Posted on 08/28/2019 5:49:23 AM PDT by lodi90
In late November 2016, I was enjoying Thanksgiving break in my hometown on the Columbia River in Washington state when I received an unexpected call from Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Would I meet with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss the job of secretary of defense?
I had taken no part in the election campaign and had never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, so to say that I was surprised is an understatement. Further, I knew that, absent a congressional waiver, federal law prohibited a former military officer from serving as secretary of defense within seven years of departing military service. Given that no wavier had been authorized since Gen. George Marshall was made secretary in 1950, and I’d been out for only 3½ years, I doubted I was a viable candidate. Nonetheless, I felt I should go to Bedminster, N.J., for the interview.
I had time on the cross-country flight to ponder how to encapsulate my view of America’s role in the world. On my flight out of Denver, the flight attendant’s standard safety briefing caught my attention: If cabin pressure is lost, masks will fall…Put your own mask on first, then help others around you. In that moment, those familiar words seemed like a metaphor: To preserve our leadership role, we needed to get our own country’s act together first, especially if we were to help others.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
My favorite here: "I figured that my strong support of NATO and my dismissal of the use of torture on prisoners would have the president-elect looking for another candidate."
I’m sure hes a very intelligent man but I’m already bored reading the excerpt. Does he ever get to the point?
Not really. It’s a typical tip toe through the tulips from Twinkle Toes Mattis. It seems the only things he is passionate about are continuing to support Democrats and Obama’s ROE that got “his” Marines killed.
But it is a harbinger of things to come in 2020, I believe, as other former Trump admin figures attack him. Mattis’s book is ostentatiously titled “Code Sign Chaos.” That is ripped right from the Never Trump “Trump WH chaos” playbook.
Wall Street Journal is headed by greedy scroungers, therefore I will not subscribe (again). Do you think they enhabnce their image or income by shutting down the reader of the article at the end of paragraph three?
Tribalism- what you get when you force tribes to live together.
Mattis is a globalist fanook. One of the biggest disappointments in Trump’s Cabinet. Glad he is gone.
In retrospect it is obvious that Trump himself never expected to actually win. He was woefully unprepared to pick a cabinet that reflected his America First ideology or were able to destroy the plotters that tried to rig an election and prevent him from taking and exercising his office. Instead he crippled his Administration with globalists and insider swamp creatures. Sorry but that was his hopefully not fatal flaw. It is costing him and the country dearly.
This article is not behind a paywall for me.
That wins the "The Most Intellectually Dumbest Post Of The Day" award.
Muh Democracy!! “Mad Dog” is a run of the shill for globalism.
That’s a bunch of nonsense. Trump was woefully unprepared to select a cabinet because he had no circle of political figures in his background, and because his trusted advisors weren’t the type of people who would have any interest in working for the U.S. government. I think he was perfectly content to view his cabinet as a group of rotating @ssholes who would spend 6-12 months wandering from one crisis to another before moving on.
Trump did the best he could hiring based on resume and reputation, but that also brought in swamp rats like this general. But to his credit he didn’t waste time booting them out.
I think A number of his picks were to placate the GOPe and yes more than a couple were catastrophic picks that definitely hobbled him. We can hope that if gets the second term fixes this starting with the firing of that deep state snake Wray.
I think you must consider how it would be had Hillary won. I’m happy with incremental improvements. Not sure how Trump could have been better prepared since he didn’t run in those circles. But I’m sure he was surprised he won. I certainly was.
I wasn't ... not one iota ...
If I were Mattis I’d be more worried about exposure to the Theranos scandal and the DoD/Amazon Cloud trainwreck.
I agree. The timeline of Mattis’s involvement in Theranos is quite an indictment of his judgement and lust for private sector payola.
“This article is not behind a paywall for me.”
Lucky you. Better hope the WSJ subscription department doesn’t read FR comments! I get the paywall bum’s rush.
Or more likely:
That wins the “The Most Intellectually Dishonest Post Of The Day” award.
That is true......
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