NBC’s Chuck Todd may has been up too late watching war movies on competitor channel TCM before uttering this statement on the Today show:
President Clinton chose a childhood friend to be his chief-of-staff, Mack McLarty. What did that mean? That chief-of-staff never knew how to tell the President no. Never was a sort of behind-the-scenes guy. In Rahm Emanuel Obama knows he’s getting Douglas MacArthur, or General Patton. A guy who’s a field general, who will keep all of the, keep everything running on time, the trains running on time and will go after Congress.
He’ll make the trains run on time? So he’s Mussolini, too? Hey, if you say so, Chuck.
But Patton was relieved of command by Ike at the end of WWII when he wanted to push into Russia; MacArthur was unceremoniously dismissed by Truman during the Korean War. Obama has publicly admitted on several occasions as being a rather dovish fellow. And Tim Graham of Newsbusters notes, “Like Obama, Emanuel has no military service on his resume, starting his career in Illinois ‘public interest group’ politics.”
As Tom Wolfe illustrated in Ambush At Fort Bragg this is but the latest example of a journalist using military lingo in his speech, even as his network has routinely been astonishingly negative regarding their chief missions over the last five years.
Update: And if the left have found their MacArthur/Patton/Mussolini, the right “haven’t yet found our Omar Bradley.”
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