Frank Meile: Trump Did Not Call For Milley's Execution

Even as serious as this matter is, I've been ignoring it because this sort of thing is rife on the left.

   As usual: I'm not exactly defending Trump here. He shouldn't have said what he said. It was stupid and way over the line--also as usual.

   But no, he did not call for Milley's execution.

   The left, of course, loves victimhood, and playing the victim is one of its most cherished and effective tactics. It commonly counts all sorts of non-death-threats as death threats. For example: "I hope you die" is not, ordinarily, a death threat (though you can always think up a context that will change a meaning). "In the past, the penalty for what he did would be death" (oh, sorry: DEATH!) is also not a death threat. And, as Meile points out: it's plausibly true in this case. 

   This playing fast-and-loose with "death threat" is something we saw in, e.g., GamerGate. There may have been some, but the few alleged death threats actually made public weren't death threats at all. Again: not excusing actual death threats. And not excusing people saying awful things to people for shit reasons. But the latter is not the former--even if death is mentioned. 

   Similarly, "you should kill yourself," a go-to type of harassment by Teen Web Leftists, isn't a death threat. Though, for all I know, it's illegal for other reasons. And it's stupid and shitty.

   This is a well-known pas de deux by now: Trump says something (often dumb, but often not); leftists (including, of course, the media) pretend he said something much worse. Repeat ad nauseam. See also when he didn't say that all Mexicans were rapists...and when he didn't say that white supremacists are very fine people.