Beth Philley

Guardians ⚾, Browns, Bengals, Chiefs, & Buckeyes, Very progressive politics, No non-friend DMs

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

Yeah, this is not good

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

Why are National Guard troops in Washington D.C standing in front of a ballot drop box like they’re guarding it! This seems like it would be against 18 US code 592 which makes it a federal crime for any Military officer to be at any general or special Election polling place & ballot box.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

OMG! More misdirection, which is totally on brand for this circus.

[Conor Lamb @ConorLambPA]

If you’re wondering why we’re talking about televised firing squads all of a sudden it’s because it was finally revealed we lost *an entire base* in Kuwait and our troops didn’t have enough bullets to defend it. A career ender for Hegseth in any other world.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@PatrickThePi Welcome to #Believeland Aunt Shelly! @WolfShellyMama6

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

Definitely worth the 5 minutes. It will take you to read it.

[The Space Coast Rocket @CoastRocket]

WE COUNT THE ENEMIES WE KILL. WE RARELY COUNT THE ONES WE CREATE.

Nidal Hasan was a patient on my floor in the surgical trauma ICU at Brooke Army Medical Center.

I wasn't there when he arrived. I had just left for my deployment to Mosul, Iraq. But the nurses and doctors who cared for him were my peers and my friends, and I know exactly what that required of them, because every one of us had done some version of it before. Before anyone tells me what strength looks like, understand what that work demands.

I have cared for a drunk driver who wiped out an entire family and landed in our ICU himself. I have cared for gang members who shot up a block while children were stepping off a school bus, then ended up on our unit with bullets of their own. I have kept alive people who murdered their own families and failed at taking their own lives. And in Iraq, I saved the lives of the very enemy fighters who had just tried to kill us and miraculously survived our response.

Every one of those patients got our best. Not because we felt anything for them, but because of who we were. You set aside anger, grief, prejudice and every personal feeling you have, because a life in front of you is a life in front of you. That's the oath. That's the duty.

So when Hasan came through those doors, my colleagues did what we had always done. They preserved the life of a man who murdered thirteen people and would have killed them too, given the chance. He killed those men and women in one of the very same buildings many Soldier's like myself have been in when I was stationed at Fort Hood.
He is alive today because they did their jobs. That was not sentiment. It was a hard, tangible expression of the values this country claims to stand for. Our principles had to mean something even when the person benefiting from them had violated everything we believed in.

Now the Pentagon plans to livestream his execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, and our leaders apparently believe turning his death into a public spectacle will demonstrate American strength. I think it demonstrates how little they understand the enemy they claim to be fighting. We kept Nidal Hasan alive, now our leaders want to make him a martyr.

Hasan walked into Fort Hood expecting to die. He believed his death would be rewarded. At his trial, he called no witnesses and offered no defense, and his own court-appointed lawyers worried he was seeking execution. He failed at martyrdom once. Now we're about to hand it to him, in high definition, for every extremist with an internet connection to replay, manipulate and celebrate.
We supply the footage. They supply the meaning.
Long after the politicians finish congratulating themselves, that video will still exist. Their moment of bravado becomes somebody else's recruiting material for decades. And this failure to think past the immediate display of power reaches far beyond one execution. We count the enemies we kill. We rarely count the enemies we create.

Look at the school in Minab, Iran, where multiple investigations attributed the strike that killed more than 100 children and their teachers to us. You cannot bury people's children beneath the rubble of their classrooms and expect a speech about American intentions to decide how they remember you. No denial brings those children home. No claim of good intentions makes their parents forget whose weapons killed them.
If those were our children, we would remember for the rest of our lives. We would demand accountability. Many of us would want vengeance. We would tell their stories to the next generation. We know this because we did exactly that after September 11.

Why do we imagine other people love their children less, grieve less deeply, or remember less clearly?

We have developed a horrifying talent for creating more terrorists than we will ever stop. We inflict suffering, evade responsibility, and then act as though the anger that follows came out of nowhere.

Think back to the first time you saw one of those al Qaeda videos of an American being beheaded. Remember the sickness in your stomach. Remember the rage. Remember thinking that only savages would film a killing and send it out for the world to watch. Now ask yourself what the rest of the world will see when the camera is ours.
Terrorist organizations stage executions for the cameras. Authoritarian regimes make death a public spectacle to feed fear and rage. Watching our own leaders reach for those same tools should force us to confront how much of ourselves we are surrendering in the name of defeating them.

The line separating us from the people we condemn has to live in our conduct. A flag cannot hold it for us. Neither can a uniform, a title, or a declaration that we are the good guys.
On that ICU floor, on a bloody street in Mosul, and in trauma bays across this country, people like my colleagues hold that line every day under circumstances most will never face. They keep monsters alive because their duty and their humanity are bigger than their hatred of what those monsters have done.

Execute him if that's the sentence. But do it the way a confident nation does; quietly, lawfully, and without giving him the stage he always wanted. Let him be forgotten.

I expect our leaders to show at least as much discipline as the nurses who had to care for him.
They keep telling us they are defending what makes America different. Every day, they make that difference harder to see.

Robert W. Burns III is the editor and publisher of The Space Coast Rocket, an Army veteran and a retired trauma nurse. The views expressed in this column are his own.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@jackmjenkins @EliSeitz10

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@JoJoFromJerz Nowhere in his announcement does it say how much we are paying. That's a very big piece of this puzzle I think.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@TaraSetmayer Are the requirements long blonde hair, fake boobs, and a somewhat regular pulse?

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

"These were supposed to be the chapters in the history book that made us recoil. We weren’t supposed to finish reading and ask who owns the streaming rights."

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

So we’re livestreaming military executions now?
American soldiers shooting a man in a wheelchair for the whole world to watch?

What in the blood-spattered, bread-and-circuses bullshit are we doing?

Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people. He deserves punishment.

I’ve been to Fort Hood many times in my life. I stand with the families who lost someone they loved that horrific day, who have spent every day since living with an absence nobody can fill.

Their loved ones deserved to come home. Their families deserve our support. Turning the man who took them into the star of a worldwide broadcast is a grotesque way to dishonor everything he stole.

Because he WANTED martyrdom, and Pete Hegseth, our secretary of day drunkenness, is gift-wrapping it with a camera crew.

Hegseth looked so excited discussing it with Pizzagate Posobiec, you’d think he’d been invited to a wedding with an open bar and a complimentary Nazi tattoo station instead of a photo booth.

This Pentagon pick-me prick is handing terrorist cells a propaganda bonanza. They can erase Hasan’s atrocities, sanctify his death and circulate those images for decades. That endangers my kids, your kids and our troops, because violent extremists LIVE for this shit.

And what are our children supposed to learn watching Hegseth impersonate Jesus one day and salivate over public slaughter the next?

Where in the Bible does it say, “And then Jesus said, ‘Get a second camera on the bloodlust’”?

Paul wrote, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him.” “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

How did you get “livestream the headshot” out of THAT, you sanctimonious, scripture-spouting salesman for state-sponsored sadism?

And by the way, isn’t this what they do in IRAN? You know, Iran—the brutal, murderous regime our tin-pot tyrant told us we were going to war to help overthrow?

You know who else does this shit? Afghanistan. Twenty years fighting the Taliban, and we’ve decided their public-execution program needed an American distributor?

We’ve started borrowing the brutality we claimed to be fighting.

This is sick. This is depraved. Hitler had executions filmed. North Korea assembles crowds to watch the state kill. And now the Pentagon wants a worldwide audience.

These were supposed to be the chapters in the history book that made us recoil. We weren’t supposed to finish reading and ask who owns the streaming rights.

Back in 1936, an estimated twenty thousand people gathered around the gallows to watch Rainey Bethea hang in Kentucky. That grotesque gathering became a national scandal that helped end public executions there.

Ninety years later, these sociopathic showboats want to bring the whole planet to the gallows.

But why stop at bullets? Why not stoning? Burning at the stake? The William Wallace treatment—hanged, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered?

Why not build your endcap emperor a Colosseum, Coors Light Callistus? His name in big gold letters. There’s a perfectly good spot where the Washington Monument is. Tear that shit down. What’s it doing? Remembering somebody ELSE?

Make it pay-per-view: free Trump coin with every subscription, commemorative Snuggie with the premium bloodbath package. Spectators can pay extra for seats in the splash zone.

We’re in a literal war with the world’s greatest sponsor of global terror, and all they want to do is exact retribution for the little girls we killed.

We can’t afford gas, groceries or healthcare, measles is making a comeback like Tiffany on a Long Island VFW tour, and THIS is what our government is producing.

How does this make us safer? Stronger? How does this psychopathic pageant honor thirteen murdered human beings?

Their deaths are being used to advertise his.

It’s barbaric. It’s fucking insane. This is not justice. This is fascism.

This is the Temu Taliban with bald eagles, a military band playing “YMCA” in the background, and better fucking lighting.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

Soooo glad I stayed up!

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

I'm thinking about going to bed. I can't take this.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

Patty Barrels!!

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@nats_sportschat Solid 5

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

Rocchio mean-mugging Fedde had me cracking up!

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

Walks, sloppy defense, & 1 used challenge. That's what I like to see!

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@Angry_Staffer Gross

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@H0rsinAr0und @AmyMcGrathKY Absolutely! But sadly, some people will not see the difference.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@swiftlyguards Feel better soon! It's almost 8:00

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

October 8th...just saw a Christmas tree commercial.

[Beth Philley @GuardsGranny]

@GuardsJoey Let's go Guards!