Posted on 05/21/2023 9:02:01 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama from 2006-2011, appeared on “Face the Nation” Sunday and told moderator Margaret Brennan that he thinks the biggest threat to the nation isn’t white supremacy, it’s not China or Russia or climate change—it’s the political polarization of our country. It’s not the first time we’ve been so divided, he says, but there’s something new about our latest rifts :
MARGARET BRENNAN: What do you think the biggest threat to United States is right now?
FORMER SEC. GATES: I think it is the polarization in the country. And, you know, we’ve always had polarization in America.
The, if you go back to the Jefferson, Adams presidential race in 1800, the things that were said in that election would fit right into a current political environment. But what’s been different, more recently, is not just a measure of paralysis, as indicated by the debt ceiling, but a level of meanness and a lack of civility among our politicians, or the sense that somebody who disagrees with you is not just somebody you disagree with, but is an enemy, is a bad person.
This lack of civility is, I think, something new and really is pretty pervasive in the Congress. And it sets a pretty bad example for the rest of the country.
Watch:
"Polarization in the country," is the biggest threat to the U.S. right now, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells @margbrennan. Gates points to "a measure of paralysis, as indicated by the debt ceiling" and "a level of meanness" and "lack of civility" among politicians. pic.twitter.com/l2tyV69aSB
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 21, 2023
Gates is also concerned about the current stalled debt negotiations between President Joe Biden and House Republicans, and how the drama lowers our status on the world stage:
I think it’s a real problem. It feeds the narrative from China in particular, that our system doesn’t work, that it’s broken, it’s paralyzed, it can’t get things done, that their model is more stable, and actually more effective than ours. So sort of having these episodes of great crisis, and then some solution at the last second, really feeds the notion that the U.S. political system isn’t working at all.
He thinks things haven’t gotten so polarized that the very system isn’t working as intended:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you think it [the political system] is working?
FORMER SEC. GATES: Not very well. You know, I mean, the truth is, in the last year or so some fairly, fairly major legislation got past some of it with bipartisan support. And so, there is the possibility of some things being done. But on something like the debt ceiling, and so on, the inability to get some of these big things done, I think is a real problem.
Brennan asked how he would change things. Gates argued that we need to focus on doing what’s right for America, not just attacking our political enemies:
Well, I think it starts with leaders, and you don’t have to demonize people to disagree with them. You can say, you know, my opponent has a different point of view. I totally disagree. I think that that would be a terrible mistake, but I also believe that he or she also is trying to do what he thinks, he or she thinks what is best for America.
It’s pretty simple actually. It’s just treating each other with more civility and the reality that as Americans, we’re all in this together. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re from a red state or a blue state.
Whatever happens to the country happens to everybody.
Gates had plenty more to say regarding China, Donald Trump, our military, and more—you can read the full transcript here—but his commentary on our divided nation sticks out. He’s 100 percent right that it’s a major problem that effectively kneecaps any attempts at bipartisanship.
I don’t think there’s an easy fix, and even though this is partisan to say, I can’t help but point out then when one party attacks the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, launches baseless investigations and impeachment efforts against a sitting president, and promotes a two-tiered justice system, it’s very hard to find common ground.
We all better hope these debt ceiling negotiations are successful because if they fail things will only get more bitter between the two sides, and the American people—as well as the world—will pay the price.
He sounds rather vacuous and not able to think critically…
“Gates points to “a measure of paralysis, as indicated by the debt ceiling” and “a level of meanness” and “lack of civility”
These things are symptoms of the communist take-over of the USA contrary to all of our founding principles.
It is impossible to find any compromise middle ground with baby-killers, child groomers, and tyrants. A variety of compromises were tried in the 1840s and 1850s over similarly intransigent issues, but the compromises enraged people on both sides and the center could not hold.
USA phone companies were deregulated in 1984.
That was 15 years before anyone I knew even owned a cell phone.
Cell phones caught on in other parts of the world much faster than the USA because foreign land lines were much more expensive, and much less reliable, than land lines in the USA, which had the best land line system in the world.
It is clearly democrat party voters.
I thought it would be “Ruzzia”.
Actually that’s not true. I had a fiber optic phone line in the 80s in England. (passive optical network, aka TPON infrastructure.) It spanked the US system.
That was being rolled out by the nationalised BT, and Thatcher sold BT off. Surprise surprise, the privatised BT put the kybosh on TPON and we had to wait over 20 years for their Openreach division to retart rolling out fibre.
Us Brits had maglev decades ago, and tilting trains in the 70s. Bloody statism, eh?!
Privatisation killed them both off. If we want tilting high speed trains now, we have to pay another country.
How quaint Robert. If we could all just be nicer to one another. Bob is a little slow—when dealing with sociopaths, civility is a weakness.
I agree that is what he is saying. Blame the House Republicans.
“It’s the political polarization of our country.”
It’s called evil and the Demoncrats vs. God
Guess who wins?
You shall know a tree by the fruit it bears.
“Polarization”: people resisting the Left’s agenda.
It’s DEMOCRATS!! They are the BIGGEST Threat to BABIES and DECENCY!
"...unless they're white and Christian and Conservative. In that case we have to erect a police state to persecute them, hire rioters to kill them, and then round up the remainders and send them to extermination camps." ~ he explained.
Regardless, my point was that deregulated land lines in the USA were less expensive, were almost 100% reliable, and were more widely subscribed than any other country in the world.
Remember the last time the US Congress decided that we needed to imitate European telecoms?
Credit card chip readers. Literally billions of dollars were spent to replace our entire electronic payment system.
Two years later, I got my first RFID Visa card. I have not used a chip reader in a major store in close to ten years.
All the key inventions for cellular radio networks were made before the breakup of the Bell System. The first demonstration of the Motorola hand held was in 1973.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones
In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles.[17] At this stage, the technology to implement these ideas did not exist, nor had the frequencies been allocated. Two decades would pass before Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs expanded the early proposals into a much more detailed system plan. It was Porter who first proposed that the cell towers use the now-familiar directional antennas to reduce interference and increase channel reuse (see picture at right)[18] Porter also invented the dial-then-send method used by all cell phones to reduce wasted channel time.
In all these early examples, a mobile phone had to stay within the coverage area serviced by one base station throughout the phone call, i.e. there was no continuity of service as the phones moved through several cell areas. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff, as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology, were described in the late 1960s, in papers by Frenkiel and Porter. In 1970 Amos E. Joel, Jr., a Bell Labs engineer,[19] invented a “three-sided trunk circuit” to aid in the “call handoff” process from one cell to another. His patent contained an early description of the Bell Labs cellular concept, but as switching systems became faster, such a circuit became unnecessary and was never implemented in a system.
A cellular telephone switching plan was described by Fluhr and Nussbaum in 1973,[20] and a cellular telephone data signaling system was described in 1977 by Hachenburg et al.[21]
Nothing, and my copper system usually had superior sound quality. But I was more or less forced into switching to fiber optics because the phone company was no longer maintaining the copper system properly. The backup batteries that kept the system going when the power was off were gone. The phone went dead at the moment the lights went out. And then there was the struggle of waiting for them to bring the copper system back on line after a power failure. It just wasn't a priority for them. They basically told me that I was SOL unless I switched to fiber.
This! Seems Gates dismisses the threat as we see it of such policies
So when John Kerry says “Confiscating farms is not off the table “, is just “political polarization “?
The Jews and Nazis, the kulaks and Bolsheviks were just a “lack of civility “not actual looting pilliaging and murder?
Got it! Thanks, Bob .
Say it like it is, it is communism which is alive and well in our Congress and big cities across America.
So says the former Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts who polarized that organization by allowing homosexual adults and boys to join and participate.
“Civility” is a beltway word. The real issue is the attack on the legitimacy of the government. That began with Gore’s contesting of the 2000 election, followed by the declared intention of the democrats to “not let him govern.” After a relatively peaceful hiatus during Obama, it was renewed by the attempted sabotage of 2016, followed by Hillary’s attack on the legitimacy of Trump, and all-out war against the sitting president.
We need to segregate all the white folks. Whites only restaurants. Whites to the back of the bus. White neighborhoods. Whites only restrooms.. Whites only schools. Let’s Jim Crow the white people for a change.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.