The Inartful Dodger

We’ve endured a full year of President Donald J. Trump. There have been casualties. Lord sweet Mary have there been casualties.

Here’s a big and possibly underrated one: civility and cogent discourse.

Our first Twitter president has reduced the national dialogue to name-calling in 140-character (or, excuse me, 280-character) snippets. Exclamation points in lieu of intelligence. I have been baited; we all have.

Still, I tip my metaphorical cap to Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Democrat from Illinois, for coining the best sick-burn Trump nickname to date.

Trump, of course, is famous for slapping demeaning nicknames on his opponents, a tactic formerly reserved for sexually frustrated high school gym teachers and that jerk who used to sit three cubicles over from you and listen to Creed and trim his fingernails at work.

Crooked Hillary. Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Sloppy Steve. The list goes on. And on and on and on and on.

This week, Duckworth clapped back. Addressing the ongoing government shutdown and Trump’s suggestion that Democrats were jeopardizing the lives and livelihood of our military servicemembers, Duckworth pointed out: A) Trump is the de facto head of the party that controls both houses of Congress and the Executive branch; and B) He avoided service in the Vietnam War for a nebulous medical condition that earned him five draft deferments but did not prevent him from playing several college sports.

Specifically, Duckworth referred to Trump as “Cadet Bonespurs.”

Duckworth is a veteran of the Iraq war who lost both of her legs in combat. She speaks on this issue from an unimpeachably righteous high horse.

Trump, bellicose rhetoric and support-our-troops grandstanding aside, is the classic silver-spoon, elitist wartime chicken hawk. That charge has been leveled before, against Democrats and Republicans. Never has it been more justified.

The president doesn’t have to be a former military man or woman. On the contrary, history proves our best wartime commanders in chief (Lincoln, FDR) are not decorated soldiers.

If you’re going to beat the battle drum incessantly, though, have the decency to acknowledge your own lack of service. Admit it: When the moment came to pick up a gun, you scurried under the gilded skirt of your wealth and privilege.

Mostly, I’m curious how the disparity between Trump’s words and deeds plays with his deep south and rustbelt base, the alleged real Americans who put God and country on a bumper sticker and stick it on their forehead.

It must require a cement-mixer full of cognitive dissonance to look at that bloated, draft-dodging, lily-livered, inherited-class East Coast millionaire and see the embodiment of machismo and the American Way.

I see a weak, cynical old man who wouldn’t know true service if it came coated in fried chicken and Sean Hannity’s puckered lips.

I see Cadet Bonespurs.