The wonderful world of Jill and Scott Kelley, and the wonderful world of today’s military

At the Atlantic’s website, Jill and Scott Kelley’s remarkable career of high-level connections and influence—gained mostly by throwing great parties for top officers from nearby MacDill Air Force base and the headquarters of U.S. Central Command—is summed up. The Atlantic also clarifies a couple of points. The shirtless photo sent by FBI agent Frederick Humphries to Jill Kelley was a joke, not sexual in nature, and was sent years ago. Which doesn’t change the fact that Humphries got so emotionally involved in Kelley’s case that his superiors had to order him to stay away from it. And there were not thousands of e-mails between Gen. John Allen and Jill Kelley (a report that was obviously false from the start), but “hundreds” over a period of years, and in many of them Allen was only on the cc line. Which doesn’t change the fact that Jill Kelley had enough influence with our commander in Afghanistan to get him, while he was stationed in Kabul, to write a letter to a judge testifying to the good character of Jill’s sister Natalie Khawam whom the judge had already determined was an unstable person and a pathological liar.

That’s Gen. Allen. As we’ve discussed before (“Clothes make the Eloi”, “Our nation’s chubby, shapeless guardians”), how could anyone take seriously a military officer dressed in that ridiculous pajama outfit? And how could could he take himself seriously? And how is it that these ridiculous uniforms were adopted by the U.S. military over the last twenty years with no opposition? Didn’t any high-ranking people say, “These uniforms make us look like jokes, they are out of the question”? Evidently not. The pajamas were part of the unresisted advance of liberalism. Once you had made the military look like clowns, and they had accepted it, then getting them to accept the increasing integration of women in the military, massive affirmative action for women and minorities, the strategy of winning Muslim hearts and minds by accommodating Islam (including the order not to urinate in the direction of Mecca), and, finally, open homosexuality in the military was a piece of cake. David Petraeus’s choice of the tacky Paula Broadwell as his hagiographic “biographer” and his adulterous affair with her were the sort of behavior you would expect of such a military.

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Randy writes:

Another phenomenon that used to bother me was how the military would use the term “bad guys” to refer to our enemies. This would most often occur as part of public press briefings by military spokesmen. I always thought the term inappropriate in a military setting. It seemed to detract from the truth that our enemies were our enemies, not characters in a Western movie. The term eliminated any sense of indignation toward what those “bad guys” represented or the harm they would bring to us if we didn’t aggressively pursue them to their destruction. I guess this is one more symptom of the softening of our military.

James P. writes:

Randy writes:

Another phenomenon that used to bother me was how the military would use the term “bad guys” to refer to our enemies.

I like that formulation better than “violent extremists” or “states of concern” and the various other flabby euphemisms that the U.S. military now uses (or, worst of all, calling our Muslim enemies “anti-Islamic activists”).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 17, 2012 09:39 AM | Send