For all their mealy-mouthed “thank you for your service” bullsh**, if you scratch a progressive you will invariably find someone who is hostile to military service and now finds it more convenient to mask it in condescending “thank Gaia for these little people” malarkey. That was not the case a very short decade ago when the progressive movement proudly showed their true colors.

Full disclosure, there is more than a little latent anger on my part here. I went to college during the grim aftermath of the Vietnam War. As an ROTC cadet I was required to wear a uniform on campus one day a week. I know what these people are really like when they think they are in the majority.

Trump, however, has them feeling their oats. And his nomination of at least two flag officers to cabinet secretaries (Mattis/Defense; Kelly/Homeland Security) and the selection of Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser has set them off. Take these contributions from some major media writers:

Politico

Three generals and maybe a fourth. Can we just cut to the chase and call ourselves a junta?

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) December 7, 2016

The New Yorker

How many generals do you need in government before you technically become a junta? https://t.co/cGUJse64M3

— nxthompson (@nxthompson) December 7, 2016

And there are tons more. There is even a #TrumpJunta hashtag.

This is just the cheapest sort of bigotry masquerading as some sort of insight. It isn’t even linguistically correct. A “junta” requires that the generals be on active duty. All the generals Trump has picked are retired and therefore civilians. Much like the dipsticks criticizing their selection. These are people who would never, ever call a cabinet with several women a “bunch of biddies” or apply any similar language to a disproportionate number of minorities in a cabinet. But when a man has given thirty-plus years of his life — and in the case of General Kelly, the life of his son — in the service of his country, well, he becomes suspect and it become completely okay to impugn that man and accuse him of betraying the oath he has upheld for most of his adult life.