Newsmax, a conservative US website, has had to take down an extraordinary post suggesting that America under Barack Obama might be heading for a military coup. The item by John L Perry, a former White House speechwriter, was titled Obama Risks a Domestic Military 'Intervention' and suggested there was "a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the 'Obama problem'. Don't dismiss it as unrealistic."
Perry's post did not explicitly call for the Marines to storm the White House, but it did outline a scenario – nationalised enterprises, rising taxes, unemployment and inflation, the president at war with the intelligence services, missile defenses dismantled - upon which leading figures in the US military would be forced to act.
"Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog," he wrote. "Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a 'family intervention', with some form of limited, shared responsibility?"
Perry, who claims not to be a neo-con, or even a Republican, but surprisingly worked for the Democrats under Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, goes on: "Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars.
