The DoD (Esper) made the decision earlier today to disarm the national guardsman stationed on the streets of DC. Without consulting the White House. Esper is so fired. Trump won’t feel safe anymore. Milley should resign, too. Both Esper and Milley refused to appear (by invitation, not subpoena) in front of the House's armed services committee next week.
Some really scathing opinions about Milley especially are being floated, because at least we know Esper is a lackey. This one from a piece in the New Yorker by former General and NATO ambassador Doug Lute was pretty strong:Lute was particularly concerned when General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dressed in battle fatigues, walked with Trump from the White House to St. John’s. In six years at the White House, Lute said, he had never seen any senior officer wear a combat uniform to the White House. “That was extraordinary,” he said. Even when senior military officials assembled in the White House Situation Room to watch the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, in 2011, they did not wear combat gear. “Intentionally or unintentionally, Milley signalled support for the President’s statement that we needed to crack down on street protests that were largely peaceful and law-abiding, and that Milley would be in charge,” Lute said. The message of intimidation was magnified by military helicopters flying low over the heads of protesters and military vehicles rumbling across Washington. “That’s not who we are,” Lute added.
Just for the record, Milley has been notorious for at least a decade for giving barely half of a whole fuck about his uniform. I’d offer the counter-perspective of GEN Milley signaling a militant stance. He actually gives such a small fraction of a fuck about showing up to the President’s eyes-wide-shut party that he couldn’t be bothered to dress up. Considering he’s pretty much said it in official memo format, this is far more likely to me.
He's a 4-star general with a long tab, he understands the power of the uniform. Welcome back man, hope all is well
You’d think so. Which is what makes it even more baffling. How would you explain that photo from the news? :D Good to hear from you boss, same to you.
It's a difficult decision to make: on the one hand, Cotton's op-ed is horrible; on the other, having it out there in plain words makes it obvious just how fascist many of our politicians are. He's saying the quiet part out loud, which makes it a lot easier for skeptics to hear. It'd be one thing if Cotton was just some guy wanting to publish a screed in the Times, but as he holds significant political power, perhaps it's better if we're able to understand him just as he wants to be understood. It's one thing to not give fascists a platform; it's another thing entirely to keep the US government from clearly saying "yes, we're fascist".Readers should grasp what people like Cotton are arguing, not because it’s worth taking seriously but because it is being taken seriously, particularly by our mad and decomposing president. [...] In the past, The Times’s Op-Ed page has offered space to enemies of the United States, including President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Sirajuddin Haqqani, deputy leader of the Taliban, arguing that its readers are served by access to their perspectives.
I’ve started to doubt my debating-club approach to the question of when to air proto-fascist opinions. Putin and Haqqani, after all, weren’t given space in this newspaper to advocate attacks on Americans during moments of national extremis. Cotton, by contrast, is calling for what would almost certainly amount to massive violence against his fellow citizens: an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”
It’s important to understand what the people around the president are thinking. But if they’re honest about what they’re thinking, it’s usually too disgusting to engage with. This creates a crisis for traditional understandings of how the so-called marketplace of ideas functions. It’s a subsidiary of the crisis that has the country on fire.
And yet, here he is, apparently unironically, talking about persecution of minorities by surveillance and military means in China. The level of cognitive dissonance that is being displayed by these people just keeps growing. It's gotten to a point of absurdity.
Here's the thing: The NYT is a bastion of find wordsmithing, and does set a high bar for public writing. But The Economist is better, in every regard. And they don't hide their biases or preferences; they make them a central part of their arguments for/against something. I don't agree with every position The Economist takes, but they soberly look at every issue and present their news on the topic with clarity and exquisite writing skills. They make the NYT look like Fox N Friends. Read The Economist. I've been a subscriber for close to 20 years, simply because they are consistent, thoughtful, excellent writers, with effective and enlightening coverage of the entire world.
Saw some internal slack message that said his op-ed caused the biggest peak in unsubscribes per hour. The NYT has become increasingly insufferable, or I’m just increasingly aware of their inability to stick to whatever their core values might be. If this is anything to go by, I doubt they’ll change anytime soon.
People are getting impatient with the old school "one side thinks this, the other side thinks that, and we'll give equal weight to both" idea of journalistic objectivity, because the right takes advantage to make ideas that should obviously be unacceptable look acceptable. The NYT isn't becoming more insufferable because it changed, it's becoming more insufferable because it needs to and hasn't.
They pulled the unsubscribe pathway off their website and their phones went to voicemail. I deleted the app yesterday. Stopped giving them money a year ago. Someone on Twitter pointed out that it's an organization filled with hardworking rockstars whose every efforts are undercut by a handful of feckless morons who happen to be in charge.
For real, lets not pretend that this kind of thing doesn't happen on the NYT editorial page. Some fucked up shit gets printed, sometimes in the editorial page, sometimes in the paper proper. A few weeks ago an article about the problems being experienced by Saudi Arabia took fifty seven paragraphs or something to mention the fact that they've killed a quarter of a million Yemenis in the past few years. There is also some really great reporting. People who are absolutely shocked at this can go fuck themselves, they apparently just found moral fortitude and a spine for the first time this week. Oh shit, just got woke to the hypocrisy of the NYT by Tommy Cotton! Maybe it's just modern cancel culture catching up to reality and we really do need to shit on the Times, cancel our subscriptions and spray paint slogans on the their building. I think we might be to ready to exclude. I think we might be too quick to get all worked up. Read that shit with a critical eye, enjoy some good journalism and try to be aware of the political biases and commercial influences that are coming to bear.
Not only this, but it's like, wtf else do we have for prose as succinct as NYT? Only mk. I reserve the right to shit on NYT while retaining a subscription. Goldberg's rebuke of Cotton and NYT was gold, and the editorial board was probably like "yeah, ya got us".