Eagles, Not Ostriches
LA CROIX-VALMER, France — On a brief beach sanity break, I happened upon a Mediterranean landing spot where U.S. forces and allies invaded Hitler's southern flank as Operation Overlord stormed Normandy up north.
On D-Day, pilots of the newly formed 101st Airborne rained down hellfire. As their commander had said, their "Screaming Eagle" emblem defined a division "that will crush enemies by falling upon them like a thunderbolt from the skies."
The bald eagle, America's icon for 250 years, was saved from extinction by the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Congress made it the national bird at the end of 2024. Joe Biden said it symbolized freedom, strength and courage.
Six months later, an ostrich seems more fitting in a divided America.
Fearful ostriches lower their heads as if burying them in sand, vulnerable to a swift kick in the butt by any passerby. Yet their muscular legs and sharp claws can eviscerate a lion when their offspring are at risk. You can see where I'm going here.
Americans have only months left to look up, not down, and fight back. Feckless politicians are letting billionaires, ideologues, religious zealots and amoral "tech bros" pluck them down to pinfeathers. After 2026, it will likely be too late.
A mad would-be king whose mob-style extortions, greed, insatiable ego, depraved indifference to human life and reckless warmongering are turning a blindered, unreliable America into a global pariah.
In the Mediterranean, Donald Trump looms from the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar to hinterlands that include the ancient Persian empire, a monstrous chimera beyond anything Homer's Odysseus imagined. His dark shadow extends from China to Chile.
We are running short of time to protect a salvageable planet for the generations to come. Sensible citizens need to energize the apathetic, helping them see how, and why, so much has changed since those allied forces landed in Europe.
No democracy can be better than the people elected to govern it. Only a thundering landslide at the polls can rescue America and restore its historic global role of defending human values.
We need soaring eagles, not head-in-the-sand ostriches.
Heartrending tragedy last week makes the point in Texas Hill County, where I recently spent a morning along a placid Guadalupe River. I talked politics with a blue-blooded farmer at odds with her red-necked neighbors.
She was dismayed at how so many once openminded conservatives now slavishly follow Trump down his tarantula hole, excusing anything he does. Nuance is gone. Anyone who criticizes him, or even questions him, is a Trump-hater.
We saw the result when the river suddenly rose 28 feet in an hour overnight.
Tragedies don't get much worse than little kids swept away from a holiday camp, and anguished parents awaiting what they suspect will be devastating news. So far, the overall death toll is 120, and many more are still missing.
For days on end, CNN reported little else, with a "breaking news" tagline. Big-name stars and local stringers covered every aspect, down to a long interview with a grief-stricken man forced to abandon his cat. Cause and effect were barely mentioned.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared: "Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie, and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning." Trump managed to fault Biden.
Presidents are not responsible for sudden natural disasters on their watch. But effective, fully funded federal agencies need to see them coming and act fast. Most disasters cross state lines. Preparedness varies, and coordination is crucial.
A sign at the old Brooklyn Eagle read: "A dogfight in Brooklyn is bigger than a revolution in China." These days, distant shots are heard round the world. "Weather events" are part of larger patterns within a closed ecosystem poisoned by carbon emissions.
The Guadalupe burst its banks in 1987, an early example of far worse calamities across the world, largely unnoticed in America. Expanding populations along rivers and on flood plains, combined with intensifying storms, pose a constant risk.
The National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had 24/7 monitors stationed across the country. Elon Musk drove off many of them, including Paul Yura, a 32-year veteran at the Austin/San Antonio office.
Leavitt insists that NWS positions were fully staffed. Former specialists and experts still at work dispute that with factual detail. The discord reflects a far larger problem. Trump has crippled White House credibility.
Local networks often break down in sudden crises. The Kerr County sheriff said he was aware only near dawn after 911 calls for help began coming in.
Heather Cox Richardson, cited below, pins down the timeline. NWS staff cuts were only part of the failings.
Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who is best equipped to comment, was harsh. He led the Hurricane Katrina task force in 2005 and wrote an exhaustive study later. Texas needed 2,000 troops after the flood, he said, not the 500 it mustered.
Gov. Greg Abbott promised to spare no effort in search and rescue. But thousands of National Guardsmen, federal troops and contractors were hunkered down on the nearby border at great expense to guard against an "invasion" that is now a thin trickle.
Honoré assailed the president for not only crippling NOAA but also phasing out FEMA. Trump plans to leave disaster response to states.
Among other Republican hypocrisy, Rep. Chip Roy exulted when Trump's "beautiful" bill scrapped most of what he called green scams to curb fossil fuel. Yet he was a fixture on TV in first-responder gear expressing commitment to his stricken Texas constituents.
Intense coverage in Texas reflected America's growing self-obsession in two crucial ways.
The outside world watched CNN: scenes of courage and sacrifice, with vignettes on each missing child. Suffering innocents in Ukraine and Gaza, now at a peak after five years, taken together, were reduced to brief minutes at the ends of newscasts.
Many drew a clear message. To many Americans, only Americans really matter.
And most reporting, not only CNN's, left out wider context. Floods, freak storms and tsunamis now kill by the thousands, impacting multiple millions, in remote places where only airlifts and combat engineers can provide rescue or relief.
In 1991, an Associated Press report I filed from Chittagong, Bangladesh, began: "No one here wonders whether a cyclone will strike again, only when and how hard and how many more people will die for lack of preparation or a quick response."
U.S. military helicopters rescued Bangladeshis on stranded islands. Since then, I have watched generous aid restore flooded farmlands and washed-out roads in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. During famines and conflict, U.S. transports shuttled in food.
Trump is reshaping the military to end the vital role of soft power.
America has a Department of Defense because founders intended to fend off attackers, not invade other countries. Since Vietnam, unwinnable needless wars have swollen terrorist ranks and created deep hatreds. Presidents need to keep that in mind.
But Trump muses aloud that he wants a Ministry of War to not only threaten foreign foes but also operate within U.S. borders in defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act. In typical doublespeak, he calls that peace through strength.
In his first term, the draft-dodger commander-in-chief called volunteer troops suckers and losers. He declined to visit war graves in Europe because of a few raindrops. He fired seasoned generals. Others quit in disgust. Now he heaps praise on the military.
It is hard to imagine a more disgraceful scene than the aftermath to his preemptive attack on Iran. A country united against America is now likely racing in secret to produce a dirty nuclear bomb that can be smuggled into Israel by sea or by land.
The mission over Iran was expertly done. Bunker-buster bombs produced during the Obama years were dropped by seasoned aircrews in stealthy B-2s, long in service. Trump only gave the order yet took credit for the entire show.
He declared "total obliteration" of Iran's nuclear capacity and fumed when an initial assessment called that unlikely and experts concurred it was far too early to know.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began a press briefing by railing at "fake" newspapers and networks that did not laud the most brilliant military action in history. Why, he asked, weren't they patriotic? Cheerleading is not part of reporting.
Israel had already crippled Iran's air defenses. Long flights, fueled in midair, are hardly unusual. It was a fine performance. D-Day was more impressive.
This is ranging far from La Croix-Valmer, Normandy and the Guadalupe River. But in today's world, everything is interlinked.
Upcoming reports will look at how inward-looking U.S. news media give short shrift to what is reshaping, if not killing off, a world that belongs to our progeny. Ukraine, Gaza, China, Russia, climate collapse and the rest.
The facts are clear. Trump owns the Ukraine war as he does the Afghanistan debacle. Putin played him for the fool he is. Only now he calls out Putin's "bullshit" as North Korea, China and Iran help intensify the war he promised to end on his first day.
George W. Bush, simply inept, said of Putin in 2001: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy." Hillary Clinton recognized a snake. Trump saw dollar signs — and a ruthless authoritarian after his own heart.
Unlike Putin, Netanyahu needs Trump. He packages his refusal to wind down his onslaught in Gaza with fulsome flattery. You could die laughing at his speech at the White House after nominating Trump for a Nobel Prize.
Trump demands a ceasefire yet lets Netanyahu stall. His own specialties include evicting people from old family homes to make room for gaudy resorts.
In his first term, a cabinet and advisers blunted his excesses. Now devout partisans infest the public payroll. At the bottom, hired thugs with badges boast they can arrest anyone they choose. At the top, a president plunders the citizens he is sworn to protect.
Hegseth typifies second-term top aides, the least qualified batch of sycophants I have seen in ten administrations.
The military career he vaunts began with guarding tortured Guantanamo prisoners, who included some blameless Afghans denounced as terrorists by neighbors for personal reasons and shipped off to years of confinement without trial.
At Fox News, he mocked honest news reporting on a goofy weekend talk show.
When Attorney General Pam Bondi stands beside Karoline Leavitt, I see a mother-daughter combo straight out of the Handmaid's Tale. The billionaire secretaries of Treasury and Commerce must know the realities of Trump's tariff obsession.
In the Texas aftermath, reporters found Kristi Noem, in charge of securing the homeland, waited more than three days to activate FEMA urban search and rescue team while crowdsourcing advice on which Instagram portrait she should chose.
In Europe and elsewhere, leaders seethe at the man who makes them grovel at his feet to avoid arbitrary demands that cost their own people heavily. Many are aghast at an electorate that put a convicted felon and fraudster back in the White House.
Trump has shot no one on Fifth Avenue, but his self-focused response to Covid-19 needlessly killed at least 500,000 at home and more abroad. His foreign aid cuts have already taken the first of what are expected to be millions of lives.
Wealthy countries are besieged with a rising human tide of people fleeing violence, hunger and climate collapse. Some face almost certain death. Others only want a better life. A few are stone-cold criminals or members of dangerous gangs.
As birthrates drop and economies expand, countries need qualified, law-abiding immigrants. Geneva Conventions drafted by the United States after World War II require them to grant asylum if a fair hearing finds legitimate cause.
None can take all those who show up at borders. But only the United States repels and expels people with such tenacity only because a president's political success depends on baseless fear and loathing whipped up by lies.
People legally in the country for decades can be snatched off the street by masked ICE goons in unmarked cars and sent directly to hellholes while families watch in horror. Some U.S. citizens get caught in roundups to reach daily quotas.
I grew up in Arizona near the Mexican border, and I've covered migration across the world for most of my life. For me, Republican exploitation of a bogus crisis and cruel treatment of people in peril rank high on the scale of crimes against humanity.
In a viral photo, Noem smirks in a tight sweatshirt and a fancy watch against a backdrop of men locked up for life in spartan cages. Some might be guilty of crimes, but without due process there is no way to know.
For some, their only crime was believing those welcoming Emma Lazurus words chiseled under the Statue of Liberty.
Republicans joke about "Alligator Alcatraz" and market funny merch. Rights activists dub it Alligator Auschwitz. It is not that dangerous. Alligators have killed only 26 people since 1948, mostly provoked. But concentration camps are what Nazis did.
Yet House Speaker Mike Johnson, victorious after Trump's big bill squeaked to approval, pronounced the United States as "the most beneficent" country in history.
Cardinal Robert McElroy, the archbishop in Washington, sees it differently.
Borders must be controlled, he said on CNN, “however, what’s going on now...is a mass, indiscriminate deportation of men and women and children and families, which literally rips families apart and is intended to do so."
Trump's "inhumane" and "morally repugnant" policies contradict Catholic teachings, he said. "There’s something radically wrong with a society that takes from the poorest to give to the wealthiest. It's just wrong."
We need to think of new generations to come and put things right. For that, America needs eagles, not ostriches.
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