By Bob Gaydos
You know how sometimes there are things that happen, things people do, situations that occur that just stick in your craw? Not just annoy or disturb or irritate, but really just stick there and bug the hell out of you? Well, I've got three of those right now. Didn't realize it until I checked my notes looking for something to write about.
-- The top craw-sticker, not surprisingly, comes from Donald Trump.I've been trying to cough him up for eight years now. It has to do with his crudeness. The man is devoid of decency. He's also a bully.
The most recent examples of this are his insulting, illegal campaign photo op at Arlington National Cemetery and his public comments about his surprise opponent for the presidency, Kamala Harris.
As has been well- documented, Trump's staff not only bullied a female employee of the cemetery who tried to tell them that the national shrine to members of the armed forces was off-limits to political campaigning, Trump actually posed, smiling, next to graves with his stupid thumbs-up sign.
Then he insulted the Army for calling him out and said the woman had mental problems. Then he said everyone lied about the whole thing, despite the photos. And he added insult to insult by blaming Joe Biden for the deaths being commemorated on that day, even though Trump created the conditions for their deaths when he was commander-in-chief.
The other Trump craw sticker is his resort to personal insult, name-calling and just plain nastiness with regard to his opponent because he is too damn stupid to discuss any legitimate issue that might concern voters.
From The New York Times (surprisingly): "In a little over five weeks, in speeches, social media posts and interviews, Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a 'wack job'; a 'communist'; 'dumb as a rock'; 'real garbage'; 'a bum'; and, employing a phrase he applies almost exclusively to women, 'nasty.' In early August, he reposted an image depicting Ms. Harris as a dung beetle with her face covered in what appears to be blackface while astride a coconut. And he has made or amplified innuendo-laden references to his opponent's long-ago relationship with the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, suggesting she traded sexual favors to accelerate her political career."
The real craw sticker, of course, is not Trump. He can be spit out like all those phony schoolyard bullies. Full of fear and never read a book. No, the real problem is that so many Americans accept this kind of behavior as appropriate, not just for anyone, but to someone they want to see in the Oval Office. We are a nation crawling with dumb, racist bullies. I'm never going to get rid of this one.
-- This relatively new craw-stick comes courtesy of the Boeing Corporation and NASA. The space agency, when it put the extraterrestrial travel responsibility out to bid, chose Boeing as one of the contractors. Boeing, of course, has had a morbid history of just regular jet planes crashing and killing hundreds of people on Earth. It still has doors falling off planes in flight.
Yet NASA OK'd a Boeing Starliner to take two astronauts to the International Space Station, even after delays on the ground because of helium leaks. Well, they eventually got there. But NASA says it doesn't trust Boeing to get the astronauts back to Earth on the Starliner because of, yes, leaks. And thruster problems.
Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were supposed to spend eight days in space, but have been there three months now. Apparently, there's plenty of work to do. But Williams is a cause for concern. In space, red blood cells are destroyed faster than on Earth. Hers are apparently being destroyed at a troubling rate. But not to worry, NASA says. (See above: Boeing leaks.)
The astronauts are now scheduled to return to Earth in February, 2025, aboard Elon Musk's Space X spacecraft. Two astronauts got bumped from that mission to make room for the stranded astronauts.
Meanwhile, the Boeing Starliner capsule is scheduled to return, empty, on September 6. Fingers crossed at NASA on the landing.
No word on when Boeing figures out its flying problems or what NASA has in mind for the company's future space missions. Hello, Congress?
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