Copyright Anchorage Daily News
We should applaud Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s recent address on the government shutdown. She must be surprised and disappointed that the president and her colleagues, who gave her such carefully crafted promises to capture her vote on the Big Beautiful Bill that became such a Swollen Ugly Act, lied to her and acted in bad faith with no intention of keeping any promises. She probably feels some nagging regrets and is doing the best she can as one of the few remaining senators who practice genuine American statecraft under the heavy blanket of cowardice and corruption smothering the Republican Party, not to mention the threats to her life and safety that plague her office. Though she is not one of the greats, she is good. Perhaps now she finally feels surprised and disappointed that people still feel surprised and disappointed when the president lies. Sen. Dan Sullivan, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to think or feel at all. Witness the asinine or insane logic he applied to the question of extrajudicial killing via military operations targeting people and watercraft in the Caribbean. Sullivan said, “... these vicious drug traffickers who are responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans. President Trump’s lawful strikes against these [narco terrorist] cartels are saving lives. ... More Americans have died from drug overdoses in the past seven years than in both world wars and the Vietnam War combined. ... Eliminating these cartels before they reach our shores protects our country and sends a strong message of deterrence.” By Sullivan’s logic, we should kill people without legal process before they’ve committed a crime in order to prevent them from later committing a crime that we would have to prosecute in legal process. And we should kill unidentified people we suspect of intending to commit unspecified crimes in the future as just payment for unidentified people who must have committed specific crimes in the past. And how about his failure to blink when he said that killing people saves lives? It’s as unsound and manipulative as telling you, as so many advertisements do, that you will save money if you just go out and spend it. This is the caliber of thought and concern we’re dealing with here, when lives are at stake. If Sullivan reasons like that, he should not be a senator, for it indicates brain damage, intellectual incapacity or a willingness to contort himself into whatever malignant shape necessary to conform to the twisted dictates of his dictatorial boss. His loyalty to the Big Man’s Party is disgusting in the ease with which he compromises his integrity and abandons his personal courage. As a military officer and as a senator, his oath is to act in good faith to preserve and defend the Constitution before anything else. Alas, he is but one remarkably flaccid member among so many jelly-spined or rotten-hearted puppets in this new Republican Party — Republican in name only — which kowtows to Trump and Company’s destructive greed or actively participates in the violent push to make America an exclusive club with a clearly defined servant class. Have we become a nation of self-interested opportunists with failed educations that left us with poor reasoning skills and such a paltry understanding of history that we find this sensible? Do we no longer value educated, intelligent, qualified statesmanship? Is crass dehumanization once again a high value in American culture? Can’t you see where this takes us? Scott Justesen has lived in Fairbanks for more than 15 years and works as a commercial pilot for a local air carrier. He served in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) and the Reserve Army Medical Corps, a year of which was spent deployed to Iraq.
