General Kelly Trump's toady
by digby
This is so low:
The Daily Beast confirmed that senior White House officials signed off on this specific line of attack as legitimate communications strategy. When The Daily Beast emailed White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to ask if she was an official telling reporters at multiple news outlets that Obama did not call Kelly, she declined to comment on the record.
She also did not respond to a question regarding if Kelly personally signed off on turning his deceased son into a political weapon to attack Trump’s predecessor this week.
Kelly has previously been reticent to invoke his son’s death in public. Shortly after he was killed, the elder Kelly spoke at a gathering of the Military Officers Association of America. Before taking the stage, he told the Marine introducing him, “Please don’t mention my son,” according to a 2011 Washington Post profile.
Obama administration officials were shaken by Trump’s revisiting of the attack line. It was noted that Kelly and his wife attended a Gold Star families breakfast at the White House in 2011 and sat at the First Lady’s table. But that point seemed secondary to the shock many felt that the administration was using the death as a political cudgel.
Alyssa Mastromonaco, the Obama deputy chief of staff, who had harshly criticized Trump when he first made the charge on Monday, told The Daily Beast that she was “traumatized” to see him do it again on Tuesday. On Twitter, Obama's national security spokesman Ned Price, encouraged Kelly to put a “stop” to “this inane cruelty.” Other former Obama officials simply couldn't fathom that Kelly would have signed off on this, to the point where they said it was affecting them on a human level.
“This debate is so sad,” Tommy Vietor, a veteran of the 2008 Obama campaign who later served as a National Security Council spokesman, said on Tuesday. “People should read the speech Gen. Kelly gave at the service of two Marines who died shortly after his son did. I think that’s the tone we should use when we talk about fallen service members. We shouldn’t politicize these things.”
This is typical of Trump. For all of his so-called love of veterans (and their foolish reciprocation) he is actually quite contemptuous of the military. They aren't taking it well:
He certainly has the right to criticize the military. We all do. Of course, he's the first to condemn anyone else for doing that for "disrespecting the troops."
But pretending that he's the only president who cares about the fallen is just ... sickening. Especially since he's the one who didn't send the letter and make the fucking call!
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