A Memorial Day to Forget

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I can’t think of a worse way to observe Memorial Day than by pardoning war criminals.

Yet that is what the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States is making plans to do. He can’t risk his hair in the rain to visit the graves of our war dead, but if he can rehabilitate a few soldiers whose only crimes are that they murdered a few people who aren’t even white (women and girls maybe, boys and old men, but not white), he’s ready to party.

First up for pardon is a man who hasn’t even been tried yet (hasn’t stopped the President from pardoning like-minded pals before). This man is a Navy SEAL turned in by seven other SEALs under his command in Iraq. Among other things, they witnessed him stab a defenseless teenage captive to death, use his sniper rifle to shoot a school-age girl and old man for target practice, and fire rockets and machine guns into neighborhoods for fun. He certainly sounds like he deserves a presidential pardon, at least from this president.

Other possible pardons are of a Blackwater contractor who massacred ten women, two kids, and two men who might have been an actual danger to him, had they been armed and known of his intentions; a soldier already hailed by Trump as a “U.S. Military hero,” who summarily executed a captive because he thought the man might make bombs for the Taliban; and a whole group of Marines shown on video urinating on the corpses of suspected Afghan fighters (not the President’s first involvement with a pee tape).

Are these the sort of heroic actions the president imagines he himself might have assayed but for the pesky (if imaginary) bone spurs that kept him out of military service?

What kind of man pardons war criminals? But then I’ve wondered this kind of thing before. What kind of man lies with nearly every breath he takes? What kind of man incites violence against political foes and journalists? What kind of man steals children at our southern border, cages them, lets them die in his custody?

Wait…we already know. Vladimir Putin’s kind of man.