I understand the queasiness in which many conservatives (myself included) felt when watching his nomination hearings, and he walked the middle of the road, but I tried to attribute that to getting nominated...you can't effect change if you can't get in the game.
That said, I was reading this transcript, and this passage bothers me:
"...I think the first thing is to be very slow to characterize your fellow Americans. I know that when people have to run for office they have to say “I’m smart and my opponent’s dumb,” or “I’ve got better ideas than my opponent.” That’s politics there’s nothing wrong with that. But, I get very very concerned when I hear people start characterizing their opponents as stupid. I still understand that because politics is a little rough and tumble at times, but I don’t buy it and when they start calling each other either crazy or evil. You and I, we don’t compromise with crazy people or evil people. And so, I don’t think that’s helpful. Generally speaking, just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t make them crazy or evil. I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.
By sitting down and talking with them, after having a good strong argument, going out and having a root beer with them, maybe showing up at the same church, maybe going to the hospital to see their kid when they’re having their appendix out, reminds you that they’re human beings too. There’s no reason to get all worked up as if someone is evil or crazy. For one thing, none of us are perfect and all-knowing, so this might be their right, and that’s why I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking. They know what they think, they don’t read anything but one newspaper that agrees with them or they watch only one television news show because it reinforces them, instead of listening to the ones that don’t agree with them. So, I think the way you get over it is, you take people one at a time and you give them the same credit you give yourself and your ideas..."
Where I have a real problem with this is that, many of us have been far, FAR, too slow to characterize a number of our "fellow Americans". In my opinion, we let it go about FORTY years longer than we should have. And now look where we are. We are discussing New Army Training Tells Female Soldiers To ‘Accept’ Naked Men In Their Showers, and Immigrants Ignore U.S. Immigration Laws Because Obama Won't Enforce Them, and THOUSANDS of other unimaginable things that have been forced on us, almost all of which were wrought by the Left.
The fact that we didn't dismiss these people as bat-s**t crazy means America has become that Frog in the Hot Water.
And the people who are referenced in this article: Bill Ayers ‘Dancing in the Aisles’ Over Obama’s Pardon of FALN Member Oscar López Rivera are EVIL. And that INCLUDES the TWICE ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
These people who HATE my country are NOT people I am going to take "one at a time and you give them the same credit you give yourself and your ideas". I am not. Not going to do it. We are decades past where we should have done that. And the problem is, there are a huge number of Useful Idiots who, while well meaning, share responsibility and culpability with people like Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and multitudes of other Leftist radicals, because these well-intentioned fellow Americans were thinking with their hearts and not with their heads and refused to discern the evil.
Don't get me wrong. I think very highly of SecDef Mattis, and am willing to see what he does in the next few years. But what he said in that paragraph really bothers me.
I hear you. It is grating to hear him trying so hard to give players from both parties due credit, especially the part where he attributed calls for NATO partners to pay their bills to past presidents, when this one is the first one to have gotten it out there and on the way to being done. But it is possibly part of his personal discipline so that he can remain useful and continue his career no matter which party is in power. I get the feeling that he keeps his personal opinions to himself and tries to express publicly only an objective view of how history may judge events and players.
You have this backwards. The dominant political philosophy in America has been extremely quick to label you as stupid, ignorant, bigoted, privileged, pandered, racist, sexist homophobic. You just need to be shouldered into the ditch so they can run everything the way they see fit.