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Depending on each day, I draft memos set up to be sent, in some cases, as much as a week after they are written. Thus, when they are finally sent the information could be a bit stale in terms of the topic but the rational is still provocative and the writing still, in my humble opinion, is mostly superb and well worth the read.
Second, when I post my memos for future reading/sending, if there are two for a certain date, the fact that they appear written at 5:15 AM, 3:15 PM etc. is not so. They could be written at any time.
I seldom get up early to write memos but occasionally I do have thoughts at weird hours and might get up to jot something down so I will not forget it because some of my better writing is dreamt, the words just flow and I want to recapture the essence and sentence structure if possible.
Today, Sept. 24, I seemed to be on a roll, had plenty of free time and wrote and posted, for future mailing, memo's 578 thru 583. This being 583.
As for the number, that refers to memos sent or to be sent so far this year.
I hope this clears up a few matters.
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So you think all is quiet around the globe. This is a reminder of what others are doing :
Sweden progresses with two complementary strategies to deter an invasion. A sharp increase in Sweden’s defense budget allocation will enable its military to move forward with implementing all core parts of the government’s “Total Defense 2021-2025″ plan.
U.S., Lithuania keep ‘close’ watch on Russia-Belarus training centre, general says. The top U.S. Army general in Europe said on Thursday the United States and Lithuania would work to preserve the continent’s peace “no matter who positions what, where”, after Belarus and Russia held war games and set up a military training center.
Russian plane enters NATO member Estonia’s airspace for 6th time this year. The alleged intrusion took place at noon Wednesday as the Beriev A-50 plane entered Estonia’s airspace near the Baltic Sea island of Vaindloo and stayed there for less than one minute, Estonia’s military said in a statement.
North Korea
BAD IDEA – Pentagon ‘open to discussion’ that ties formal end of Korean War to denuclearization. The United States is open to discussing the possibility of formally ending the Korean War in an effort to achieve “the complete denuclearization of the peninsula,” the Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.
Iran Threat
Iran ups pressure on Kurdish rebels. Iran is threatening to expand a bombing campaign targeting rebels in border villages of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, saying Iraqi Kurdish authorities must expel the rebels or the offensive will broaden.
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The best way to destroy a nation is through the destruction of its culture, patriotism and dependency of it's citizenry, education of their progeny etc. Progressive Democrats have been doing this for decades. They started in a subtle manner and now have become more open and aggressive. Along the way they developed many techniques among which are the weaponization of words, intimidation, and destruction and demonization of a person's character.
The best way to destroy a nation is through the destruction of its culture, patriotism and dependency of it's citizenry, education of their progeny etc. Progressive Democrats have been doing this for decades. They started in a subtle manner and now have become more open and aggressive. Along the way they developed many techniques among which are the weaponization of words, intimidation, and destruction and demonization of a person's character.
And
Make sure BLM survives/prospers:
BLM `storms troopers' gather at Carmine's restaurant in NYC as new footage shows real attackers in last week's incidentThe well-known recipe of terror by Black Lives Matter has been played out once again as a group of bigoted BLM storm troopers, some wearing black full-face masks, showed up on Monday at the Carmine’s restaurant in New York City to “protest’ against “anti-black racism” after three black women attacked ... Finally: +++ |
Biden Administration Orders Ideological Purge Of U.S. Military Academies
There is no greater danger to the country than this effort to politicize the military by ensuring that all officers hew to the political party line of this administration.
By John Lucas
John Lucas is a practicing attorney in Tennessee who has successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man and then graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger and fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. He is married with four children.
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And you thought witch hunts were history:
Daily DC Insider
The January 6th committee is starting to flex its muscles
A group of January 6th protesters
Image Source: The Blaze
Former advisers to former President Donald Trump have been served with subpoenas by the House select committee investigating the riots at the US Capitol on Jan. 6.
Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, Dan Scavino, a former communications director, and Kashyap Patel, a former Defense Department employee, were all served with subpoenas on Thursday.
Critics of Donald Trump and his backers claim that Trump was aware of the plan to attack Congress and that he assisted in the organization of the leadership of the violent demonstration on January 6th.
Of course, many conservative voters see this as a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. On the other hand, John Durham is finally revealing more details about the Clinton conspiracy against Trump. But that news isn’t getting coverage from the mainstream media
There’s sure to be more fireworks as the January 6th commission continues its investigation.
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Idaho knows best:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Based on Kim's Op Ed maybe she should have been nominated as Biden's Vice president.
Kim's reminds the reader of two things worth mentioning:
a) "...Mr. Biden campaigned as the ultimate grown-up and leader, and his administration kept up that facade for months. But the Afghanistan debacle was a reminder that Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates described Mr. Biden as having botched nearly every foreign-policy issue for 40 years..."
and
b) Our "screw up president" was going to unite our nation but instead we are witnessing the discord ripping his own party apart because of what Gates said above. The man is a certified Dufuss and is incapable of putting The Humpty Dumpty Donkey together again.
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Biden’s Reconciliation Mess
Democrats’ disarray in Congress is a sign nobody is in charge at the White House.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Papa Joe Biden was belatedly dragged from his recliner this week to settle escalating hostilities between warring Democratic siblings over a multitrillion-dollar agenda. No surprise that his two days of meetings accomplished nothing.
Mr. Biden campaigned as the ultimate grown-up and leader, and his administration kept up that facade for months. But the Afghanistan debacle was a reminder that Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates described Mr. Biden as having botched nearly every foreign-policy issue for 40 years. Today’s party fight over its $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is likewise a reminder that a man who spent a Senate career drifting with the Democratic tides is ill-equipped to step up with a vision that will unite battling factions.
Not that the squabblers couldn’t benefit from some time-outs. Speaker Nancy Pelosi in late August dragooned her centrists into voting to begin a reconciliation bill, in return for her promise they’d get a vote on their bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill no later than Sept. 27. Democratic leaders figured a month was long enough to bully members into submission on the reconciliation bill’s substance and $3.5 trillion price tag, and to tie the two votes together.
But fights broke out over Medicare, drug pricing, climate provisions, and means testing. House committee chairmen rolled over objections and rushed out bills, only to confront a stalled Senate. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have refused to be rolled or rushed on the package, and the Monday deadline looms. Centrists say: Give us the infrastructure vote or reconciliation is toast. Progressives say: Give us all $3.5 trillion of our reconciliation dollars, or infrastructure is history.
Meanwhile, the accusations and name-calling have burst into the open, exposing deep divides. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is tweeting and retweeting accusations that her party’s centrists are owned by “Pharma” and the oil industry. Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, blasted House Democrats who pushed back on drug price controls for daring to “step out of line at this juncture” and called for primary challenges. Oregon progressive Rep. Pete De Fazio griped that the infrastructure bill was “crap” written by “12 rump senators” (to include Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema) who are “all pro-fossil-fuel” and “such jerks” to boot. Notice the “such.”
It was left to John Podesta, who served as President Clinton’s White House chief of staff, to this week send an unsolicited memo to every Democratic office, warning that the party is at risk of implosion. He advised centrists to embrace the reconciliation process. More notable, he bluntly counseled progressives to climb down from their $3.5 trillion demand, pointing out the obvious—that they don’t have the majorities or the mandate to pass such an agenda.
Congress’s Climate Crackup September 16, 2021
Reality Bites Reconciliation September 9, 2021
Biden’s Second Surrender September 2, 2021
Pelosi’s Cannon Fodder August 26, 2021
Democrats Run From Afghanistan August 19, 2021
The question is why the man who matters—the president—wasn’t making that point from the start. Mr. Biden ran as a centrist, an alternative to the wild Sanders agenda. His campaign—to the extent he had one—centered on controlling Covid and restoring political norms. Even that agenda was a tough sell. He won a narrow victory; House Democrats lost seats; Chuck Schumer ended up majority leader in a 50-50 Senate.
All this counseled a modest approach—assuming Mr. Biden had an approach. His career has consisted of latching on to whatever is the latest Democratic fad, with no real defining ideology of his own. Upon winning his primary battle, he promptly invited the vanquished Mr. Sanders to write his policies. He allowed his ego to be stroked by aides and historians who assured him his presidency could be “historic.” The result has been a mammoth Bernie agenda strapped to a limited White House mandate, and a president who is along for the ride.
The Biden White House may yet clean up this mess, but the bigger point is that a Biden in charge wouldn’t be here in the first place. Rather than invite Mr. Manchin to the Oval Office last week to cajole him (unsuccessfully) to support $3.5 trillion, he’d have sat down with the West Virginian months ago to understand his bottom lines. Ditto Ms. Sinema and House centrists.
Rather than letting progressives bid up expectations for an unprecedented and wildly uncertain reconciliation strategy, the president would have explained political reality to his party. He’d have insisted it give him a win by unifying around an enhanced infrastructure bill, one that strategically picked off GOP support. A Biden in charge would at this moment be crowing that he’d passed a Covid relief bill, and finally ushered a national infrastructure reboot over the congressional finish line.
An argument can be made that the best thing that might happen to Mr. Biden now would be the collapse of reconciliation. The press would label it a defeat, and progressives would howl. But if a breakdown took the monstrosity off the table, it would provide the president an opportunity to reset—to refocus on a bipartisan bill and to recast himself as reasonable and in charge. He might even save his party from a thumping next fall.
All it would take is for Mr. Biden to act, for once, like the man he sold himself as in the election
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Several days ago I gave my view of Merkel's time as Germany's Prime Minister. Today I am posting an Op Ed that provides further insight. I particularly loved the author's line : "...where you stand depends on where you sit..."
As of now Germans seem to be happy to rid themselves of Merkel and comfortable at the prospect of a stitched together government.
Sort of accords with what the Israelis wanted.
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Post-Merkel Germany’s Race for the Center
Regardless of who wins, Sunday’s election will deliver a coalition that governs by consensus.
By Josef Joffe
Who will replace Germany’s eternal chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Sunday’s election? None of the six parties in the Bundestag will capture a majority, and so it will be on to Act II: coalition-building, which may take weeks, even months. But it hardly matters whom the Parliament finally anoints. The voters will have affirmed tepid centrism.
That isn’t the Germany of the 20th century. “Centrists” the Kaiser and Führer were not; they wanted to fuse Europe into a German fiefdom. Such types are ancient history.
Germany’s new players are essentially unknown in the U.S. Leading in the polls is the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz. Behind him trots Armin Laschet, the equally uninspiring candidate of Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats. He is trailed by the youngish Annalena Baerbock of the semi-left Greens and Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats. Mr. Lindner, an old-style liberal, speaks for them all: “We secure the country’s center.”
Each candidate could win a place at the cabinet table. Whatever the winner’s political coloration, the government will be gray. That is a blessing—or curse—of multiparty government. Two-party systems like America’s and Britain’s tend to polarize. Coalitions of the many gravitate toward the middle; otherwise the parties couldn’t govern together.
Germany in 2021 is a consensus country. By American standards, that looks like sheer bliss. A change of government will shift things only a couple of degrees to the left or right. All Germany’s political parties, not only the Greens, want to save the planet. On taxes, the Greens and the “reds” (the color of the Social Democrats), want to soak the rich a bit. Anybody for lowering taxes? No, but the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats promise not to raise them.
Such nuances matter little, given the Modern Monetary Theory that delivers unlimited funds at close to zero interest. Like every Western government, the new German government won’t rein in a state grown fat on Covid trillions. Like the Biden administration, it will expand entitlements. Why penny-pinch or squeeze out more taxes if you can pay off your clientele for free? This new faith now rules from Sacramento to Stockholm. The U.S. is being Europeanized.
Yet trans-Atlantic togetherness ends at the water’s edge. Like his predecessors, Mr. Biden won’t get Berlin to invest seriously in defense and assume a strategic role befitting Germany’s heft as the world’s fourth-largest economy. In their party program, Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats didn’t even mention spending the magic 2% of gross domestic product on military defense that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed to years ago.
Mr. Biden would love to recruit Germany—and the rest of Europe—into a hands-on alliance against Russia and China. He will be disappointed, though the Greens have recently stepped up their rhetoric against those two enemies of human rights. No German political party will fall in behind Mr. Biden. Berlin lacks the will and wherewithal to take on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. China is too far away to pose a direct threat, while Russia is too close to risk riling. As in real life, where you stand depends on where you sit.
The Germans and French will dispatch the occasional warship to the Indo-Pacific, but for show, not combat. The reflex is to evade entrapment in America’s global conflicts; let the Japanese, Indians and Australians help the U.S. defang Chinese expansionism. Naturally, the Afghan experience hasn’t galvanized European resolve. The allies weren’t even consulted about the chaotic American pullout. The French won’t forgive the U.S. for torpedoing their nuclear-submarine deal with Australia.
It is a safe bet that either Mr. Scholz or Mr. Laschet will lead the next government, perhaps with a third party in tow. Any threesome will plod along in Merkel’s tracks. To survive, such a government will have to rule by daily compromise, which actually reflects the secret yearning of the German electorate.
Let’s not grant, but dilute power, runs the silent motto. No charismatic figures, please, but trusty party horses bridled by coalition discipline. Imperial overreach was yesterday; today, power politics isn’t us. We will try to please Uncle Sam, our security lender of last resort, but won’t alienate China and Russia. In the classic German understanding of foreign policy, we are a “power of peace,” having profited nicely from our “culture of strategic reticence.”
As goes Germany, so goes the rest of Europe; neither will act as Mr. Biden’s lieutenant against Russia, China and Iran. And yet the New Germany remains America’s default partner (and vice versa). It will be Mr. Scholz or Mr. Laschet, plus cohorts. It hardly matters who collars whom, given the built-in centrism of coalition governance.
The U.S. plays in a different league. A world power can’t outsource its global responsibilities to regional grandees like Germany, nor will Germany shoulder the burden. It’s the difference between a big brother and a kid brother. It’s family, but in the shadow of disparate interest and power. Sixteen years of Angela Merkel proved the limits of fealty as well as the resilience of the world’s oldest alliance. The new chancellor, Mr. Whoever, won’t ditch Ms. Merkel’s playbook.
Mr. Joffe serves on the editorial council of the German weekly Die Zeit and teaches international politics and political theory at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington.
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I have consistently warned, as have others, $3.5 trillion is a phony number. When did government, politicians ever give it to your straight?
Unlike the family budget, which is used to keep the household running, government budgets have a myriad of purposes.
Yes, it keeps the Agencies flush, the bureaucrat's happy and employed but it also is intended to buy constituent votes so politicians can be successful campaigners. It also is designed to understate the true cost so it will find favor with individual voters.
Budgets are guesstimates. Household budgets are generally more accurate than government ones because the breadwinner cannot raise taxes. In the case of the government, spending more than is allocated is assuaged through deficit financing.
Investors must buy something they believe is safe and pays a decent return. That "old school" stuff went out the window with FDR and World War 2. Fiscal responsibility went further out the window with Johnson and Carter made a mockery of the rate structure because he caused inflation to rise to heights seldom seen.
Bidden might eventually screw things up if he gets his spending ways and challenge Carter's interest rate levels. Time will tell.
Meanwhile the world is betting America will not default. Consequently, Democrats are setting matters up to blame Republicans for being obstinate and making it tougher to keep the government open.
It is all a rigged chess game to see who squeals first so blame can be allocated for political gain.
I have repeatedly written: "we have the best government money can buy.
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$3.5 Trillion Is a Phony Number
Budget tricks disguise the true cost of Biden’s vast entitlement plans
By The Editorial Board
Democrats are grasping for ways to finance their cradle-to-grave welfare state, with the left demanding what they claim is $3.5 trillion over 10 years. The truth is that even that gargantuan number hides the real cost of their plans.
The bills moving through committees are full of delayed starts, phony phase-outs, and cost shifting to states designed to fit $3.5 trillion into a 10-year budget window that can pass with a mere 51 Senate votes. Even if the bill shrinks to $2 trillion or less, the real costs will be far greater. Behold one of the greatest fiscal cons in history.
• Start with the child allowance, which is among the bill’s most expensive provisions. Extending the $3,000 to $3,600 per-child payments for a decade would cost roughly $1.1 trillion. That’s as much as all of the income tax increases on individuals passed by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Democrats have hidden the real cost by extending the allowance only through 2025. Even if Republicans gain control of Congress and the White House in 2024, Democrats and their media allies will bludgeon them to extend the payments, which will cost another $110 billion each year. The GOP will be accused of raising taxes on middle-class families.
• Democrats are using a different time shift to disguise the cost of their Medicare expansion. New vision and hearing benefits would kick in over the next two years and cost about $20 billion a year. But Democrats are delaying the phase-in of the much more expensive dental benefit to 2028. This “saves” $420 billion over 10 years, but the costs explode after that.
• Then there’s the new universal child-care entitlement, which gives $90 billion to the states—but only from 2022 to 2027. The bill limits household costs to a share of income on a sliding scale. None would pay more than 7% of income no matter how much they earn or how many children they have.
Child-care providers will raise prices to capture more government subsidies, as colleges and health insurers do now. This is a rare entitlement in the bill that has a dedicated appropriation. But what happens when the $90 billion runs out, which may occur before the 2027 expiration? The bill automatically appropriates “such sums as may be necessary for each of fiscal years 2025 through 2027.”
• Democrats also charge states with standing up a universal pre-K entitlement, which would start next year and run through 2028. The House Education and Labor Committee bill doesn’t specify an appropriation, but President Biden’s budget projects this new entitlement would cost $33 billion a year when fully phased in.
Initially the feds would pick up 100% of the cost, but Washington’s share would decline to 60% by 2028. Shifting spending to the states reduces the 10-year cost, but the states will get stuck with huge bills as the federal cost-share declines.
• Democrats are also shifting some costs of free community college to the states. The entitlement passed by the House Education and Labor Committee would run only from the 2023-24 school year through 2027-28. The feds would pay 100% of average state tuition and fees for students at community colleges in 2023, but only 80% by 2027.
This phase-out and cost-shift shaves at least $50 billion off the 10-year federal tab. But states will have an enormous incentive to expand community college enrollment to reel in more federal dollars, so the budget costs could explode anyway.
The precedent is ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Initially the feds induced states to expand eligibility up to 138% of the poverty line by picking up 100% of the cost. Federal spending ballooned as the Medicaid rolls swelled. But as the federal cost-share declined to 90% in 2020, states were stuck with a surprise bill.
A dozen states have declined to expand Medicaid. So now Democrats are creating a new federal program that expands Medicaid in these states, starting in 2025. This will soon become a national quasi-public option. Cost estimates are fuzzy. But as with other entitlements, the spending would be on autopilot and removed from Congress’s annual appropriations.
The press has reported almost none of this, which is how Democrats like it. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is far from a conservative outfit, pegs the real cost over a decade at $5 trillion to $5.5 trillion. Total U.S. annual GDP is about $23 trillion.
But don’t expect an honest accounting from the Congressional Budget Office, which will score the bill based on the directions Democrats give. Recall how CBO scored the federal takeover of student loans as a money raiser in 2010. The bottom line: $3.5 trillion is merely the first installment of a bill that would put government at the commanding heights of family life and the economy for decades to come. Tax increases will follow as far as the eye can see.
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The final Op Ed posting is fascinating in two ways:
a) It suggests America may becoming less militaristic
and
b) Furthermore, fighting wars and being top dog may no longer be affordable and appealing because we have done a poor job of winning wars lately and Democrats would rather buy votes, create dependency through handouts and expand welfarism.
In other words, Mother Hubbard's Cupboard is not large enough to accommodate food stamps and k rations.
Lamentably this comes at a time when China, Russia, possibly Iran and certainly Islamist terrorists are militaristically on the ascendency and "Papa" President is making platitudinal speech about diplomacy in The U.N.
Stay tuned the ensuing decade could turn dangerously interesting. Particularly in view of the fact Gen. Milley seems to care more about China's feelings that doinghis job carrying out a president's wishes.
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Old Veterans Organizations Are Fading Away
Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines don’t join the VFW and American Legion like they used to.
By Faith Bottum
Peggy Randle is 85 and lives alone with her cat, Max, in Boulder City, Nev. She also fires rifles at veterans’ funerals. A nurse in the Navy during the Vietnam War, Ms. Randle belongs to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and other organizations that help provide military honors when soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are laid to rest.
“The cat isn’t much of a conversationalist,” she says, “and I still have something to give. I can still stand up there and fire that M1. I can still help with the 13 flag-fold. I can still do all of those things, and I’m going to do them as long as I can.”
Veterans across the country report the same experience: declining membership in the VFW and American Legion, and the difficulty putting together honor guards for funerals. The VFW had its origin in 1899 gatherings of veterans of the Spanish-American War. The American Legion began after World War I, at a 1919 meeting in Paris. Both started as essentially interest groups but quickly grew into vast national networks of local social clubs.
Those clubs would host civic programs such as essay contests, Friday fish fries and scholarships for veterans’ children. The American Legion’s summer baseball program was once so extensive that few high schools bothered to organize their own teams, and more than 3,400 local teams are still active today.
The VFW has around 1.5 million members, a drop of a million from 1992. The average age is 67, with 400,000 members over 80. The largest organization of veterans’ clubs, the American Legion, has two million members, down from 3.3 million in 1946. Kenneth Hagemann, 59, is a retired Marine and deputy adjutant of the VFW in New Jersey. There are 218 posts left in the state, he explained, but “in 10 years, I think it will be 175. We go down every year.
One reason is simply the decline in numbers of veterans. During World War II, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 16.5 million Americans served in the armed forces. Estimates of those who served in the war on terror over the past 20 years hover around three million.
There’s another reason the old organizations are fading: Younger veterans simply don’t join clubs the way older generations did. Partly this reflects a general decline in community organizations—the sociological transformation that Robert Putnam observed in his 2000 book, “Bowling Alone.” Americans aren’t joiners. Not like they once were.
But the VFW and American Legion are also shrinking because many veterans from the past 20 years carry with them a more ambiguous sense of both their military experience and their relation to established American institutions. “Vets now don’t look for comfort in person at clubs,” said Alexia Hodgson, an Army second lieutenant in Anchorage, Alaska. Social media, she suggested, fills some of the gap. “A lot of vets I know . . . talk about their life and experiences, both in and out of the military, over Reddit, Discord and Twitter. ”
“My generation engages in a different way,” added the novelist Phil Klay, a retired Marine and winner of the 2014 National Book Award for his short stories about military service in Iraq. “We tend to be more issue-focused than the old local organizations”—and yet, he admits, “it’s important to keep memories alive through local rituals.” The difficulty in providing honor guards, he said, symbolizes a worrisome detachment of his generation from local communities. When younger veterans do join a group, they tend toward newer and more service-inspired national organizations such as Team Red, White & Blue or Team Rubicon.
Something important is lost, however, when the local connection is broken. “I was still on active duty when my grandfathers passed away, and I went to the funerals in uniform,” said Josh Hauser, a former Marine staff sergeant in Hollsopple, Pa. “That was the first time I realized who takes care of this very important thing, because it was a local VFW that did the military honors.”
And what will happen when those old veterans’ clubs are gone? The social-club model simultaneously integrated veterans into the local community and gave them a sense of national importance. “I sometimes can’t comprehend how we’re able” to get to all the funerals, said Robert Garlow, honor-guard commander for VFW Post 36 in Nevada. “Yeah, we feel stretched thin, but it’s something we really want to do.” Consciously or not, they’re right to feel a personal and sociological significance in what they do. The old local community organizations understood the importance of attending funerals to comfort the family and honor the service of the dead.
“They’ve earned it,” Ms. Randle explained. “And maybe someday someone will think I’ve earned it, too.”
Ms. Bottum is the Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at the Journal.
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