Yesterday a casual acquaintance sent me an email today with a link to a Baltimore Sun editorial by Richard J. Cross III. I wasn’t familiar with the name, but he’s the guy that wrote the ‘Benghazi Mom’ speech for Patricia Smith — the woman whose son died during the attack on the consular outpost. Cross, in the editorial, says this:
In that speech, I concluded with the following line: “If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?” As a political speechwriter, that was something of a home run moment for me. The New Yorker called the speech “the weaponization of grief.”
He considers the weaponization of grief to be a home run moment. That should tell you just about everything you want to know about this guy. He wrote a speech for a grieving mother — an emotionally powerful speech he knew would be given in front of a large audience at the Republican National Convention — the convention at which Donald Trump would accept the nomination.
In the speech Cross describes Trump in this way:
Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not. He is blunt, direct, and strong. He speaks his mind, and his heart.
In the speech, Cross directly blames Hillary Clinton for the death of this poor woman’s son. He writes:
For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton. I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.
Now Cross says he can’t bring himself to vote for Trump. Why? Because Trump “embraces fear.” Because Trump has said ugly things about Muslims. Like this is some sort of revelation. In his editorial Cross says:
The central question in 2016: Are Muslim Americans an equal and welcome member of the American constituency? For me, the answer is a clear “yes.”
So he’s decided he has to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Richard Cross III
Well, fuck him. Fuck Richard Cross the Third. Fuck him three times. Fuck him in the neck. This guy deserves no praise. When you wave the bloody shirt, you don’t get to pretend you were just doing your job. You don’t get to repudiate Donald Trump while celebrating a speech that praised him. You don’t get to refer to the reality that Trump isn’t qualified to be the President of These United States as “an inconvenient fact.”
If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?
You have to be a special sort of asshole to get a mother grieving for her dead son to stand on a stage and ask that question and then answer it by saying you’re going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Richard Cross III is that special kind of asshole.
gregfallis.com 
This guy gives assholes a bad name. An asshole has an important job. What went in, must come out. Give credit where credit is due. But do not defame an important outlet. An asshole is better than him.
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First of all, what branch of the military were they enlisted to?
Oh- none? They were NOT active military but mercenaries and CIA operatives. (And Amb Stevens, who, for all we know and can calculate, was probably with the CIA as well). So, while it sucks that anyone dies, anywhere, from terrorist actions and civil war, the bottom line is that these guns-for-hire KNEW what they were in for.
Just like we saw with Blackwater and its morphed re-branding, ex-military come mercenaries are paid extremely well for one reason and one reason only- they accept that they are in extremely hazardous situations and there is strong risk that they will die.
If this ass-wipe speech writer really cared about the safety of our REAL enlisted folk, he would have attacked SecDef Rumsfield, DICK Cheney and Bush the Lesser for going to war with ‘crap preparation’…
As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe — it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.
“Troops put Rumsfeld in the hot seat”. CNN. 2004-12-08. Retrieved on 2006-04-07.
Responding to the question “Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up armor our vehicles, and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?”
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