truman dealt with racial segregation in the military:

Adam Serwer writes that “if Democrats can’t repeal a policy more than two thirds of the American people, including a majority of conservatives want gone then they can’t expect people to vote for them”:

In December the Defense Department is reportedly set to release a study showing that, like the American people, most servicemembers aren’t opposed to gays and lesbians openly serving. That’s in contrast to the vast opposition of most servicemembers to racial integration in the 1940s; if Truman had insisted on staying his hand until a political climate as favorable as this one had come along, integrating the military might not have happened until decades later.

Truman ended segregation in the military because it was the right thing to do, despite the fact that it was unpopular. Ending DADT happens to be both popular and the right thing to do, and Democrats today still can’t get it done.

Is there any wonder that people don’t have any faith in the government?  Something is both the right thing to do AND the popular course of action and the fuck-tards in Washington still can’t get it done.