JD Vance has a lot of explaining to do

When Benjamin Pennington was a kid, he liked to play Army with friends, and his room was filled with Army prints and model military planes. “Ben’s dream and life calling from an early age was to be an American soldier,” his obituary says.

And that he was. A Kentucky native, Pennington enlisted at 18 and was later stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, where he fell in love with his new state. He hiked 14ers, snowboarded and pursued a life of faith. In January, he was baptized at Zeal Church in Colorado Springs.

Two months later he was dead.

The 26-year-old staff sergeant is one of 13 Americans who have been killed as part of the so-called Operation Epic Fury, a war of choice started by President Donald Trump that has injured more than 400 Americans, pummeled the economy, destabilized the Middle East, and left the United States the conflict’s humiliated loser.

Pennington’s death is just one grievance that will meet Vice President JD Vance when he arrives in Colorado Springs on Thursday to deliver the commencement address at the Air Force Academy. Vance will be visiting a city that has suffered direct attacks from the administration. He will be showing his face in a state that has been a repeated target of vindictive and damaging acts of petty retaliation by the White House.

Vance owes Coloradans an explanation.

The Iran war has distressed Colorado Springs in many ways. Home to five military installations, the city instantly was put at risk by Trump’s attack on Iran. “Colorado Springs is a massive target, much like Huntsville, much like Tampa, other centers of gravity for defense technology,” cybersecurity expert Scott Edwards told KOAA News.

Worse, the administration has intentionally wounded the city. Last year it announced it would move U.S. Space Command from Peterson Space Force Base to Alabama. Trump didn’t even pretend that this was a strategic or practical move. It was pure punishment. He dislikes how Colorado runs its elections, which experts across the board laud as safe and secure.

The Space Command spite exemplifies the administration’s posture toward Colorado in general. Having singled out the state as a political opponent, the administration Vance represents treats Colorado like a foreign enemy to be harassed and abused with no fidelity to its constitutional duty to act in the interest of all Americans. It is breaking up the renowned atmospheric science hub NCAR in Boulder, it has denied disaster recovery funds for wildfire and flooding emergencies, it has withheld money for food and childcare in the state, and it has tried to undermine the state’s election systems.

This is all so destructive. But it’s also outrageously immoral. U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Lafayette put it succinctly when he said, “The president has declared war on our state.”

Vance was the source of perhaps the administration’s biggest recent insult to the state when he named Tina Peters as a prime example of a person who could receive a payout from a corrupt new pool of taxpayer money that Trump created. Peters, an election denier and Trump ally who was convicted of felonies for helping to breach her own election equipment when she was Mesa County clerk, caused incalculable harm to trust in Colorado elections. But Vance claims she’s “innocent,” and, solely to indulge his lying boss, he wants to take money out of your pocket to put in hers.

What does Vance have to say for himself? How does he expect to visit Colorado and just ignore what his administration is doing to the state? Where does he get the nerve to stand in front of 900 graduating cadets of the academy when the administration has so recklessly misused America’s brave fighting men and women? How does he explain why Pennington had to die?

Pennington’s family remembered him as having lived “servant-hearted and in sacrifice to others.” That’s the kind of character that makes Americans proud of their armed forces.

But the man who will step to a podium at Falcon Stadium on Thursday serves an administration that exhibits no evidence of those traits.

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