Dr. Woody's Fascinating Factoids: Hand Salute!

No gesture is more quintessentially "military than the salute. The inviolable rule all enlisted folks are taught in boot camp: If it moves, salute it; if it doesn't paint it!~

But, at the hands of the Rightard/Wackloon outrage machine, this simple, emblematic ACT last week fell victim of a woeful misunderstanding--or willful misrepresentation--when when the Wacktards/Rightoids and other pixel-soiled minions of the Grasping Oligarchs and Plutocrats (the GOP? who gnu) flung up at Pres. Shamwow F. LowBar, charges that he disrespected a Marine guard, and by implication, they whole US military.  No, no, not the Umbrella thing.  Please, keep up!

This was later and involved a salute, and the pearls around ALL the necks at the Weekly Standard, where the story ran, were in serious danger of bursting their silken threads under extreme twisting, as their headline shrieked :  Obama Fails to Salute Marine!

Under that baldly accusatory rubric, there was a seven-line"twit-story" recounting how, upon boarding Marine One, the helicopter, Obama had not returned the salute of the Marine sentry. That was it. That's all there was. There was no "there" there.
 
Yet the Righturds were raging at what they portrayed as an egregious act of disrespect against a "the military." Their rhetoric imputed to the Prez a callous disrespect of that lowly Marine, clearly implying that the damned NEGROW, in his uppity, beige arrogance, again showed he was a Kenyan, muslim, socialist who didn't RESPECT the USofA!  Little Billy  "Daffy-mouth" Kristol's moue-mouth froze in a sneer! The NERVE of this vile interloper, this low-born peasant? They were livid.

All KNOW I am not a fan or defender of Prez. Shamwow F. LowBar, but this shit was just too much. Because the complaint is just so plainly, and purposefully wrong!

As an act of deference, the etiquette of the salute demands that it be tendered by any SUBORDINATE to ANY SUPERIOR OFFICER.  The President IS the Commanding Officer of the whole military machine. Everybody in uniform is his subordinate; EVERYBODY (in uniform) salutes him. 

However, officers are NOT required to return the ANY salutes of inferiors, though they may do so if they're not doing anything else. And NOT doing so is NOT a gesture of disrespect.

Customarily, civilians ARE NOT TO PERFORM the "military salute" at all! The dimwitted, ritual-befuddled, drooling cretin Raygun, in his senescence, made a great show of doing so--he thought it was a macho thing--and presidents since have repeated it, the but it is still a violation of protocol.
 
So the long and the short of it is: the Marine WAS required to salute the Prez, but the PREZ was NOT required to return it.

One of the casualties of the all-volunteer military has been that fewer and fewer people have intimate (boot-camp deep)  knowledge of the rigid arcanities and intricacies of military decorum without which the machine would cease to function. But without such knowledge, critics like those at the WEEKLY STANDARD should keep their flapping cock-holsters buttoned!

Copy that troops?

Now back to you in hippy central, sarge!