AAPI blast Trump's disparagement of U.S. veterans, POWs and war-dead

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth at the WWII Memmorial in Washington D.C.

United States Senator Tammy Duckworth lambasts Donald Trump's calling America's military war dead and wounded as "losers" and "suckers."

In a bombshell article published in The Atlantic, Trump also allegedly requested amputees not be included in plans for a Washington D.C. military parade because, in his words, “nobody wants to see that.”

Trump also requested amputees not be included in plans for a military parade because, in his words, “nobody wants to see that.”

Duckworth, who lost both legs while serving in Iraq as a helicopter pilot, said: “I’ll take my wheelchair and my titanium legs over his bone spurs any day,” referring to the minor ailment Trump used multiple times to obtain a medical deferment from being drafted during the Vietnam War.

During a conference call arranged by the campaign staff of Democratic POTUS nominee Joe Biden, Thai American Duckworth continued to hit Trump hard for the comments he made as reported in The Atlantic article, which has been verified by multiple media outlets since it was first published.

“This is a man who spends every day redefining the concept of narcissism. A man who’s met a life of privilege, with everything handed to him on a silver platter,” said Duckworth.

“Of course he thinks about war selfishly,” said the Illinois senator. “He thinks of it as a transactional cost instead of in human lives and American blood spilled, because that’s how he’s viewed his whole life. He doesn’t understand other people’s bravery and courage because he’s never had any of his own.”

On Twitter, Duckworth continued her relentless attack on Trump, who on numerous occasions she has referred to as "Cadet Bonespurs," and "Coward-in-chief." 

“What @realDonaldTrump will never understand is that our Wounded Warriors earned their wounds. They are our badges of honor from our service to the country we love. If he can’t bear to witness those who have sacrificed for our nation, perhaps he should avert his cowardly eyes,” she tweeted.

Also taking part in the conference call was Khizr Khan, father of the late Captain H. Khan, who was killed while serving in the U.S Army in Iraq.

“Words matter," said Khan, who was attacked by Trump for his rousing speech during the 2016 Democratic National Convention. "The words we say are a window into our souls — of how we see the world and our place in it. 

“When Donald Trump calls anyone who places their life in service of others a ‘loser,’ we understand Trump’s soul.”

Trump, said Khan, is “incapable of understanding service, valor and courage. His soul cannot conceive of integrity and honor. And let me say very loudly and clearly so America can listen: His soul is that of a coward.”

Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, also author of the article, reported that Trump called the soldiers who died during World War I “losers” and “suckers”, while canceling a 2018 visit to a cemetery of U.S. war dead in France. Trump claimed the cancellation was due to the inclement weather, which did not prevent other French and foreign dignitaries from appearing at the memorial.

In a Friday press conference, Democratic rival Joe Biden said, "if what is written in the Atlantic is true, it’s disgusting and it affirms what most of us believe to be true – that Donald Trump is not fit to do the job of president, be the commander-in-chief."

"If these statements are true, the president should humbly apologize to every Gold Star mother and father and every Blue Star family that he’s denigrated," Biden said.

Other vignettes included in The Atlantic article:

• Trump also allegedly told his senior staff “we’re not going to support that loser’s funeral” after U.S. Sen. John McCain died before calling him “a f-ing loser,” a which he repeated in a televised interview. 
• He also mocked former President George H.W. Bush for being shot down while piloting combat missions during World War II.
• At a 2017 service at Arlington National Cemetery, Trump told former chief of staff John Kelly, whose son Robert died in 2010 at age 29 while serving as a Marine Corps officer in Afghanistan, turned to Kelly, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Not surprisingly, Trump has called The Atlantic article "fake news," a "hoax" and a "continuation of the witch hunt,” according to Politico.

Meanwhile, White House staff has scrambled issuing denials, but at this point, with the number of falsehoods, misleading statements and outright lies emanating from administration officials and staff, their credibility is almost zero.

Since the article was published Thursday, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, NBC, ABC and other news outlets have independently confirmed the statements attributed to Trump.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news sprinkled with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.

Weekend Reads: Ta-Nehisi Coates explains why Trump is our first white president

THIS SUMMER the character of the Trump administration has removed any doubt about its intentions. The motivations behind its actions are examined by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his must-read article for The Atlantic entitled, "Donald Trump Is the First White President."

While TV pundits dance around the issue, from the perspective of AAPI and other people of color in this country, it has never become more clear that the driving force behind the Trump's obsession with President Barack Obama's birth certificate, the sloppy Muslim ban, the revocation of DACA, the Justice Department's new look affirmative action, the proposal to cut immigration in half, his half-hearted condemnation of Nazi's, the KKK and white supremacists after Charleston and the Damn Wall on our southern border - all of it - comes down to race.

With efforts to take down Obamacare and decisions to cancel DACA, it’s no secret that 45 is trying to take down anything productive from the Obama administration. But no one has considered how whiteness and the dismantling of every policy decision by the nation's first black president plays into this.

In a compelling piece for The Atlantic, journalist and cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrated precisely how (and why) Donald Trump is creating his legacy by negating everything that Obama stood for.

“For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally,” he writes. “Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness.”

Coates continues:

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own.

Certainly, not all of Trump's supporters are white supremacists, but it's a safe bet you can say, all white supremacists are Trump supporters.

We can pull-quote the entire article, really, but it's easier to read the whole thing with all the rhythms and flow by checking out the article in The Atlantic here.
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Late Filipino/American author's deep, dark secret revealed.

ATLANTIC GRAPHIC

LATE AUTHOR Alex Tizon revealed a family secret that he, his parents and his siblings kept hidden for over 50 years: His family had a slave.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tizon;s article , "My Family's Slave," was published posthumously in the June issue of The Atlantic, three months after he died.

In a country where extreme poverty presents little or zero options, it is not uncommon for a poor Filipino to become a household servant in exchange for meals and roof over their heads. Sometimes, a small salary comes along with the job; sometimes, not.

It is a practice rooted deep in Philippine culture that existed in the pre-Spanish colonial period. The Spanish, who dealt in the slave trade, institutionalized the practice. In time, these "servants" can become like members of the family, or, as in Tizon's case, treated like a household slave.

Alex Tizon

RELATED: RIP Alex Tizon

Tizon's heartbreaking story tells what happens when his family moved to the U.S. and brought their unpaid servant, Eudocia Tomas Pulido, with them. In Tizon's childhood, it was   her face he'd see first when he awoke and the last one he saw when he went to sleep.

As Tizon got older and learned the meaning of "slave." He realized the circumstances that brought "Lola" into his household, his conflicting feelings eventually led to estrangement with his parents over how they treated her. It might be difficult for non-Filipinos to understand how the family could keep their secret for so long.

I've known women like Tizon's "Lola" and understand how he, a beneficiary of a U.S. education and upbringing, still had to struggle to keep the secret from the rest of the world. "Slave" might be too harsh a word to describe the condition they live in and the economic and social mores that created this class of people. At the same time, "servant" is not an adequate word for that person.

Sometimes, once in the U.S. and exposed to American culture with its broad number of choices, these people manage to escape their host families and disappear in the nether world of what Filipinos call tago nang tago, TNT in Filipino shorthand, meaning "hiding and hiding." In contemporary American parlance, they become "undocumented immigrants."

In the end, Tizon brought Lola into his family as a true family member, as a lola (grandmother) with the respect, love and care that comes with that honorific title.

It's a moving piece, it demonstrates that with Tizon's death, the AAPI community -- indeed, all of America -- lost a voice that could touch even the most hardened heart.

READ Alex Tizon's articles in The Atlantic:

• My Family's Slave 
• In the Land of Missing Persons 

In a note accompanying the article Atlantic editor-in-chief by Jeffrey Goldberg writes:

The pulitzer prize–winning reporter Alex Tizon built an exemplary career by listening to certain types of people—forgotten people, people on the margins, people who had never before been asked for their stories. Alex’s wife, Melissa Tizon, told me recently that her husband was always impatient with small talk, because he believed that all people had within them an epic story, and he wanted to hear those epic stories—and then help tell them to the world. “Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story,” he liked to say. 

... Alex offered us the chance to publish a story he had been waiting much of his life to tell, the remarkable tale of Lola, the woman who was his family’s secret slave in the Philippines, and who remained their slave when they moved to America.

Tizon's wife "Melissa told (Atlantic editor) Denise (Kersten Wills) and me that Alex wanted, more than anything else, to bring Lola's story to the world," Goldberg writes. "'This was his ultimate story,' Melissa said. 'He was trying to write it for five or six years. He struggled with it. But when he started writing it for The Atlantic, he stopped struggling. He wrote it with such ease.'"

"The eradication of all forms of slavery remains an unfinished goal of civilization, and of this magazine, and stories like Alex's help us understand slavery's awful persistence," writes Goldberg.

Tizon's article has created a bit of a firestorm on Twitter since the article was published online.

Filipinos in the Philippines and in the United States, however, had a very different point of view.

That just goes to show the different perspectives created by different cultures. That goes a long ways in explaining why Filipinos in the Philippines can so overwhelmingly support Rodrigo Duterte as their president, who is routinely criticized in the western press for the thousands of extra-judicial killings of alleged drug dealers.

We in the west, looking across the Pacific from our comfortable couches, reading our tablets and drinking wine, can't understand how terrible things can get; how dire, abject poverty and socio-cultural inequality can bring about an environment in which people accept the loss of due process rights, cheer the extra-judicial killings, bring a foul-mouthed, anti-American president to power and think nothing of taking advantage of the poor's hopeless plight. 

I'm not condoning what happened in Tizon's family or what's happening in the Philippines politically, but sometimes, before we start pointing fingers, we do need to walk in someone

else's shoes. We should also realize how easy it is to justify something you know is ultimately not right. 

In reading Tizon's article, one can almost feel the tension in his writing and how he must have struggled with this throughout his own life. At the very least, we should look at our own lives and how many times we turned away from a beggar, ignored the homeless sleeping in doorways or turn a deaf ear to the verbal slights against people of a different color; or turn a blind eye when we see an injustice being done because of  at an accent, a turban or the shape of the target's eyes.

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The Atlantic: Muslim aide says why she left the Trump White House

Ruman Ahmed

IN 2011 Ruman Ahmed got a job of a lifetime. Straight out of college, she joined the Obama administration. "My job there was to promote and protect the best of what my country stands for," she writes in a piece in The Atlantic. "I am a hijab-wearing Muslim woman -- I was the hijabi in the West Wing -- and the Obama administration always made me feel welcome and included."

The 2015-2016 presidential campaign changed the climate of the country, says Ahmed, the daughter of immigrants from Bangladesh. She felt the Muslim/American community was under attack.

As Obama left and Trump's people began moving into the White House, since she wasn't a presidential appointee, Ahmed felt her job with the National Security Council wasn't in jeopardy. She thought she could work with the incoming administration, as her peers had done with previous administrations, regardless of party affiliation.

She lasted eight days. When the President signed the executive order banning and restricting travel from seven Muslim-dominated countries and stopped accepting refugees, she felt she had to leave.

She told her boss, Michael Anton, who came in with Trump, why she was leaving: 

"I told him I had to leave because it was an insult walking into this country’s most historic building every day under an administration that is working against and vilifying everything I stand for as an American and as a Muslim. I told him that the administration was attacking the basic tenets of democracy. I told him that I hoped that they and those in Congress were prepared to take responsibility for all the consequences that would attend their decisions.:

Anton looked at her and said nothing.

It turns out that Anton wrote an article under a pseudonym on behalf of the Trump campaign that was widely disseminated among conservative websites. In the article he wrote that Islam is an inherently violent religion that is “incompatible with the modern West,” defended the World War II-era America First Committee, which included anti-Semites, as “unfairly maligned,” and called diversity “a source of weakness, tension and disunion.”

The article is also interesting because it gives us a glimpse of how the Trump White House was operating in an environment of chaos. The Monday after the inauguration, "I walked into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, with the new staffers there. Rather than the excitement I encountered when I first came to the White House under Obama, the new staff looked at me with a cold surprise. The diverse White House I had worked in became a monochromatic and male bastion."

"This was not typical Republican leadership, or even that of a businessman. It was a chaotic attempt at authoritarianism," Ahmed writes.

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO/ PETE SOUZA

Ruman Ahmed was part of the National Security staff that advised President Obama.

I wonder how many government employees are facing the same dilemma that confronted Ahmed and how many are arriving at the same conclusion.

Certainly, the underreported "revolt" within the government runs deep. Some workers have chosen to go underground and work from within the government. With alternative websites springing up set up by disgruntled government employees who have been told to stop using social media to share information about climate change, scientific and medical research and breakthroughs, I suspect the feeling of distrust against Trump and his political appointees runs deeper than we think.

Ahmed's resignation is only the tip of the iceberg.

America is far from perfect. There is much that still needs to be done, to fight for -- but we have to admit, the country has made mighty strides in the past 60-70 years during which we learned to take care of our elderly, ensured that retirees are not living in poverty and that all people have access to affordable health care. However, as the Trump administration begins to flex its muscle - the Muslim ban is only the start and The Wall has taken on metaphorical status - and we see the progress we've made in civil rights, equality and opportunities being attacked or undermined, we all need to ask ourselves the questions: Where do I stand? What can I do to express my outrage; to change things; to make a positive difference?

As Ahmed concludes in her article:

"Placing U.S. national security in the hands of people who think America’s diversity is a 'weakness' is dangerous. It is false.

"People of every religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and age pouring into the streets and airports to defend the rights of their fellow Americans over the past few weeks proved the opposite is true –– American diversity is a strength, and so is the American commitment to ideals of justice and equality."

Read the entire article here.

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