The first thing that came to mind when I heard Kelly's quote:
Quote:
MARC ANTONY.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
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Of course, the chance that Kelly has the self-awareness to deploy this level of irony strikes me as roughly the same as the chance that the president* himself has that level of self-awareness. I wish I could say that it surprised me that Kelly is an apologist for treason in defence of slavery, but it doesn't, particularly after his tenure at DHS and his blatantly racist and misogynistic attack on Rep. Wilson earlier this month.
I will say that, judging from what I know of the military, this is almost certain to shred what was left of his reputation there. Not only did he speak in defence of people who took up arms against the United States, but he also spoke out against egalitarianism. While the military may not be particularly progressive overall, it seems to be
extremely invested in the idea of meritocracy: that is, the idea that a person's race, gender, sexuality, and other similar traits should have
no bearing on their personal success. Kelly has fully revealed how little regard he has for that idea (to be fair, his trashing of Rep. Wilson had already strongly implied this).
Trump truly does have the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to shit. (Josh Marshall's Dignity Wraith metaphor is also a good one.) Of course, I'm virtually 100% certain Kelly was already like this to a rather large extent, but it's still rather remarkable how nearly everyone in even remote proximity to the president* ends up trashing their reputation.