Our savior generals aren't

Any examination of Kelly’s past public remarks makes clear he is not a sober professional, calculating that he must degrade himself in public so he can remain in place to rein in Trump’s worst instincts behind the scenes. Rather, Kelly honestly shares those instincts: He’s proudly ignorant, he’s a liar, and he’s a shameless bully and demagogue.

The chief of staff in an administration headed by any halfway-normal human being would have said: “The president is deeply concerned by news reports that he miscommunicated his condolences when speaking with Sgt. Johnson’s wife Myeshia. He hopes to talk to her again as soon as she feels able, to apologize and make this right. And while he would have preferred that Rep. Frederica Wilson had not spoken publicly about what he intended to be a private call, he appreciates her personal connection to Sgt. Johnson and that she is mourning his loss as well.”

  The Intercept

Of course, any chief of staff headed by any halfway-normal human being wouldn't have had to.

Kelly did not express any concern for the well-being of Johnson’s widow and family. He did not acknowledge any possibility that Trump had done something wrong, even inadvertently. He engaged in a Trumpian scorched-earth attack against Wilson.

[...]

Wilson immediately responded that Kelly “is willing to say anything” because he’s “trying to keep his job.” But in fact all the evidence suggests that she is wrong, and Kelly said what he did because he believes it.

I may be reading too much into it, but since Kelly has never come out front to defend The Most Notable Loser like that before, I think it's also a result of The Most Notable Loser having defended himself by telling everyone that Kelly told him the story about his own son's death in Afghanistan and repeated what Kelly thought would be a good line: "He knew what he signed up for."  Kelly was personally implicated on this one.

[L]ong before Kelly and Trump ever met, they were on the same page when it comes to hysteria and venom. (Kelly’s son Robert had been killed in action in Afghanistan just days before, but Kelly said identical things both before and long after his son’s death.)

[...]

“If anyone thinks you can somehow thank [members of the military] for their service,” Kelly proclaimed, “and not support the cause for which they fight — America’s survival — then they are lying to themselves and rationalizing away something in their lives, but, more importantly, they are slighting our warriors and mocking their commitment to the nation.”

That's right. Get behind the war, or get out.

Furthermore, Trump himself famously questioned the Iraq war.

[...]

[P]eople who join the military accept that “the cause for which they fight” is not up to them. That’s truly admirable.

It is?

[C]riticism of U.S. wars isn’t about low-level military personnel but America’s political leadership. And [Kelly] evidently does not believe current U.S. foreign policy would survive open, honest debate.

[...]

“America’s civilian and military protectors both here at home and overseas have for nearly nine years fought this enemy to a standstill and have never for a second wondered why,” Kelly said in 2010. “America’s warriors have never lost faith in their mission, or doubted the correctness of their cause.”

Talk about somebody lying to himself! Or is he just lying to the rest of us?

Again, what’s most praiseworthy about members of the American military is that many do wonder why they’re doing what they’re doing, but understand that their orders ultimately come from elected civilians.

It is? I'm having some trouble with Jon Swartz' article on this count.

And obviously many of the most coruscating critics of America’s wars have come out of the military. Kelly should look up his fellow Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, author of “War Is a Racket.”

[...]

According to Kelly’s speech, the United States has never gone to war “to build empires, or enslave peoples, but to free those held in the grip of tyrants. … The only territory we as a people have ever asked for from any nation we have fought alongside, or against, since our founding, the entire extent of our overseas empire, are a few hundred acres of land for the 24 American cemeteries scattered around the globe.”

"Our empire."

Apparently Kelly never walked by any of the Pentagon’s Comanche, Chinook, Cheyenne, Kiowa, or Lakota helicopters and wondered, Hey, who are these things named after?

I never even thought about those names. Now I'll never be able to think about them in any other way.

“I don’t know why they hate us, and I don’t care,” Kelly declared.

And that's a huge problem. This is the man who was in charge of the Southern Command and Guantánamo and whose every thought can go directly into the ear of the president.

There’s a reason Sun Tzu said, “[...] If you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

[...]

“Our enemy is savage, offers absolutely no quarter, and has a single focus, and that is either kill every one of us here at home or enslave us with a sick form of extremism that serves no God or purpose that decent men and women could ever grasp.”

Jesus Christ.

“America is at risk in a way it has never been before,” he insisted, and “future generations” will “ask why America is still free and the heyday of Al Qaeda and their terrorist allies was counted in days rather than in centuries.” [...] Al Qaeda failed to murder or enslave 300 million Americans because, as of 2001, there were maybe 200 of them. Also, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are quite large.

Big water.

Also, we are winning the war on terror but our successes are concealed “by the media elite that then sets up the know-it-all chattering class to offer their endless criticism.”

Well, except that we're not "winning" anything.

Kelly may be personally far more palatable; he’s certainly no mewling coward like Trump and has unquestionably put his life where his mouth is. That goes for his children as well — his other son is also a Marine — even as Trump’s kids are the living embodiment of every criticism Kelly makes about U.S. society.

But there’s a reason these two men found each other. They see the world in fundamentally the same way, and Kelly is going to help Trump do what he wants to it.

If he can just get those leaks stopped.

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