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Memorial Day is the kind of holiday that should bring the country together a tiny little bit because it honors all fallen soldiers, regardless of their skin color or their party affiliation. In the end, they were all Americans. It doesn’t even matter if you agree with the conflicts they died in. After all, it wasn’t them who made the decision to go to war, they were just the ones fighting it.
Generally, politicians manage to rise to the occasion.
Granted, that is a fairly low bar because it shouldn’t be so difficult to compose a message that commemorates all those servicemembers who gave their lives for the United States.
Here is President Joe Biden’s, for example.
“On Memorial Day, we honor the fallen heroes who served and sacrificed for our freedom and for our future,” he tweeted. “We must never forget the price that was paid to protect our democracy.”
And here is what House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to say: “America honors today the brave men and women of the US military who have paid the ultimate sacrifice while defending our country. We owe them, and the families they left behind, an eternal debt of gratitude.”
The point is that, no matter whether a Democrat or a Republican composed these messages, they are essentially interchangeable, and that is how it should be.
Memorial Day is not a day for petty partisanship.
Even Donald Trump, who has bungled various holiday messages (e.g., last Christmas) by turning them into rants about how he has been mistreated, got it right this year.
“We can never replace them, we can never repay them, but we can always remember,” he* wrote on his Truth Social platform. “That is what we are doing – we remember.”
So, just about everybody sounded the right note… just not Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
The right-wing firebrand apparently couldn’t help himself from adding a decidedly political spin to his Memorial Day message.
“From Bunker Hill to Benghazi to Abbey Gate,” he wrote. “Never forget the brave men and women who gave their lives for freedom and our country.”
That’s a curious (and pathetically partisan) choice of battlefields.
Benghazi, of course, refers to the deadly attack on two US facilities in Libya in 2012, during which four Americans died… none of them members of the armed services, which Memorial Day should be about. That isn’t to say that their deaths and sacrifices matter less, it just shows that, in every way, Benghazi is a bad example to choose for a Memorial Day message.
To be fair to Jordan, maybe he just doesn’t know any other battles, like Gettysburg or the storming of the beaches in Normandy on D-Day. Both cost a lot more American lives, and each of them arguably helped turn the tide in wars against ferocious enemies of freedom.
It would make sense that he is only familiar with Benghazi.
In fact, he was a member of the United States House Select Committee on Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, also known as the GOP’s multi-million-dollar effort to somehow blame Hillary Clinton for the attack and torpedo her chances to become president in 2016.
And let’s not forget that his reference to Abbey Gate is also a partisan attack… this one on Biden, who was president when a terrorist attack killed 13 American service members and nearly 200 Afghan civilians in Kabul in 2021.
There is one thing Jordan got right, though. All of the people being commemorated today gave their lives so a complete fool and partisan hack like him has the right to write dumb political messages… but that doesn’t mean he should exercise it.
*Editor’s Note: Right before the publication of this article, we became aware of Donald Trump’s actual Memorial Day message, i.e., not the one a staffer wrote for him so that the former president wouldn’t sound like a gigantic weirdo with a chip on his shoulder.
Here it is in its entirety:
Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.” She didn’t know when the so-called event took place – sometime in the 1990’s – never filed a police report, didn’t have to produce the “dress” that she threatened me with (it showed negative!), & sung my praises in the first half of her CNN Interview with Alison Cooper, but changed her tune in the second half – Gee, I wonder why (UNDER APPEAL!)? The Rape charge was dropped by a jury! Or Arthur Engoron, the N.Y. State Wacko Judge who fined me almost 500 Million Dollars (UNDER APPEAL) for DOING NOTHING WRONG, used a Statute that has never been used before, gave me NO JURY, Mar-a-Lago at $18,000,000 – Now for Merchan!
