Is the new rule that Ivy League generals are beyond criticism? By Andrea Widburg
General Barry McCaffrey (retired, thank God), graduated from West Point, served in Vietnam, and put an end to his honorable career by attaching himself to the Clinton White House. Instead of fading decently away as old generals should, McCaffrey continues to insert himself into military politics, always with an eye to tilting the military towards the left. His latest opinion is that Tucker Carlson, a civilian, should be fired for daring to say that General Mark Milley, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is an idiot and overall disgrace to the fine tradition of the American military.
As always when I write, I need to put into place a few basic predicates:
Up until the Obama administration started meddling with it, the American military was the most effortlessly diverse and harmoniously racially mixed institution in America. Not only was the military a meritocracy, every person serving understood that a military divided amongst itself is deadly, not to the enemy, but to the troops who serve.
Were and even are there racists in the military? Absolutely. In any group of people, you’re going to have idiots who are insecure or stupid enough to assume negative things about someone based upon the color of his skin or the shape of his eyes. The military, however, has always had an efficient system for getting rid of these people because their very existence endangers the troops and the missions.
The Obama administration, however, disliked the traditional military. What it did overtly was to open the military to openly homosexual and transgender troops. There is no way to tell whether this affected military readiness, unit cohesion, or anything else because there will never be an honest report on the subject. What the Obama administration did less openly was to purge the military of officers who thought that the military’s structure was good. Ultimately, he fired almost 200 military officers.
The officers that Obama left behind at the Pentagon were almost entirely stone-cold Democrats in their orientation. This was perfectly demonstrated in October 2019, when Admiral McRaven (retired), who once headed special forces, actively attacked then-President Trump, strongly implying that Trump should be the subject of a coup. Considering that all military officers can be called up again in times of need, even though retired McRaven is still, in theory, a member of the armed forces, and he ought to have been court-martialed.
Of course, nothing happened to McRaven. Another retired officer who chimed in was Barry McCaffrey, the same one who is the subject of this post. He claimed that Trump was effectively Mussolini because he canceled the White House subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Apparently, graduating from West Point doesn’t mean you’re not historically ignorant or emotionally incontinent.
Fast forward to Wednesday, when Gen. Mark Milley said some outrageously racist things before the House Armed Services Committee. And it doesn’t matter that he was a White man saying things about other Whites. The whole point of Critical Race Theory is to teach Whites to be self-loathing. With Milley, those lessons fell on fertile soil.
Tucker Carlson described what Milley said and, quite appropriately, castigated Milley. The entire monologue is magnificent, but fast forward to 7:10 for his righteous attack on Milley:
In a free country, what Tucker Carlson said was perfectly appropriate for a political commentator. However, Barry McCaffrey took umbrage. Not only does he feel that Mark Milley is above criticism by a mere TV personality, but he was also outraged that someone would dare criticize a General who graduated from Ivy League schools:
Dear Gen. McCaffrey, Colombia is a country. While Milley’s views are sufficiently leftist that, maybe, he really did pick up a lot of his ideas from the Marxist guerillas there, the fact is that his resume says “Columbia University,” a place that could well beat those guerillas for leftism.
Of late, my feeling is that, if you’re an Ivy League grad within the last 40 years or so unless you prove otherwise, I’m going to assume that you’re indoctrinated and badly educated. You may have been smart when you went in, but four years of relentless propaganda can destroy all but the most stalwart constitutionalists and patriots.
I’ve said before and will say again, that under Obama, there came to be a cancer in the Pentagon. The cancer went slightly into remission under Trump, but with Biden in the White House, it has metastasized badly and may well kill the military entirely, with old fools like McCaffrey cheering on the death throes.
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