BULLETIN: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-BLOCK (1:44) Trump, “honoring” Miriam Adelson, a wealthy widow trying to help him buy the election and the government, has denigrated and insulted our nation's greatest military heroes by saying that the PRESIDENTIAL medal of freedom he gave her was quote “better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor because the recipients of the latter were usually deceased or injured.

"When we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom," Trump said at an event Thursday night at his ramshackle golf course in New Jersey, "that’s the highest award you can get as a civilian. It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead, She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal."

at any other point in our nation’s history a presidential candidate who said what Donald Trump has now said about winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor, would not only have had had his nomination rescinded by his party, but its leaders would have expelled him, and probably chased him out of the country or at least into hiding.

This latest in a series of Trump blasphemies against American war dead and wounded comes in the middle of an attempt by his campaign to ride the limited military service of his vice presidential pick, Senator Vance, as an indicator of patriotism and bravery, and the attempt to swift-boat his Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz because there are nuanced details of the end of his TWENTY-FOUR year career in the military – a career which he resumed, coming out of retirement after 9/11. Vance has accused Walz of "stolen valor" and just yesterday in Pennsylvania a campaign surrogate called Walz a "coward."

Lastly, there is Trump’s own original sin in this area: he somehow obtained five deferments from service in Vietnam in the 1960’s using “bone spurs” that mysteriously ended at the same time the military draft did.