W.D. Ehrhart

by W.D. Ehrhart I recently drove on a major thoroughfare through Chester County, Pennsylvania, one of the most reliably Republican counties in the United States. Somewhat to my surprise I did see more than a smattering of Harris/Walz signage along with signs for Pennsylvania’s incumbent Senator Bob Casey. But by far the overwhelming political signage was for Trump, Trump/Vance, and Casey’s challenger, David McCormack. There were stretches of highway with dozens of Trump signs every five feet. Most amazing of all were signs that read: “Trump: Safety; Harris: Crime,” “Trump: Low Taxes; Harris: High Taxes,” and “Trump: Low Prices; Harris: High Prices.” All three of …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Just over a year ago, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, two-thirds of whom were civilians. At the same time, Hamas took about 250 people hostage. It was a bad day to say the least, and there seems to be no end in sight. Over the course of this past year, over 42,000 people have died in Gaza at the hands of Israeli Defense Forces or from disease, exposure, and starvation. Another 97,000 have been injured. On the West Bank, over 700 Palestinians have died with more than 5,700 injured. Eleven hundred Israelis have died, and …

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by W. D. Ehrhart I stopped watching major political speeches fifty-two years ago in the wake of Richard Nixon’s televised announcement in the spring of 1972 that he was mining Hai Phong harbor in North Vietnam. It made me so angry that I pulled off my boot and threw it at the president. This was back when televisions were boxlike things with all sorts of vacuum tubes and stuff like that inside. The television exploded. Glass all over my college dorm room, and the television’s insides popping and sparking. I’m lucky I didn’t start a fire. And the television wasn’t even mine. I’d borrowed it …

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by W.D. Ehrhart During a recent campaign event in New Jersey, Donald Trump proclaimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is the “equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor. They’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. [Miriam Adelson, a major Republican donor to whom Trump gave the Medal of Freedom in 2018] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. They’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and she got it through committees …

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by W.D. Ehrhart In a recent essay in the Lynchburg News & Advance, my friend, former enlisted Marine and now-retired Major, Ed Palm pointed out that in spite of minimum starting salaries twenty (20) times higher than my $88 a month back in 1966, “signing bonuses” as high as $40,000, and generous educational benefits, the U.S. military has been unable to meet its enlistment needs in the era of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). The AVF was supposed to ensure that the U.S. would never again suffer another humiliating defeat like the American Fiasco in Vietnam when reluctant and unwilling soldiers ultimately engaged in open revolt …

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