John Kelly does his master's bidding

Now you can stop counting on John Kelly. You never could. But you may have been fooled for a while.

This is the "adult" in the White House.

Chief of Staff John Kelly just spoke during the White House press briefing about the entire military bereavement phone call controversy. It was volcanic. He mercilessly attacked Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, both for her comments a couple days ago and for an earlier incident (which frankly seemed like a cheap shot). Kelly took basically complete responsibility for everything President Trump had done, what he had said, how he handled the phone calls to the families of the four who died in Niger.

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Kelly has walked the walk and suffered it. He rose to the highest ranks of the Marine corps and lost a son in Afghanistan. He speaks with great credibility and experience. But I must say that the fusillade he delivered turned things almost entirely upside down.

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Kelly also said, in addition to his other criticisms of Rep. Wilson that he was stunned she had ‘listened in’ on a call from the President to a bereaved widow. It seems quite clear from everything we know that the family took President Trump’s call on speaker phone with Rep. Wilson there with them. My understanding is she had a personal relationship with the family. He made it sound like she was violating some trust, eavesdropping almost. That seems deeply misleading and dishonest.

  TPM

Of course it is. And it's also his set up for Trump to tweet this:

[Congresswoman] Wilson made a very direct and damaging attack on the President. But this is a member of Congress, caring for and being with a bereaved family. Invited by them, sharing their pain. ‘Listening in’ is just an attack that turns everything on its head.

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Kelly has a lot of credibility he has earned. I don’t want to question his motives simply because his description and comments seem so at odds with what I have seen over recent days. But the entirety of his comments seemed exploitative, an effort to turn people’s certainly reasonable (and I believe accurate) sense of being appalled at the President into an attack on military service and military sacrifice. [...] It’s a more emotion-packed version of Trump’s effort to turn the anthem/police brutality protests into dishonoring military sacrifice. He ended up by refusing to take questions from reporters who couldn’t say they personally knew a Gold Star Family.

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I understand that he said this in a moment of peaked emotion. But we individuals or reporters don’t earn our spurs of civic freedom by being proximate to military service. [...] President Trump is a blowhard and a phony and a liar. Kelly isn’t. He brings prestige and a lifetime of military service to every remark. But at the end of the day this seemed like putting that wrapper of dignity around the most Trumpian of traits: never apologize, always attack, let the truth defend itself.

And check out this part of his speech:

"You know when I was a kid growing up a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor."

  Daily Caller

Bullshit. The man is a child of the 50s when women were relegated to the kitchen.

"That’s obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life, the dignity of life, was sacred. Religion, that seems to be gone as well.  [...]  I just thought the selfless devotion that brings a man or a woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that might be sacred.”

Right. Because his son died in Afghanistan. I'd feel sorry for Kelly for that, except that he's the guy who mostly influenced his son's choices. What else could the boy do to live up to his father, the great general?

But, more to my point here is that John Kelly is using that fact and his influence now to smear another family who dared to tell the truth and make his boss look bad. The selfless devotion he's talking about hasn't been sacred since at least Viet Nam, and probably before that to Korea. He knows that.

Part of the reason Kelly was so offended and "stunned" is no doubt because he's the one who gave Trump the words to say to Johnson's widow. (The question here is does Kelly not realize Trump can't pull off sensitivity and concern for others?)

“[Trump] called four people the other day and expressed his condolences in the best way he could and he said to me, ‘What do I say?'”

Kelly went on to say that he told the president what Kelly’s friend Marine Gen. Joe Dunford told him when Kelly’s own son died. “He said, ‘Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining… that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we’re at war. And when he died… he was surrounded by the best men on this earth, his friends. That’s what the president tried to say to four families the other day.”

The Most Notable Loser had to ask Kelly what to say because he himself has no human empathy. If you're going to tell a man like that what to say in times like this, you need to be very careful and give him something to say that nobody could take in a bad way. Kelly missed that point. He screwed up. And he knows it.

Take, for example, this line: "When I was kid growing up a lot things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor."

Kelly was presumably referring with disdain to the myriad allegations against Harvey Weinstein, a prominent movie executive and major Democratic donor. But it's hard to square Kelly's call to venerate women with Trump's lewd comments made in an "Access Hollywood" tape. "Grab them by the pussy" isn't exactly treating women as sacred.

Or Kelly's plea that Gold Star families be off-limits from the political back-and-forth ...

Remember that Trump -- against the wishes and advice of virtually everyone in the Republican Party -- attacked Khizr Khan, a father who had lost a son in Iraq, following Khan's speech, which was heavily critical of Trump, at the Democratic National Convention. "Who wrote that? Did Hillary's script writers write it?" Trump said of Khan's speech at the time. "I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard."

And it was also Trump who questioned the status of Arizona Sen. John McCain -- who was tortured and held in captivity in Vietnam for years -- as a war hero. "He's not a war hero," Trump said of McCain. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

  CNN

Sorry, but Kelly knows all those things about Trump. He's out in front of the cameras giving that speech because he gave Trump the words to say, and they weren't the right ones. Because Trump got in trouble for saying what Kelly told him to say. So now, just like every other lickspittle in Trump's kingdom who has had to go in front of the cameras because of something that made negative news for The Most Notable Loser, Kelly has to "fix it".

At any rate, we've now turned this into a news story about who's the most patriotic in a situation where a young man died in circumstances that are murky (the FBI has joined the investigation), without any discussion of what the Hell the US is doing putting young men in the position that this could happen in the first place, and John Kelly has reduced himself to, at best, a bumbling enabler, and at worst, a self-serving dick covering for the inexcusable POS that is the top dog in the dog-eat-dog world Kelly lives in.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: