General Jerry Boykin for National Security Adviser?
by digby
Here’s the president’s favorite news source Breitbart.com relaying an idea from the crazed Islamophobe (and transition adviser) Frank Gaffney about who should replace Michael Flynn. It’s hare to imagine they could find anyone crazier than Flynn, but if anyone could find one Gaffney can:
“Obviously, the underlying issue was the relationship he had with this ambassador from Russia, but I think it’s much more than that,” Gaffney said of Flynn. “It seems to me what Flynn was attacked for most vigorously, though often in an oblique way, is the same kind of thing that all of the other people you’ve been talking about this morning are under attack for, and most especially Donald Trump. And that is a clarity about the nature of the enemy that we’re facing at the moment.”
“At the risk of sounding like a globalist, unfortunately, that enemy is on the march globally. I think it’s best described as ‘sharia supremacism,’ but whether you call it that or ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ or ‘jihad’ or any number of other names, euphemisms, Mike Flynn was pretty squared away on that. I think people who are determined not to see it or at least not to come to grips with it – and in some cases that certainly was true of the Obama team, enabling it – I think are determined to take out everybody in this administration who is prepared to see it as the existential threat of our time,” Gaffney said.
“I’ve just done a commentary on a similar moment, interestingly enough, 35 years ago,” he remarked, referring to Ronald Reagan’s early loss of his own National Security adviser, Richard Allen. Reagan made what Gaffney hailed as an “extraordinary choice,” Judge William Clark.
Gaffney recalled Clark was “plucked from obscurity, as far as the Washington Beltway guys were concerned,” a man who was “not seen as a great foreign policy guru.”
“But man, what he helped Ronald Reagan do – and I hope your audience will recognize is needed now – is he understood that time’s, as Ronald Reagan put it, existential threat to freedom, namely Soviet communism. And he helped Ronald Reagan put together a strategy for defeating it – which, when executed, did just that,” he said.
“We need a similar guy. I have a candidate. I’m sure that’s the kiss of death, but I believe the guy who should replace General Mike Flynn is another retired Army Lt. General by the name of William ‘Jerry’ Boykin,” Gaffney proposed.
He said Boykin has “that kind of clarity and courage under fire, most especially, of an extraordinary leader of men, one of our most decorated special operators.”
“This is the guy for this time, I think, and I hope that Donald Trump will think about bringing him in. He knows him, he worked with him in the course of the campaign, and he would, I believe, help him execute a strategy for victory over jihad, which is what we need at the moment,” he said.
Marlow agreed that Boykin would be a “fantastic” choice and said Flynn’s resignation gave President Trump an opportunity to “show he has a deep bench,” having put together “the best cabinet since Reagan, maybe even better than Reagan’s first cabinet.”
Gaffney agreed with Marlow that Flynn’s resignation could represent the Washington establishment’s knocking out an important connection between President Trump and his core voters.
“I think it’s a serious problem, and I think what you’ll see now, with the blood in the water, is that the sharks will be circling for others who have that connection,” Gaffney predicted. “It’s not just the connection to Trump’s base, of course. It’s the people who helped bring Trump to his present position and who have enabled him to articulate that threat to the establishment Republicans and to the Left – the Obama team, and worse – and not least to the Islamists.”
“You do have an unholy alliance, it seems to be, that has formed up, whether it’s overt or simply implicit, a shared purpose: to try to take down a Donald Trump who would drain the swamp, and who would challenge all that’s been wrong with Washington,” he said.
Jerry Boykin is a far right religious extremist who was forced out of the Army and believes we are literally in a Holy War between Islam and Christianity. Here’s just one recent example of his lunacy from last August:
Speaking at a conference in Colorado Springs in August, Family Research Council executive vice president Jerry Boykin warned that Muslims are “going to infiltrate every element of our society, including the church,” and insisted that there is no such thing as moderate Muslims, just people “who have chosen not to follow the teachings of the Quran and the hadith.”
In a panel discussion on “the threat to America” at the “Breaking the Silence” conference at Colorado Springs’ Church For All Nations, Boykin cited a 1991 “explanatory memorandum” that anti-Muslim activists like to claim is secretly guiding the actions of all Muslims in the United States before claiming that conservative California pastor Jack Hibbs had had a fake Muslim convert “planted” in his church:
They’re going to infiltrate every element of our society, including the church. We have a friend that is a pastor in Chino Hills, California, his name is Jack Hibbs. A six, seven thousand member church in Chino Hills, California. He had an associate pastor that was a Muslim convert. Turns out the guy wasn’t a convert at all, he had been planted there. He’d been planted there in this church, huge megachurch, that guy’d been planted there.
They’re infiltrating every element of our society while we are trying to believe that there is a big separation between the radical Muslims and moderate Muslims. And the reality is, John [Guandolo] said it, the moderate Muslims are just simply Muslims who have chosen not to follow the teachings of the Quran and the hadith. And there are a lot of them, and God bless them, I wish that more of them would refuse to follow it.
Trump would love him. But even he may see that even though he’s a general who really looks the part, Boykin is a bad replacement for Flynn at this moment. But you never know with this guy.
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