The Military-Intelligence Complex
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/military-intelligence-complex/Not long after a number of generals and admirals recently weighed in with renewed criticism of the president in orchestrated unison, presidential candidate Joe Biden seemed giddy at their effort. After breezily asserting that “this president is going to try to steal this election,” Biden then charged additionally that Trump might not depart peacefully after losing the election .
In other words, according to Biden, Trump would either steal an election, claim he won, and then not leave after really losing it, or he would clearly lose it and then refuse to vacate the White House.
But Biden bragged that he was not worried, now that retired generals had “ripped the skin off of Trump,” and thus could be counted on as muscle by the new president Biden:
I was so damn proud. You have four chiefs of staff coming out and ripping the skin off of Trump, and you have so many rank-and-file military personnel saying, “Whoah, we’re not a military state. This is not who we are.”
Biden then offered the warning, “I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
Biden is, of course, increasingly incoherent. Nonetheless, when he cites “four chiefs of staff,” he is referring to four former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff and now retired generals and admirals — Retired Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, Retired Army General Martin Dempsey, Retired Air Force General Richard Myers, and Retired Army General Colin Powell — who have publicly criticized Trump’s notice that he will use federal troops if necessary to restore calm.
Joe Biden calls the generals who criticize President Donald Trump as four chiefs of staff, but they are retired generals.
The logic is twisted but seems to suggest that retired generals who come out to criticize the current elected president may have to be pressed into action by Biden to enforce the results of an election. Ponder the theoretical interpretations that the addled Biden has drawn from the recent “revolt of the generals.” If Biden continues with this logic and alleges, after the November election (as did Hillary Clinton), that Trump “stole” the election and thus the vote is fraudulent, then he can decide that Trump could be reelected only illegitimately. He apparently believes he has the support of the military, active and retired, to rid us of the interloper. This is preposterous, but it is a preposterousness that the retired generals themselves have spawned, because their current crazy talk seems not so crazy to a crazy Biden.
Remember, this nonsense about Trump either stealing an election or refusing to return to private life after losing an election also arises in an ironic context. Disclosures mount that outgoing Vice President Biden himself thought that he and his administration had a right to surveil the Trump campaign and presidential transition. Biden himself requested the unmasking of an American citizen in subsequent intelligence transcripts; the name had been redacted and was then illegally leaked to the press. Biden was part of an Obama team that approved spying on General Michael Flynn, Trump’s designated national-security adviser — all justified on the notion of “Russian collusion” that at that time had already been debunked by the Obama administration’s own FBI.
President George H. W. Bush ordered the US Marines into Los Angeles to stop the riot in 1992.
After all, it was not as if Trump without precedent had ordered thousands of troops into the streets to quell violent protestors, the way President George H. W. Bush did, following long-accepted precedents, in 1992. In that year, Bush characterized the racially sensitive riots in Los Angeles, over the beating of Rodney King, as mob-like: “What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. . . . It’s not a message of protest. It’s been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple.”
Accordingly, as commander in chief, Bush ordered 4,500 Marine combat troops into the city to quell the violence. And he added of the order, “Federal effort will not be driven by mob violence, but by respect for due process and law.”
At the time of the 1992 riots, Bush’s chairman of the joint chiefs, who oversaw the dispatch of the federal Marines into Los Angeles, was General Colin Powell. Powell, who has now criticized Trump for even considering the use federal troops, reportedly told Bush of his request for federal troops to quell a domestic disturbance, “All you’ve got to do is say it.”
There are two other concerns. For the first time in modern memory, lots of media venues and essayists have openly discussed the possibility that the unpopular president might be the object of a coup, warnings issued both prior to and after Trump’s election, from both Americans and foreign observers, and then again in reaction to recent declarations of disdain from the retired generals and admirals.
What is striking about these admonitions are not specific charges that Trump has violated the Constitution — indeed, we are daily reading more evidence of the Obama administration’s efforts to sabotage a campaign, a presidential transition, and the early months of the new Trump presidency. Instead, we hear rants that Trump is divisive, and variously uncouth, rude, or profane in a manner the nation has not seen since perhaps Andrew Jackson, whose rustic decorum also outraged the bipartisan political establishment of the age.
General Colin Powell oversaw the dispatch of Marines into Los Angeles.
