(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

In 1999, I went to Minnesota to cover the inauguration of Governor Jesse Ventura and the first few weeks of his administration. The inauguration itself was enlivened by the members of Ventura’s old SEAL unit under the direction of a guy named Terry (Mother) Moy, the master chief under whom they’d all trained. These were large, incredibly tough-looking humans, but they also were fully invested in the joy and hilarity of the improbable event they’d come to witness, and their feeling of fellowship was more than a little infectious and I liked them very much.

Which all came back to mind when I read this New York Times account in which other SEALs who served with the now-pardoned Edward Gallagher express their horror at what Gallagher did to deserve the punishment from which El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago has delivered him. It’s not so much Gallagher’s crimes in uniform that’s so shocking today; those events have been well-known for a while. Rather, what is flatly terrifying in its implications is the reaction of the other SEALS to Gallagher’s pardon.

They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment. “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

Video from a SEAL’s helmet camera, included in the trove of materials, shows the barely conscious captive — a teenage Islamic State fighter so thin that his watch slid easily up and down his arm — being brought in to the platoon one day in May 2017. Then the helmet camera is shut off. In the video interviews with investigators, three SEALs said they saw Chief Gallagher go on to stab the sedated captive for no reason, and then hold an impromptu re-enlistment ceremony over the body, as if it were a trophy. “I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Special Operator Miller, who has since been promoted to chief, told investigators.

These are the people who served with the guy who said this about him. These are the guys from The Unit. They went through the same grueling training. They were sharpened to the same fine point, tuned to the same fighting pitch. And despite every instinct for solidarity and brotherhood that had been drummed into them, they went to the authorities because Gallagher’s crimes were too black to ignore and because they were too good a group of soldiers, and too decent a group of people, to ignore them anyway. You just don’t see this out in the open that often. It’s akin to Ron Ridenhour’s talking to the Army, and then to Seymour Hersh, about the events at My Lai, or Hugh Thompson, landing his helicopter between the Vietnamese civilians and William Calley’s murderous platoon to put a halt to those events in real time.

Make no mistake. Edward Gallagher is going to be a star of the upcoming Republican presidential campaign. The president* is going to use him as a representative of The Troops, and as an antidote to his own contempt for military personnel who are as revolted by him as any decent human being would be. Gallagher is going to be the anti-Khizr Khan. He is going to appear at presidential* events. I make him even money to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention. Edward Gallagher is going to be the symbol of the U.S. military and there’s nobody in the GOP who can stop this from happening.

Nice job, gang.

From where I lounge these days, the Iowa Democratic caucuses look like a complete mess. In 2012, you recall, the year in which there was a Republican free-for-all, it took them two weeks to figure out that Rick Santorum had been a narrow winner, and Santorum was a no-hoper from jump. We should all take as a given that all caucus systems are basically flawed to the point of worthlessness. That being said, you at the moment can throw a blanket over the top four candidates in the polls. If the numbers stay remotely close to what they are, and depending on the weather over the next month, and whether or not the folks in Precinct 12 in Marshalltown are fond of the hotdish that night, they may have declared a winner in New Hampshire by the time Iowa gets its act together.

Justin Sullivan Getty Images

Consequently, any judgments on the effect of Iowa on individual campaigns are worthless now, and very likely, they’re going to be worthless after the caucuses are over. This is system is a disaster and, Lord, does it need changing. Right now, it’s little more than a six-month venue for cute photo-op’s and, it must be said, an excuse for candidates to trim their positions to suit certain, ahem, demographics that are mostly irrelevant to the Democratic Party anyway, and have been for years. With this many candidates, and with the naked hunger of the elite political press for the kind of horse-race that railbirds usually call “a cavalry charge,” another tangled debacle is almost inevitable, god help us.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Give Him Cornbread” (Beau Jocque): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly To The Pathe Archives: Here’s a propaganda film about the creation of the Red Army. Cameos by Lenin and Stalin. Narration by Comrade Donald Duckovich. History is so cool.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Business Insider? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Now, new research reveals another toxic chemical was also at play. By examining the shells of ancient fossilized bivalves — underwater mollusks like oysters and mussels — from around the world, scientists identified a global increase in mercury and carbon dioxide, and oceanic warming, about 250,000 years before the asteroid hit. This uptick resulted from a series of million-year-long volcanic eruptions called the Deccan Traps in modern-day India. "For the first time, we can provide insights into the distinct climatic and environmental impacts of Deccan Traps volcanism by analyzing a single material," lead author of the new study, Kyle Meyer, said in a press release.

If it wasn’t one damn thing, it was another. They lived hard lives then to make us happy now.

You’re all Top Commenters from where I lounge. Thanks for all the prayers and good wishes. Here’s to 2020. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line because God alone knows what await us all.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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