Personally, I suspect Trump interviewed Mattis to see who Mattis would recommend for the Defense Secretary position. Apparently that approach to assembling a management team isn't even considered in a fetid swamp like Washington, but exceptional leaders in private industry do themselves well by using it.
I don't know why you are so presumptuous that you'd make all of those outlandish assumptions about where I stand on any given issue -- especially since my progression of preferred candidates in the GOP primary process was almost identical to yours.
If you are not willing to see the Islamofascists wiped out as necessary and well BEFORE thy are able to attack us, then you are no conservative.
George McGovern cried Peace! Peace! but, as usual, there was no peace because we had enemies to fight.
Unfortunately, we had Johnson and Nixon screwing everything up by "fighting" wars that they had absolutely NO INTENTION OF WINNING. How many boys died or were crippled to argue over the shape of the surrender table in Paris where John F'n (Did you know he served the Viet Cong in Vietnam and in Paris and in Washington?) Kerry was busy canoodling with his allies and our enemies?
Johnson was in love with meeting soviet leaders in "summits" showing presumably that Americans are people too or some such drivel. Nixon had a "secret plan" for selling out our allies and lying that it was a victory. When he was driven from office, he was replaced by that total embarrassment and disgrace Gerald Ford. Nixon and Ford and Kissinger were actual internationalists, globalists or whatever the Birchers' cliche of the week may be but they were the real thing and the US suffered greatly for it.
Personally, I think that Bilderbergers have a purpose. Conservatives should have two or three of them with ketchup for lunch whenever we gather. Make mine verrrry rare.
CONSERVATISM'S FOREIGN POLICY is INTERVENTIONISM without a bye your leave from the UN, the CFR, the Bilderbergers, the Warburgs, the Trilateral Commission, the EU, the UN o+r+ any other nation or busybody. If it is in our interest, DO IT and WIN permanently, spectacularly and verrrrry memorably.
As Trump said again and again: We don't WIN any more. I take him at his word that once he takes the oath of office we will get sick of doing nothing but winning. We haven't WON since World War II and it is about time to end that sorry streak of Establishment $$$$$ cowardice.
If Congress hasn't the sense to repeal that idiot law, then call Mattis back to active duty, make him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appoint whomever he wants to be Army Chief of Staff, Navy Chief of Staff, Air Force Chief of Staff, key subordinates of each, Army Secretary, Navy Secretary, Air Force Secretary, and name Mary Who Has a Little Lamb as Secretary of Defense, tell her to go tend the sheep, and recognize Mattis as being in charge. Return to calling the "Defense" Department the WAR Department as the Founders provided. This is not nuclear physics unless the Ohio Class subs must get involved.
I assume even the quislings and idiots on Capitol Hill have not prohibited bringing brilliant officers back to active duty to clean up the messes left by Comrade Imam Obozo and to deal with our enemies as they need dealing with. While we are at it, ANYONE promoted by Obozo should be assumed to be history unless they make an infallible case why not, including people of no discernible credentials, queers, transgenders and the rest of the weirdoAmerican community. We WILL ask and they WILL tell or, if their answers are not both truthful and what we want, out they go. The courts can bear in mind that military decisions belong to POTUS not the judiciary so the nosy fedjudges can butt out and mind their own business rather than concocting "equal protection" for queers decisions to micromanage and wreck the military. Bring out of retirement the senior noncoms forced into retirement by Comrade Imam Obozo. They are the backbone if any military. They were cashiered for patriotism and effectiveness. Maybe we should issue them bonuses equal to lost pay less pensions, tax free.
Regrettably, Reagan just barely failed to take Gerald Ford out of our national misery in 1976 but even Jimmuh Peanut took the idiot out in the general and set an even lower standard for Oval Office idiocy not equaled or surpassed until Obozo. Have you noticed that Jimmuh misspends his retirement years, running all around the world apologizing for America and canoodling with our enemies and kissing their asses and bleating Peace, Peace! and calling Venezuela's elections "honest while mouthing off about the SCOTUS decision seating Dubya after the hanging chads fiasco trying to alter ballots to elect AlBore?"
More lately we have had Bush the Elder, Slick Willie, Dubya and Comrade Imam Obozo presiding over surrender on the installment plan. Enough is more than enough!
Why am I presumptuous? I had a cousin in the Marine Corps in Korea wich we lost. That same cousin was i the Mariie Corps still when our noble hero JFK sent him steaming to Cuba to back up the Bay of Pigs folks who were Cubans invading to take out Comrade Castro. JFK (all Profile, No Courage) wimped out, canceled the air cover for the Cubans, recalled the Marines to their home port, while they Cubans were under radio silence. Eisenhower had planned that invasion and whatever his shortcomings, Ike knew a thing or two about amphibious invasions. They got cut to ribbons on the beaches. As a law student, I did fundraisers to raise $$$ for another invasion in the early 1970s under Jose de la Torriende (head of Cuban Coca Cola before Castro). Castro had Torriende murdered in Miami.
JFK went on national TV to demand on spite inspectio of Cuba to see to it that the soviet missiles had been removed. He then wimped out. No on site inspection just some photos of something shaped like missiles under canvas on board Russky freighters in a Cuban harbor. You can bet the missiles never left but the usual gang of media suspects including Comrade Cronkite ballyhooed JFK for his "heroism."
Robert (truly) Strange MacNamara lied his way through ur ineffective efforts in Vietnam. Lots of demoralizing casualties. I had a parish priest whose brother, also a priest, was beheaded by the Viet Cong for bringing North Vietnamese children south to freedom. He was also instructing them in the Faith. First the pulled out his tongue and severed it (speak no evil). Then they punctured the eardrums of the children (hear no evil). Then they beheaded the priest. They also murdered a wonderful young black woman named Phillippa Schuyler, an accomplished piano virtuoso and a member of Young Americans for Freedom's Board of Directors as she ferried more innocent children across a river in Vietnam. Her father, George Schuyler, was the long time publisher of a successful black conservative newspaper in Pittsburgh.
That war effort was doomed by the timidity of our politicians, their desire NOT to win, their willingness to make victory impossible, the determination of a much more militant enemy AND he determined efforts of the Americong in our streets: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry, Rubin, Bill Ayers, Bernadette the Radical Queen Dorn, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, "Defense Minister" Huey P. Newton, "Chairman" Bobby Seale, Students for a Demonratic Society, John Kerry and a host of other tolerated traitors. At least the Ohio National Guard got to nail a few at Kent State where the Americong burned the ROTC building. Only 4 were killed. Too bad it wasn't 40 or 400. Ayers wanted to bomb a USO dance at Fort Dix to teach New Jersey girls to have nothing to do with soldiers or they would be blown up spoiled rich brat Ayers whose father was chairman of Illinois's Commonwealth Edison power company and poured plenty of $$$$$$ into the radicals' coffers. A firing squad was too good for Ayers, Sr.
More examples available on request. That should suffice. When you buy off on their peace at any price agenda, you are joining their support for our nation's enemies. THAT is not conservatism. My assumptions are not outlandish at all. You may disagree with my diagnosis and I would not want to be known for the sad reality that is you ad others like you. My country has taken enough guff and been betrayed more than enough by its quisling coward politicians. We don't need "conservatives" becoming Kumbayas. Never did. Don't now. Never will.
You can be pro-life, pro-family, anti taxes, anti spending and 50 other conservative things but your ideas on foreign policy and military policy are a disgrace and consistent with the anti-American left not any cognizable form of actual conservatism. Yours is the path rejected once and for all 75 years ago after Pearl Harbor. It ain't coming back.
The foregoing and a LOT more are my reasons. I have despised anti-war traitors and idjits as the World War II generation of men in my family (many of them labor union leaders on a local level and most Democrats but ALL of them military veterans. Three years before I was born, my mother's brother was killed when the USS Buck, a destroyer, was sunk off Salerno chasing Nazi U-Boats (sunk one the day before the Buck went down. He was the family star. He was alive when pulled from the water but died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Although his branch of the family was half German, we will NEVER forgive the Nazis or any other enemy of our country. At least he was not cannibalized like many American POWs were by the Japanese at places like Chi Chi Jima.
His widow was my Godmother and his youngest brother was my Godfather. I will keep the Faith with Uncle Bill whom I never had the privilege of knowing and will not tolerate any more antiwar crap even posing as "conservatism." I have had a bellyful and then some. That's why!