Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey has said Trump is a ‘Serious’ threat to national security.
Retired four-star army general Barry McCaffrey tweeted Friday that he reached the conclusion about Trump because the president "is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks."
"It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr. Putin," he added.
Sorry — I don’t know how to post directly from twitter. But here is the link.
The idea that McCaffrey, who was Drug Czar, would make a comment like this is shocking. Men (and women) who make all the way to the top make it by their infinite sense of discretion, keeping their mouths shut and not rocking the boat. So Barry must think things are getting bad.
Truly, it is terrifying. A President who will not defend his country. How ironic after all the trillions of dollars that went into Cold War military spending. We all knew that the inflated Pentagon budget was about pumping the Congressional-Military-Industrial complex with billions for payouts to military lobbyists and contractors irrespective of the actual defense needs. But now we see that conventional defense hardly comes into play. We may not even have the means to stop wholesale election hacking without a vast investment. And that may not be possible because defense funds are earmarked for arms manufacturers to build flying submarines, preparing for tank warfare in Europe and billion dollar stealth aircraft, not cybersecurity.
Imagine if it was Trump was in office rather than John F Kennedy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. It would either be Sarah Huckabee Sanders explaining how there wasn’t a crisis or we are always in crisis or just the threat of American retaliation means there is no crisis or whatever dissembling she does on a daily basis, with that serious look on her face. Or maybe it is Trump making insane threats, backing himself into a corner, becoming personally insulted and finally no more options other than conflagration.
It is really, really easy for me to go into denial over this. Between Russian agents doing murder in London and the hacking of our elections, this is low-intensity warfare. The world is filled with power hungry men who will only do what you can compel them to do. Who will take whatever they can, as can be observed by the Russian kleptocracy. As long as Putin feels he has a free pass to attack wherever and whomever he pleases without viable resistance, he will do it. This is why Hitler marched into the Sudetanland. Unfortunately, standing up to Putin may be very costly, but it will DEFINITELY get more costly over time as he is given leeway and he decides to take bigger risks.