Here's the nugget I loved:
"O’DONNELL: John Kelly the amateur historian is full of poisonous
falsehoods about American history that he shares with the most ignorant
president in history. John Kelly doesn’t want to apply the standards of
today to Robert E. Lee. Okay, let’s not.
How about the standards of Robert
E. Lee’s sister who sided with the north in the civil war and whose son
joined the union army?
How about the standards of Robert E. Lee’s nephew who joined the union
army, how about the standards of the 40 percent of the Virginia’s officers
who remained in the service of the union army? John Kelly dishonors all of
them who got it right. Morally right in order to declare the most
murderous traitor in American history to be an honorable man. Robert E.
Lee owned slaves, beat slaves and sold individual members of slave families
to different buyers.
Robert E. Lee did every vile thing that the worst slave owners did at that
time when honorable and decent people knew that it was evil. No one in
American history has been more guilty of treason than Robert E. Lee. In an
1865 editorial “The New York Times” said he has levied war against the
United States more strenuously than any other man in the land and thereby
has been guilty of the crime of treason as defined in the constitution of
the United States.
And three days later Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason. But generals
as we are especially generous to generals and General Ulysses S. Grant
interceded with President Andrew Johnson to get the treason case against
Robert E. Lee dropped. And now retired General John Kelly tries to tell us
that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. Robert E. Lee is responsible for
the deaths of more American soldiers than all the of the enemies the United
States has ever faced in war combined, including Hitler.
Robert E. Lee killed more American soldiers than Hitler did. And now both
Robert E. Lee and Hitler are champions, champions to the White Supremacists
and anti-Semites who marched in Charlottesville chanting Jews will not
replace us and were declared publicly by John Kelly’s boss to include, some
good people. And so how do you give the benefit of the doubt to a man who
grew up in a racist time and place and who never found the public way that
we know of to take a stand against the racism of his neighborhood and of
his culture.
And who now tells us that a racist slave owner who committed treason in
order to kill more American soldiers than anyone in history is an honorable
man? And he did all that killing to preserve slavery. How do you give the
benefit of the doubt to a man who says that we had the civil war because of
a failure to compromise and refuses to explain what his compromise over
slavery would have been and who has been flagrantly demonstrating his own
personal failure for two full weeks to apologize to a black woman that he
has so willfully and deliberately dehumanized and lied about.
John Kelly has not said a single word in the last two weeks to earn the
benefit of that doubt. We might have to thank John Kelly some day for
preventing a mad man from starting a nuclear war in the middle of the
night, but he deserves nothing but dishonor for his public conduct in the
last two weeks."
= new reply since forum marked as read
LOD!
