CNN Jim Sciutto asks former FAA Investigator, Greg Feith, "Did DEI effect helicopter/airplane collision?"
President Orange Toddler gaslights: He attributes "DEI" to all catastrophes . . . We resist!
First, let me acknowledge two excellent writers.
Before you read anything Armando writes (what does HE know?!?!), please always look at:
CellyBlue — I do know this! —
Sherrilyn Ifill (cousin of the well-loved and much missed Gwen Ifill):
There are so many, so very many.
Please check out CellyBlue — I do know this! and Sherrilyn Ifill first, always.
As Professor Joyce Vance says, We are in this together!
Which is good, because together, in our diversity, is strength and effective resistance.
Which leads directly to Armando’s little contribution for today.
At 6:10 PM EST, CNN, senior anchor Jim Sciutto prefaces a question with the predicate of representations of President Orange-Racism that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was hampered in last night’s collision between an Army helicopter and American Eagle Flight 5342 last night.
Mr. Sciutto asked if DEI contributed to conditions for the crash.
First, the obvious.
This proposition is a patent absurdity. It is white-supremacist race-baiting. It is of the same stripe as enflamed violence in Ohio against Haitian immigrants, when the Republican Governor and the city Mayor asked the campaign to stop, and JD Vance, the Yale Law graduate, doubled down.
Predictably, President Orange-Rumormonger alleged the FAA expertise was weakened because both Presidents Obama and Biden emphasized something called “DEI” in employment.
JD Vance, Yale Law pedigree, redoubled.
The insanity of the current times, 2025, is that the senior CNN anchor asked former FAA investigator, Greg Feith, whether in his long investigative experience that “DEI” had any chain of causation with any accident.
Mr. Feith said, “No!”
In context, when news was raging as were the prairie fires in LA County, the same President Orange-Toddler alleged DEI practices had an effect (causative? catalytic?) on the Santa-Ana-wind-driven wildfires that swept through enormous swaths of LA County, one of the most populous and wealthy areas worldwide.
President Orange-Insurrection loses no opportunity to constantly barrage the media about “DEI”, which is too eager to give air to such racism.
As one who spent a 41-year lawyerly career — Air Force judge advocate (8 years active, 20 additional years reserves, retired March 2003) and Navy Office of General Counsel (GS-905-15, retired end of February 2016), I can assure most emphatically that I was among those who pushed diversity, and I served with hundreds of some of the finest professionals in my entire life, woman, man, Black, Latino (Americans of Salvadoran, Mexican, Cuban and other ethnicities), Jews, Asians, Arab-Americans, Russian-Americans, handicapped persons.
Each of these persons served our country with high honor and ability.
They deserve better than to have a vile man elected by a small plurality denounce them in the course of embarrassing — himself, really.
The problem is, most Americans work hard; go home tired from work; are glad to unwind with a few beers, hamburger, beans and fries and to watch America Has Talent, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, World Wrestling and then, to be “informed” with an hour or so of Shorn Vanity or Jess Watters.
So these people think, “Hmmm. I am used to the President of the United States being a public figure who speaks truth to the American people in crisis or hard times. Hmm, no less than the President of the United States keeps repeating that “DEI” weakens preparation or even response to raging California fires decimating an enormous metropolitan area, or last night’s crash of the Army Helicopter into the American Eagle Flight 5342. We cannot have that! No wonder President Trump intervenes for the people to disrupt and end this “woke” “DEI”! Man, maybe we should act harder and should have acted sooner. Good thing I keep voting for Trump . . . “
From my experience, that is about the level of thought “Joe-Sixpack” will give to the matter: “The President serves our safety and security; I need for my family to be safe and secure; DEI reduces my safety and security — else the President of the United States would not keep emphasizing this day after day; Ergo, I support President Orange-Yuck and will oppose DEI and will oppose opposition and will oppose opposition-to-ICE raiding of churches and . . .”
I will write more about this phenomenon later, because it is not limited to the States, but is alive in Germany with fearsome implications.
When Armando — now 77 — was a kid in the 1950s, I have specific and lively memories of then contemporary events when President Dwight David Eisenhower, the Hero of D-Day: (1) Integrated with the National Guard the schools in Little Rock; and (2) Urged American business to hire the handicapped, representing them as persons of dignity and human worth and as contributing value.
Our core principle: Each human person, without exception, has inherent worth and dignity as is worthy of love and certainly of fairness and due process.
Period.
Now of course, the law must be harsh to protect public safety from persons whom due process and a trial at law has been shown to have, for example, inflicted grievous bodily harm or death upon another. So it is not a matter of going soft. Namely, a corollary as that each person should be safe, fully protected by the law and law enforcement, at home and in all of her lawful activities.
As an example. In Budapest, on the Dunacorso — the Danube-Promenade, a woman, or group of women, or child or children are safe and unharassed to walk or play at any time of night or day in one of Europe’s bustling cities.
All children and women deserve this safety.
Our civil servants deserve this safety.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has since LBJ been protected workers, public and in private enterprise.
I have rich experience over two-score years saying that the professional quality of aggressive recruiting of women, of recruiting minorities in HBCU schools, among handicapped has resulted in a highly professional and highly qualified workforce with the very best people I have met in my entire life.
It is beneath the dignity of the President of the United States to retrench to the darkness before the great moral movement of our times, the Civil Rights Movement, whose prospering in the 1950s and 1960s was contemporary to me.
The bombing of the Church in Birmingham on 15 September 1963 is one of the most agonizing events I experienced contemporarily with fellow Americans, with loss of beautiful, promising and dear, dear young women, who had innocent ideals and hopes, and who would have been the pride of their community, and whom we will never, ever forget.
Say their names: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14).
How in God’s name after such events can Americans elect a President who would retrench American racism?
I will reassure you: There are very able employment lawyers who are available to litigate on behalf of the Federal worker.
I hope that the unlawful sweep that Orange-Dip inflicts upon Federal Agencies in debunked white-supremacist conspiracy theories will be litigated by some of the most able trial lawyers in America and to bring these lawless actions to a screeching halt.
The FAA is undermanned.
But diversity in the FAA can only enhance quality.
My 41 years of experience in the Air Force and Navy have made me proud to serve with the most diverse population imaginable, including persons with all imaginable handicaps.
These are fine professionals and good persons of the highest caliber.
It is an outrage, a damnable and cowardly calumny of some of America’s finest persons and professionals to keep the megaphone flowing with lurid race-baiting as blurted by Ross Barnett 60 years ago in Segregated Mississippi.
There is the stench of an orange vomit.
We are here to sweep it and to assert the moral fiber of our Nation in the spirit of the great moral movement of our time: The Civil Rights Movement with such martyrs as the worthy young women it was my honor to name, above, such as Dr Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X.
The Spirit is that of the greatest Statesman in my life: Eleanor Roosevelt who penned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the United Nations.
We will fight.
We will oppose.
We will be seen.
We will be heard.
We will act.
We will remain.
We will persevere.
We defend the worth and innate dignity of each human person.
We will persevere and continue to challenge their lies. Well done, Armand, I especially the new names you created to reference Our National Nightmare. Glad to have you as an ally.
You can add Jonathan Daniels to the list of martyrs in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a 26-year-old seminarian who was murdered by the KKK, in collusion with the local judiciary and law enforcement. (He was a friend of my dad's.) The fact that so many good people gave their lives on behalf of civil rights for all Americans is very hard to live with, now that these civil rights are being wrenched away from them.