What explains these insanities that are insults to the American people’s intelligence?
Think for a minute.
When did we become a nation of socialist AOCs wearing “Tax the Rich” dresses to $35,000-a-ticket celebrity galas, without mandatory masks, while being served by masked servants—a now tired script from the Obama birthday bash crowd to the grandees at the Emmys?
When did we discover that we must listen to oppressed billionaire Oprah from her $90 million Montecito estate commiserating with a billionaire Lebron or royal Meghan Markle about the racist white establishment? Is there anyone in the recent Washington intelligence and investigatory hierarchy who has not lied or feigned loss of memory under oath—a low bar that nevertheless excludes, among others, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, or Peter Strzok?
Did anyone just five years ago believe the following could possibly happen in America—and invoke almost no popular outrage from a somnolent public?
Item: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, does not deny that:
1) he deliberately aborted the legal chain of operational command—that is, violated the law—by recalibrating established protocols for using nuclear weapons in times of crisis. And he says his interventions were based on his own diagnoses (after prompting from opposition leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the commander-in-chief was crazy, and thus could be circumvented.
And 2), in freelancing style, Milley, on more than one occasion, called the top figure of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army, General Li Zuocheng. He reportedly announced that his own country was currently in crisis (experiencing “messy” democracy), reassuring the Chinese that if he, Milley, the newfound autokrator, sensed there was any chance of hostile and aggressive action on the part of his own country, then on his own initiative he would tip off the Chinese in advance. And far from resigning or being fired for his Strangelovian efforts, Milley would then be hailed as a hero by the popular media and progressive civil libertarians. In other words, for the Left, it is as if Burt Lancaster’s movie character, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, was the real hero of Seven Days in May.
Milley has also become the Zelig or Forrest Gump of our times. He turns up at almost all our recent military melodramas and disasters. Milley appears variously in the photo-op/federal troops/tear-gas spoof, the virtue-signaled rumored resignation, the talking referent in anonymously sourced books, puff-piece op-eds, and backgrounder quotes, the Inspector Javert of “white rage,” the student of How To Be An Antiracist, the Afghanistan progress reassurer, the “righteous” drone striker, the adjudicator between January 6 “coups” and 120 days of “penny packet protests” costing $2 billion-dollars in riot and arson destruction and 28 deaths, the Article 88 violator, the reductio ad Hitlerum promulgator, and the underappreciated but rumored polymath bibliophile.
To understand Milley’s gambit, imagine Admiral Ernest King, some time in November 1941 secretly contacting his Japanese imperial counterpart, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, to warn him and the Japanese high command that Admiral King felt President Roosevelt was both too trigger happy for a Pacific war, and was also increasingly infirm and unsteady.
And thus, King would step forward to promise Admiral Yamamoto and the Japanese military grandees that if he felt there was any possible aggressive or peremptory presidential order against Japan, King would tip him off first.
Note that critical contemporaries had complained both that Roosevelt was pining for a pretext for war with Japan and that his closed circle had hidden many of his serious health challenges from the public—and note also that the chances that a President Roosevelt or Trump would have ever staged a preemptive attack on a belligerent neutral were—absolutely zero.
Item: The United States military in the middle of the night abandoned the largest air base in Central Asia, after investing hundreds of millions of dollars in retrofitting the vast complex, as part of a hasty end to a 20-year presence in Afghanistan.
In the last few remaining hours of our withdrawal, Americans would skedaddle to the airport, lose 13 soldiers to a suicide bomber, while guarding our final escape route, retaliate for the killing by accidentally blowing up a civilian relief worker and killing 10 of his family and friends including 7 children, wait almost 2 weeks to disclose said disaster, abandon a $1 billion embassy, dismiss 8,000 NATO allied troops in Afghanistan to fend for themselves, leave behind for Taliban terrorists some $80 billion worth of...
And 2), in freelancing style, Milley, on more than one occasion, called the top figure of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army, General Li Zuocheng. He reportedly announced that his own country was currently in crisis (experiencing “messy” democracy), reassuring the Chinese that if he, Milley, the newfound autokrator, sensed there was any chance of hostile and aggressive action on the part of his own country, then on his own initiative he would tip off the Chinese in advance. And far from resigning or being fired for his Strangelovian efforts, Milley would then be hailed as a hero by the popular media and progressive civil libertarians. In other words, for the Left, it is as if Burt Lancaster’s movie character, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, was the real hero of Seven Days in May.
Milley has also become the Zelig or Forrest Gump of our times. He turns up at almost all our recent military melodramas and disasters. Milley appears variously in the photo-op/federal troops/tear-gas spoof, the virtue-signaled rumored resignation, the talking referent in anonymously sourced books, puff-piece op-eds, and backgrounder quotes, the Inspector Javert of “white rage,” the student of How To Be An Antiracist, the Afghanistan progress reassurer, the “righteous” drone striker, the adjudicator between January 6 “coups” and 120 days of “penny packet protests” costing $2 billion-dollars in riot and arson destruction and 28 deaths, the Article 88 violator, the reductio ad Hitlerum promulgator, and the underappreciated but rumored polymath bibliophile.
To understand Milley’s gambit, imagine Admiral Ernest King, some time in November 1941 secretly contacting his Japanese imperial counterpart, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, to warn him and the Japanese high command that Admiral King felt President Roosevelt was both too trigger happy for a Pacific war, and was also increasingly infirm and unsteady.
And thus, King would step forward to promise Admiral Yamamoto and the Japanese military grandees that if he felt there was any possible aggressive or peremptory presidential order against Japan, King would tip him off first.
Note that critical contemporaries had complained both that Roosevelt was pining for a pretext for war with Japan and that his closed circle had hidden many of his serious health challenges from the public—and note also that the chances that a President Roosevelt or Trump would have ever staged a preemptive attack on a belligerent neutral were—absolutely zero.
Item: The United States military in the middle of the night abandoned the largest air base in Central Asia, after investing hundreds of millions of dollars in retrofitting the vast complex, as part of a hasty end to a 20-year presence in Afghanistan.
In the last few remaining hours of our withdrawal, Americans would skedaddle to the airport, lose 13 soldiers to a suicide bomber, while guarding our final escape route, retaliate for the killing by accidentally blowing up a civilian relief worker and killing 10 of his family and friends including 7 children, wait almost 2 weeks to disclose said disaster, abandon a $1 billion embassy, dismiss 8,000 NATO allied troops in Afghanistan to fend for themselves, leave behind for Taliban terrorists some $80 billion worth of...
