The failed coup attempt recently witnessed in Turkey isn’t “some exotic foreign news story,” writes James Kirchick for the LA Times, but a real possibility for America if Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Calling Trump “the most brazenly authoritarian figure to secure the nomination of a major American political party,” Kirchick lays out why he feels a President Trump could become the first ever to fire a general for refusing to drop bombs:
Throughout the campaign, Trump has repeatedly bragged about ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, and has dismissed the possibility that he would face any resistance. “They won’t refuse,” he told Fox News’ Bret Baier earlier this year. “They’re not gonna refuse me. Believe me.” When Baier insisted that such orders are “illegal,” Trump replied, “I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
Kirchick added that such “blimpish swagger” may work for Trump, Inc. but doesn’t in a “liberal democracy.”
The writer poses the following scenario: What if Trump ordered the military “to do something stupid, illegal or irrational,” that puts the lives and security of Americans at stake? What happens if he doesn’t listen to his military advisors telling him to back down?
Kirchich provides an answer:
In that case, our military men and women, who swear to uphold the Constitution and a civilian chain of command, would be forced to choose between obeying the law and serving the wishes of someone who has explicitly expressed his utter lack of respect for it.
“If this scenario sounds implausible, consider that Trump has normalized so many once-outrageous things — from open racism to blatant lying,” he continues.
But who would never dare do something as horrendous as Trump (who hasn’t actually done anything like this)? Hillary Clinton, that’s who:
Needless to say, such dystopian situations are unimaginable under a President Hillary Clinton, who, whatever her faults, would never contemplate ordering a bombing run or — heaven forbid — a nuclear strike on a country just because its leader slighted her small hands at a summit.
Needless to say, Kirchich has obviously missed a lot of news recently.
“Trump is not only patently unfit to be president, but a danger to America and the world,” the piece concludes. “Voters must stop him before the military has to.”
The Freedom Center is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Therefore we do not endorse political candidates either in primary or general elections. However, as defenders of America’s social contract, we insist that the rules laid down by both parties at the outset of campaigns be respected, and that the results be decided by free elections. We will oppose any attempt to rig the system and deny voters of either party their constitutional right to elect candidates of their choice.
The LA times is still in business?
I’m puzzled. WHICH military do they think would conduct a coup against Trump? Does the DNC have some sort of confused beta-boy legions we haven’t seen yet? It’s laughable to think that the four branches of the US military would want anything do with a coup against Trump.
I was thinking the same thing Persnickety!
Kirchick writes his bluster for a fish wrap in an age of fish wrap being as widely used as buggy whips.
More nonsensical fear-mongering from the left. They must be getting extremely desperate if they have to float inane dribble such as this.
Exactly. I wish I had the link but I was looking at a poll of active duty military and Hillary was only supported by 12% of active duty military personnel. The only person that can expect a coup is her.
Who ever wrote this is full of shit.
The author:
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Here’s what Wikipukia has to say about him:
Ron Paul newsletters
Main article: Ron Paul newsletters
In 2008, Kirchick wrote about newsletters that contained homophobic and racist material, published under the name of Texas Congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. The story became prominent in the 2012 presidential election.[4][5] Sam Stein of the Huffington Post also wrote in an article on the newsletters that there is evidence from old interviews with Ron Paul that he was writing for the newsletter during the period of time that the racist language was being published in his newsletter.[12]
It was later claimed by television station WXIX that Ron Paul was not the author of the newsletter segments which contained the material in question. In their second newscast on the scandal in January 2012, based on information provided by Lew Rockwell who had also worked on the newsletter, WXIX’s Reality Check claimed that the offending articles may have been written by one of the freelance writers who were said to have been employed at the time.[13]
Erik Wemple for The Washington Post wrote an article that included Kirchick’s response to WXIX’s second newscast, where Kirchick implied that the writer of the WXIX article, Ben Swann, was incorrect in his naming of the supposed writer of the “Special Edition on Racial Terrorism”.[14]
Ron Paul did not initially deny authorship of the offending material,[15] though he had begun denying it by 2001. He has accepted responsibility for the content regardless of its author, as it was published under his name.[16]
August 2013 RT appearance
After advocating the death penalty for Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning on 30 July 2013 in the Daily News,[17] Kirchick was invited to appear on RT’s live panel discussion awaiting Manning’s sentencing on Wednesday, 21 August 2013. He accepted; however, once it was his turn to speak, Kirchick refused to discuss Manning’s sentencing, instead choosing to protest the Russian LGBT propaganda law.[18] When asked by RT news editor Ivor Crotty if he was ready to have a conversation about Manning with the assembled panel, Kirchick retorted angrily: “RT has been Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden 24/7. I haven’t seen anything on your network about the anti-gay laws that have been passed in Russia and the increasing climate of violence and hostility towards gay people”.[19] Tweeting shortly after the segment, Kirchik claimed RT “just called taxi company that took me to studio to drop me off on the side of the highway on way to Stockholm airport”.[20]
Later that day, Politico reached out to both Kirchick and RT for comment. Kirchick called for a “boycott” of RT, calling its employees “not journalists, they’re propagandists”. RT responded in an e-mail, calling Kirchick’s protest “unrelated to the subject of the panel. Regretfully, RT had no other recourse but to continue the discussion without him”.[21] The Washington Post PostPartisan blogger Jonathan Capehart commended Kirchick for his “heroic” action;[22] The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe praised Kirchick’s “trolling of RT”;[23] and the next day, Kirchik’s opinion piece titled “Why I ambushed Russia’s news network with rainbow suspenders” got published by The Washington Post.[24] In it Kirchik further denounces RT as broadcasting “sophisticated conspiracy theories and “anti-establishment” attitudes to push a virulently anti-American and illiberal agenda” while relying on “a pool of talking heads, including 9/11 truthers, anti-Semites and other assorted extremists, who espouse the sort of views found where the far left and the far right converge”. A day later, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell invited Kirchick into his show where they discussed related concerns and controversies at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia.[25][26][27]
Full of shit and shite running out of the eyes even.
So, remind me because my memory ain’t what it used to be. Which side is it that is guilty of fearmongering and normalizing “blatant lying”?
LOL. That Op-Ed is pure comedy gold.
So, I guess the facts that G.W. Bush and Obama both routinely ordered the military “to do something stupid, illegal or irrational,” that puts the lives and security of Americans at stake and I don’t see a lot of push back from the military. We on earth would they push back just because the order originated from a different megalomaniac? If that wasn’t funny enough, to then go on and claim that things would be better under Killary, who has the blood of half a billion people on her hands.
James Kirchick is a doubleplusgood duckspeaker.
The military has become a training grounds for the big contractors… they will not put their pecker in HR as someone so charmingly revised shit where one eats the other day here on TBP.
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
hilary
Five days into her presidency she will also no doubt receive a nobel peace prize, not for what she has accomplished, but for what she hopes to accomplish.
Hillary has already put the lives and security of Americans at stake. Our military men and women, who swear to uphold the Constitution and a civilian chain of command, chose not to do a damn thing except to obey the wishes of someone who elected not to make any effort to save American lives at Benghazi. And she lied about a video. The military did nothing, even when they lost some of their people.
Sick fucking liberals will do or say anything for their ideology.
You’re right about Hitliary and the same things could be said of her as were posed about Trump; plus she gets added scare points because it was H-bitch behind the mess that is now the Middle East. You can also pin the refugee crisis on her and by extension Brexit, since the major reason Brits want out of the EU is so they’ll get their borders back.
BUT you’re way off base saying this has anything to do with Liberals or the Liberal ideology. HRC is NOT a Liberal, she is by definition a neocon. Real Liberals and Progressives hate her guts.
Hillary will have the rest of Sel Team 6 killed .
If Trump is a totalitarian WTF is Hilcunt?
Her bull-dyke cunt rotted and fell off?
Bullshit. The US Military has not stood up for:
1) The blatant murder of Seal Team 6.
2) The defunding and destruction of the Marines such that they are scrounging parts for their F16s from fucking museums.
3) The lowering of standards for (unfit) females to “pass” the tests to get into elite Army/Marine units. (Where, in combat, these same females will either be killed by their own troops or raped/tortured by the enemy.)
4) The announcement that the US Military will allow transgenders to serve AND PAY FOR THEIR CONVERSION SURGERY.
5) The wholesale purging of flag officers that don’t toe the Obama social PC line.
6) The stand down over Benghazi and the firing of two generals in theatre that tried to come to the aid of the defenders.
7) The stupid and dangerous ROE put in by Obama in 2009 leading to 75% of the total combat casualities total in the entire Iraq/Afgan war since it started.
8) Then entire VA fiasco and the 22 vets daily committing suicide because they can’t get the services they need.
No, either the military is truly dedicated to the Constitution and chain of command (that could be good or bad), OR it has been completely pussywhipped by the Libprog PC Fascists.
Either way, WE ARE DOOMED.
OK, following up on my and Hope’s comments… just how fucking desperate does the left have to be to post an op-ed threatening a military coup? Hard to imagine anything more anti-democratic coming from the – uh – “democrats”.
Their private polls must show Trump with a 30 or 40% lead for it to come to this garbage.
The LA Times isn’t worth wrapping dead fish with it. They’ve “Hollywooded” themselves right out of serious journalism and into cartoon land.
Not worth reading or commenting on anyway..
Muck
…ordered the military “to do something stupid, illegal or irrational..
Sums up American Foreign policy for ’44.
That is what Hussein has been doing for almost 8 Fuckin’ years. Liberal newspapers need to pull their collective heads out of their asses. Look around a bit at the clusterfuck!
However, as defenders of America’s social contract,
Can I see my signature on this ” contract ” please?
Is this the same panzy what got a bruised shoulder from an AR-15 platform? Cause he seems to know as much about the military as that guy.
As a practical matter I don’t think there are sufficient US military combat forces around D.C. to pull off a coup. There are lots of generals, admirals and the like over in the Pentagon but they are mostly administrative types who, even if they wanted to seize the government, don’t have operational command of infantry or tank forces to do the job. Quantico Marine Base is a couple of hours down I-95 but I don’t think it has a large number of deployable Marines anymore. There is the “Old Guard” with its dress soldiers and US Army band nearby but they are only a few hundred strong.
I’d like to try just a pinch of whatever this dude is smoking! I wonder if it’s as good as the weed that caused Ricky Williams to walk away from a $10+ million NFL contract?
If the military was ever going to stage a coup against the presidency it would have done so against that Islam apologist POS traitor Muslim Barak Who’s insane Obama.