John Kelly is Just Another Alt-Right Racist Goon ...

... in an administration chalk full of alt-right racist goons.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Monday said that the Civil War stemmed from a “lack of an ability to compromise,” ignoring that the two sides fought over whether slavery should be legal.

Kelly made the comments in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, also telling the new Fox host that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was an “honorable man.”

Ingraham asked Kelly about a church in Virginia that decided to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee since the plaques “create a distraction in our worship space and may create an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church and an impediment to our growth and to full community with our neighbors.”

Kelly said that Americans should not “take what is today accepted as right and wrong” and apply it to history.

“It shows you how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is. I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which in 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first, back in those days, and now it’s different today,” Kelly told Ingraham.

“But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil war,” he added. “And men of women of good faith on both sides made their stand, where their conscience had them make their stand.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/john-kelly-civil-war-lack-ability-compromise

White supremacists always want to "debate" racism because it helps them pretend that they have some kind of logical point that's worth discussing. Debating them, they think, gives them validity. But, some stuff's just flat-out wrong and isn't worth debating. You can debate which party has the best economic policy, or what should be done about foreign policy, or which health care idea is the best, or whatever. But, racism? Racism is in the "flat earth" category -- there are idiots who believe it, but those idiots are to be scorned and laughed at, not debated. There's nothing to "compromise" about. There's just truth, and lunacy. Or, in the case of white supremacy, ignorant, evil injustice. There is no "you have a good point" on something like "an accident of birth automatically makes me inherently better than other people so I should get special treatment"... it's just flat-out fuckin' wrong, the end, no argument.

I know Robert E. Lee's from a different time and had his reasons, much of which he thought weren't about slavery, but, he was wrong. You can try to find nobility in him if you want, but that doesn't mean he deserves a statue. As German generals go, Erwin Rommel was more respectable than most, but he doesn't need a statue, either. He was wrong, he lost, and it's a good thing that he lost... and, frankly, it's weird to see the side of politics who mock "politcal correctness" and the "everybody gets a trophy" culture crying that their losers don't get a statue. I have ancestors who fought and died for the Confederacy, and I'm still glad they lost. Maybe they were fighting to preserve slavery, or maybe they had other reasons of their own, but regardless of that, the cause was a bad one and the world's better off that it was defeated, and a headstone is statue enough for them. We don't need to hate 'em, any more than we need to hate some kid who got drafted from Wiesbaden and sent to the Hürtgen Forest in 1945, but they don't need a monument, either.

First off, Robert E. Lee was a shitty general, he almost single-handedly LOST the Civil War. The South didn't have to WIN the war, all they had to do was NOT LOSE it and Lee couldn't even manage that.  If Kelly knew anything about the Civil War, he'd understand that. Why anyone would want to honor him is beyond me.

Secondly, he wasn't an "honorable man", he was a traitor to his country and should have been hung--along with a bunch of other Confederate generals and politicians. All that romanticized "Lost Cause" bullshit should have been strangled in its crib.

I've lost all respect for Kelly and no longer consider him one of the adults in the White House.  He reminds me of what Truman said about MacArthur: "I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."

He picked Tricky Dicky Nixon as the back end of the elephant costume.

Robert E. Lee was a monster. The traitor part is obvious, but what is never talked about with Lee is that he had direct line command of all terrorist troops. Like ISIS when American Union troops would surrender who happened to be black they were tortured and killed. At one point it got so bad that Jefferson Davis threatened that they should hang all white officers who commanded American Union black troops, but Lincoln quickly issued an executive order called the "eye for eye" order which basically said for every white officer hung a confederate officer would hang.

The practice however of torturing and killing surrendering American Union black troops was no different than what the world witnessed the last four years with Isis, and not once did LEE bring a stop to these practices of those under his direct command despite protests of horror from Americans. The terrorists lost the war and somehow try to elevate this evil man by ignoring what he allowed to happen. If he was a german general who was allowing his troops to torture and murder surrendering American black GIs, he would have been executed after the war.

As a General he had some brilliant battles, and he had some of the worse decisions in the history of warfare. What can never be argued or ignored is this butcher allowed surrendering black American soldiers to be tortured and murdered.