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Anyone who was holding onto the illusion that White House chief of staff John Kelly is a noble man of honor serving an unstable president out of concern for what would happen in his absence is going to feel those illusions slip-sliding away after getting a load of Kelly’s Monday Fox News interview. Kelly again refused to apologize for his discredited comments (AKA “lies”) about Rep. Frederica Wilson, called the Russia investigations “very distracting,” and called for a special counsel to investigate Democrats. But his comments on the Civil War deserve top billing because WOW.
This is where opposition to taking down memorials to traitors gets Kelly:
“But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand.”
The lack of an ability to compromise, he says, failing to mention that the compromise would have had to be about chattel slavery, about the ownership, torture, and rape of human beings. In fact there were compromises along the way, but it turned out that when one side was determined to continue owning, torturing, and raping human beings, compromises were hard to maintain. Funny how that happens. And “men and women of good faith” on that particular side “made their stand where their conscience had to made their stand”—in defense of their ownership, torture, and rape of human beings. In defense of their right to separate families by selling human beings for their own personal profit. In defense not just of white supremacy but of the view of black people as less than human.
Then again, it really puts in context all those times Kelly has been described as what some might call a man of faith making a stand (in the White House) where his conscience has led him. And it gives us a new way to hear it when he calls for a special counsel to investigate Democrats over the Uranium One conspiracy theories and the possibility that they conducted opposition research against Donald Trump. We can now hear him clearly as a partisan hack, as "an accomplice to Trump's white supremacist agenda from day one," and acted out brutally in his time at Homeland Security. Or, for that matter, we can see it when Kelly tries to distance Trump from the indictments against Paul Manafort. There can be no more thinking that when Kelly says that the indictments were for activities from “long before they ever met Donald Trump” (which isn't entirely true—Manafort was allegedly still laundering money while he worked for Trump), his recitation of the talking point carries any more weight than when a professional talking points delivery system like Sarah Huckabee Sanders offers it up.
Because damn. This is a man who is either so ignorant of history or so determined to defend the Confederacy-worship of Trump’s racist base that he is blaming the Civil War on “the lack of an ability to compromise,” with no mention of slavery. How can anyone give him credibility?