This was all extremely disquieting. All of it.
The tone of it validates, rather than puts to rest, the concerns about civilian control and subordination raised by Trump having surrounded himself with so many generals. He appoints himself the arbiter of what is and is not sacred and what may and may not be discussed, based on his experiences dealing with the deaths of those under his command and the loss of his son and then dishonors them, and himself, by going out of his way to suggest that the wretched civilians, and in particular, the politicians, are unworthy of their sacrifice.
Hating Congress and politicians is a fine old American tradition, a beloved hobby of civilian and soldier alike going back to the Revolution. But Kelly here assumes the mantle of final arbiter of propriety based on his own very real sacrifices to render his pronouncement on the absolute sanctity of military sacrifice beyond contest. Having donned the vestments, he pronounces the members of the military as all being the very best people in America, by definition, and then juxtoposes them with the contemptible (and identifiably Democratic and apparently black) members of Congress. And this idea that all virtue resides in the military, and imbues those in the military with virtue unattainable by the villainous politicians and wretched, presumptuous civilians and has a very specific, and worrisome historical antecedent in Washington history.
It harks back to the toxic politicization of Army of the Potomac’s officer’s corps (and that fish rotted from the McClellan-shaped head). It reeks of the frequent expressions of contempt for Lincoln, the expressions of disgust for the Republican Party and its antislavery position, and the loose talk of overthrowing the government and installing a dictator that occupied far too much of their time in camp.
There is a powerful suggestion here that the cardinal virtue of the American officer’s corps, subordination to civilian authority, has become far too focused on the person of the president rather than on the government of as a whole.
This was a deeply disturbing, and profoundly unwholesome, diatribe. And yet another testament to the way that Trump poisons everything he touches. Because no general officer who is still technically subject to recall has any business talking this way in public, no matter what his civilian job might be. At least not unless that job was the result of him first getting himself elected to high office.