https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/11/20/1814269/-Retired-Army-colonels-slam-Trump-for-using-troops-as-toy-soldiers-for-unprecedented-border-stunt

The e******n is over, so apparently the “crisis” at the souther border is over too … or not? On Monday, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan told Politico that troops from Donald Trump’s $200 million dollar border stunt would be going home by Christmas, saying that “our end date right now is 15 December, and I’ve got no indications from anybody that we’ll go beyond that.”

But that appeared to change by the next day, when a military spokesperson also said that troops may be moved all right, and not home, but instead “to other areas of the border to engineering support missions in California and other areas,” Politico reported. “No specific timeline for redeployment has been determined,” the spokesperson said.

But in California, they’ll be doing a whole lot more of nothing after stringing concertina wire along the border, because immigration officials—you know, the folks we already pay billions to do to immigration stuff—are taking their sweet time processing claims, hoping that if asylum seekers have to wait weeks, perhaps months, to be heard, maybe they’ll just give up.

So does anyone have any idea what the fuck is going? Two retired colonels hit the nail on the head, writing that ”the president used America’s military forces not against any real threat but as toy soldiers, with the intent of manipulating a domestic midterm e******n outcome, an unprecedented use of the military by a sitting president.”

“E*******l gain, not security, is this president’s goal,” write retired colonels Lawrence Wilkerson and Isaiah Wilson. “Two of us served in the military for many years; while all troops must obey the legal and ethical orders of civilian leaders, they need to have faith that those civilian leaders are using them for legitimate national security purposes. But the border deployment put the military right in the middle of the midterm e******ns, creating a nonexistent crisis to stimulate v**es for one party.”

”When partisan actions like this occur,” they continue, “they violate civil-military traditions and erode that faith, with potentially long-term damage to the morale of the force and our democratic practice—all for e*******l gain. The deployment is a stunt, a dangerous one, and in our view, a misuse of the military.” A stunt based off a nonexistent crisis that failed miserably. Democrats swept the House of Representatives in the biggest e*******l landslide since Watergate.

Still, remember that Trump hasn’t been alone in this stunt, because complicit congressional Republicans did nothing to stop him, and because of this e******n day stunt, troops will be, at the very least, missing Thanksgiving with their families. Trump, meanwhile, is scheduled to leave the White House for Mar-a-Lago Tuesday. How nice for him. Remember all this the next time conservative pearls get clutched over taking a knee.