Which doesn’t explain the new expansion into commenting on a turtle.

Pretty sure that's about enabling behavior. A lot of GOP legislators are enabling Dump.

Precisely.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1631...gainst-america

Trump's mental illness came up again in Woodward's new book Peril. According to Woodward, the transcript of a call on Jan. 8 reveals a phone call between Nancy Pelosi and Gen. Milley in which they agree T is "crazy".
https://news.yahoo.com/top-us-genera...163402668.html

This is when Milley took top secret steps to prevent T from ordering a military strike somewhere by ordering no one obey such an order without informing him first. He even called his Chinese counterpart twice to assure him the US would not be launching any military strikes

So far this is just sourced to Woodward, and he's... not always been accurate in his reporting.

But if this was accurate, then frankly, it doesn't make Trump look nearly as bad as it makes Milley look. Which makes me wonder if maybe people are setting up Milley to take a fall. That might be convenient right about now.

Wow.

Why do you say that?

The story as told doesn't indicate that Trump did anything. All it indicates is that some people thought badly about Trump, which, so the hell what, really? It's not going to change anyone's mind about him, either you already agree or you don't, so it won't really make any difference.

But what Milley did, according to the story (and it may not be true), is really, really, really bad. And you don't have to be a Trump supporter to recognize that.

But if you remember Trump was a Russian Useful idiot and untrustworthy, then that changes your who,e perspective on this issue.

Ah yes I figured the Trumpers would turn the General who possibly stopped a nuclear war into the real bad guy.

Explicitly cited his actions during the Jan 6th insurrection.

if it is a lawful order, then it would be wrong to stop it.

That's like the joke about the boy scout who always whistled on hikes. The other scouts asked why, and he said it was to keep the tigers away. "But there are no tigers here". "See? It works!"

There was no threat of nuclear war. Milley didn't save anyone from anything. And Alexander Vindman isn't a Trumper.

from the book

I find it interesting that you think that is thinking badly about someone. That sounds like caring about someone.

I'll need that opinion expressed from someone who doesn't think Trump is a god-king second coming messiah who can do no wrong before I even begin to take it seriously.

Other than going completely delusional about election conspiracies, releasing videos about how he loved the special people who attacked Congress, screaming at staff about how ****** they were, how we weren't going to have a country anymore, etc.

Maybe you meant that Trump didn't do anything Presidential?

ETA - I heard Wesley Clark talking about Vindman and basically he said that a colonel wouldn't know what contact the generals have with each other. Could be.

Only, of course, for a certain definition of "wrong," since as we ought by now to know without having to animate the ghost of Godwin, a "lawful" order can be awfully wrong by that other definition.

Of course we have no control group to determine what would or would not have happened if things went differently. But I don't think it takes too much mental contortion at least to entertain the possibility that preventing an insane president from precipitating a gratuitous war that could kill millions and devastate the earth might be "right" in a sense more pressing than it is "wrong" in that other sense.

There have in history been people whose sense of what was right impelled them to commit acts that got them in trouble, if not executed, and while that can go both ways, there have, in history, been a few whose actions are considered in retrospect to have been worthwhile - at least by those whose judgment is not so dependent on doctrine that they would accept the destruction of part or all of humanity as the only thing that is acceptably pure.

What that amounts to is unilaterally ending democratic rule because you think you should be making those decisions rather than the country's voters. A lot of juntas agree with you.

This isn't really addressed to Bob, of course
 

No, it would be right. It would also be illegal, and a good first step toward revising a dangerously outmoded law.

Try to understand. The US's current procedures for using nukes appeared during the Cold War, a scared and scarey time. The men who devised them were WW2 survivors, as were their Soviet counterparts. They all knew plenty about surprise attacks. Better a hair trigger, they thought, than no trigger at all.

Today, we're only just emerging from the rubble of a bizarre episode of crazed mismanagement. We face different risks than we once did, and we need to address them.

Here's to that hardass General Milley, the best mutineer in the world! And to Nancy Pelosi and all the other conspirators! If they go to jail, I for one will bake them a cake loaded with hacksaw blades!

And their American guards will deliver it to them completely untouched.

Stanislav Petrov^WP sends his best.

And? Vindman's post AND my statement are both predicated on the story as presented being true. And I explicitly stated it may not be, and that I don't have confidence in the source. If it isn't true, then of course a conclusion contingent on it being true would not hold. Obviously.

:rolleyes:

spoken like a real generalissimo


Billions of votes have been cast in the US have been cast to select people to revise the system. Who looks at that and thinks they know better?

Have you seen Gen. Milley denying this? Any of those involved? No? Why do you think that is?

Why do you think anyone needs to set Milley up to 'take the fall'? Fall for what exactly?

Incidentally, how has Woodward "not always been accurate in his reporting"?

:eye-poppi You've got to be kidding. Inciting a riot to overturn the election, ranting like a madman that it was stolen from him and living in his own (un) reality is "not doing anything?" Add to that his unilateral order to draw all troops out of Afghanistan without informing or consulting ANYONE.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/polit...emo/index.html

The entire picture is of a man with the power to launch a military strike and start WW3 who is out of control and delusional. And you think Milley had no reason to do what he did? I'm thankful for what Milley did.

Nope. A junta is a military coup and takeover of the government. Milley did not do that nor was he attempting that. What he did was tell them that, IF Trump ordered a military strike, they were to follow the procedure and tell him. After all, Trump had not followed procedure in issuing the Afghanistan withdrawal on Nov. 11

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/polit...ear/index.html

Milley was tryng to stop TRUMP from not following lawful procedure.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com...23019df605.jpg

This is with the presumption that the crazy person in question was indeed democratically elected, and that the people responsible for that were reasonably knowledgable about his craziness, both at the time and later, and that the action he was about to do was itself lawful. While a sitting president can say, and has said, that anything he does is inherently legal, this is not actually true. I addition, one might point out that it is possible for a person to become crazier after being elected, and even (perish the thought) to have lied and concealed his true nature before.

To stop him would likely be illegal, an action many would undertake anyway if the necessity seemed grave enough.

Once again, I think you have allowed your devotion to ideological purity to avoid difficult decisions and to trivialize real world dilemmas. The fact that it appears a person was duly elected does not allow him to do just anything he wants for the next four years.

Tell that to Donnie who got away with doing anything he wanted for four years thanks to the same attitude as B the C.

Again, what makes your position different from a military coup?

This is all either wrong or off target. Yes, a president can't do whatever he wants. There are checks and balances, but none of them require circumventing the military chain of command, or conspiring with foreign governments. And if a president is truly crazy, then no, stopping him doesn't require any illegal action. The constitution provides a specific mechanism to handle such an event, legally. Milley made no attempt to use that mechanism.

Except he didn't. There were a number of high profile cases where the administration got shut down by the courts. Notably, Trump never went against the courts after any such ruling.

Contrast that with Biden, who admitted his eviction moratorium was unconstitutional but declared he was going to proceed with attempting it anyways.

Who cares if the constitution theoretically provides a mechanism? The constitution is not a moral or philosophical document that has any say on how I judge what someone should do.

that there wasn't an attempt to seize control of the government

That is why I said "position" rather than outcome.

Both think that their personal conclusions of what is right should direct their use of government resources more than the lawful system they agreed to.

ok, I don't think that excuses that you're misusing the word coup and in doing so mischaracterizing the events that took place.

-edit-

And I'm not even sure that he did anything that wasn't lawful. Is reassuring a foreign government you're not at war with that there's no surprise attack coming unlawful? Not so sure

I'm not clear how I'm misusing the word coup? A comparison to a different group of people does not make the person being compared part of that group.

Nobody knows how you judge anything, and at this point nobody cares.

The constitution is a legal document, and it has considerable say on how we judge the legality of the actions of anyone in government, including Milley.

There doesn't seem to be too many arguments going on about legality right now. It appears to be mostly moral questions.

It's like the third time it's been explained, but a coup is an attempt to seize control of the government. Any comparison of the actions of someone who isn't trying to seize control of the government to a coup, which again attempting to seize control of the government, is a poor comparison.

But you didn't really just use it as a comparison anyway, you accused several posters of being supportive of a military coup by implying that what happened here was a coup.

No, this would not be a coup and I don't imply things. I'm explicit. The thinking that one should use government resources to do something illegal because they think their judgement is better is the same.

OK, when you write this in response to a post support of Milley's actions:

The implication is that they are supportive of a coup.


Secondly, it's not clear that anything illegal happened. According to some reports, he was given permission and later briefed civilian leadership in the Pentagon regarding the call. Even if not, it's not clear to me that it's illegal for a general to reassure a foreign power not to worry about a surprise attack that isn't coming. Had he warned them of an attack that was imminent, these accusations of treasons and coups would make a bit more sense to me.