The idea of a straw that broke the camel’s back is proverbial.
What is the basic idea? That an accumulation of evils is bearable up to a certain point, beyond which even a tiny addition, innocuous by itself, brings disaster.
The image of a camel, struggling under a heavy load but then collapsing when another piece of straw is added to its burden, is vivid and speaks to our intuition about how the business of life often proceeds.
Like the child in the back seat on a long car ride, I find myself repeatedly asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
Oops. A week or so back, before the Pentagon admitted the truth of what happened, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken whether the drone strike obliterated a terrorist or an aid worker.
Oh, we aren’t sure, Blinken replied.
Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?
Would you?
He has subsequently revised that to a “heart-wrenching,” “horrible tragedy of war,” but how can you tell? Who will be held to account for the murder of those 10 civilians?
“Held to account?” You mean, like, “assume responsibility”?
What a quaint idea.
Take a few steps down and, pow, lying, leaking, exceeding orders, making a misjudgment: all can get you cashiered, and maybe incarcerated, almost instantly.
But once you’re in the protected circle near the top, you are all but invulnerable.
Milley can actually circumvent the chain of command and tell his top aides that he, and not the president of the United States, is in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. No strike, he told them, is to be authorized without his say so.
Milley can also secretly call his counterpart in the Chinese military, twice, to assure him that the United States has no plans to attack China and if such a plan were forthcoming. he would be sure to give him the heads-up.
Milley’s behavior has been the subject of many news stories.
But I don’t think that it is widely appreciated how serious Milley’s actions were.
He didn’t approve of the president he served. Therefore, he circumvented the chain of command and pretended that the U.S. military answered to him.
In my view, Milley shouldn’t simply be fired. He should be court-martialed for something akin to treason.
At the very least, what he did was tantamount to the early stages of a coup or, to use a word the left likes, an “insurrection.”
I know it will never happen and I’m not holding my breath.
Possibly Milley will resign or quietly be pushed out, thence to pursue lucrative book deals and spots alongside James Clapper, John Brennan, and other anti-Trumpers on the talk show circuit.
The president is well into debilitating senescence and one is typically hard-pressed to know what he will do or say.
Who knows what squamous, scurrying creatures those overturned rocks will reveal?
Did I mention that hordes of illegal immigrants continue to pour over our southern border (without masks! without vaccines!)? The Biden administration, like a 1-year-old, seems to think that if it covers its eyes, the problem will vanish.
I suspect that patience is wearing thin all around as stalk after stalk of straw is added to the back of public trust.
Biden acts like an unaccountable monarch.
His minions act like unaccountable courtiers.
Confidence in the regime, swaying under the ever-increasing burden of this malevolent incompetence, is beginning to buckle.
To alter the metaphor, the United States is approaching crush depth.
If and when that happens, the results won’t be pretty.
