Thread by @phl43

Milley's actions, which objectively border on treason, are cast in a heroic light in this piece, but this passage is pretty revealing about the kind of things he and his friends were *really* afraid of, even though I have no doubt they believe their own bullshit.

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1437808406727901204

From day 1, the military has railroaded Trump into doing the opposite of what he'd pledged to do (greatly helped in that by Trump's own incompetence), effectively subverting the democratic will, but we're supposed to believe they're democracy's saviors 🙃 axios.com/off-the-rails-…

Every time Trump tried to withdraw using the normal channels, they have managed to railroad him (which again is partly Trump's fault but has happened to every other president so it's not just his incompetence), but Milley is shocked when Trump tries to do it behind his back 😂

Trump tried to do it behind his back and, I should add, failed miserably. The true lesson of this story, a lesson we have learned many times before, is that those "saviors of democracy" are really unelected officials who effectively have a veto power on many aspect of policy.

I'm sure Milley and his pals genuinely believe they were just acting to "protect democracy", but the truth is that they were really acting to protect this power. Trump just made it easier to sell this version of the story, to themselves first of all, by acting like a clown.

Just a reminder of what these "saviors of democracy" have been up during Trump's term. (This is from the second article I linked to above.) Now compare the near-absence of outrage at this revelation to the nonstop hysteria over even the most harmless of Trump's histrionics.

Not only can those guys lie to the president without suffering any negative consequences, but they can even brag about it to journalists, and still not suffer any consequences. Instead the same journalists write glowing profiles about them a few months later 👌

By the way, I'm sure the withdrawal from Afghanistan could have been handled better, but the people who criticized the way in which it was handled should keep in mind that it was those people Biden had to rely on to carry it out. Do you think they were going to make it easy?

It's hard to plan and execute a clean exit when the people who are supposed to give you accurate info and carry out your orders faithfully are constantly misrepresenting the reality on the ground to you and trying to undermine you at every turn to further their own agenda 🤷‍♂️

Incidentally, CNN (and perhaps Woodward and Costa) left out a key part of the story that had previously been reported by Axios, namely that the NSA had intercepted conversations showing that Milley was trying to undercut civilian leadership of the Pentagon and nobody told Trump!

The reason why nobody told Trump that *the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff* was undercutting the Commander-in-Chief oversight of the Pentagon is also worth noting: nobody wanted to get "sucked into some weird scandal" 🤔

And they were right, because even though the real scandal was that Milley was engaging in something that came awfully close to treason, the press would no doubt have made this into a scandal about how Trump was making shit up to "undermine institutions" or some such nonsense...

Indeed, as I said above, this stuff about how Milley's actions were motivated by the events of January 6 was just bullshit. The entire thing, from beginning to end, is about unelected civilian and military officials exercising illegitimate political power.

https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1437893064492716036

I should add: with the help of the media, who share a similar ideology, and ensure that those unelected officials are never held accountable for their illegitimate exercise of political power. This is why Milley is hailed as a hero right now instead of being in disgrace 🤷‍♂️

To be clear, I'm not saying those guys — journalists and officials — are cynics who have the self-awareness to understand what they're really up to. They are sometimes, but for the most part, they genuinely convince themselves of the same bullshit they sell to everyone else.

They for the most part lack the self-awareness to realize they are effectively a decentralized political power that acts outside of the regular democratic process (often to subvert it), but nevertheless it's exactly what they are and they don't need to realize it to be it.

In looking back at the story about Milley and NSA intercepts, please keep in mind for comparison what happened to Flynn, then Trump's incoming NSA, after he reached out to the Russian ambassador in late 2016, something that, unlike Milley's actions, was absolutely unproblematic.

"No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist." (also Karl Kraus)

https://twitter.com/conazole/status/1437900871858364420

One thing about Trump's presidency I've been saying since day one is how it's such a great revelator of how liberal democracies actually work. It has laid everything out in the open and, amazingly but unsurprisingly, it didn't make any difference. It's truly amazing stuff.