Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis wrote the following statement and sums up what Americans should stand for. He’s deeply critical of Trump. This is the first time he’s spoken out since he left the administration in 2018. After Mike Esper distanced himself and the military today from any plan Trump had to mobilize the troops, my gut tells me that the military was not onboard. I’d be surprised if it was. Oh sure, there are always going to be some ammosexual evangelical legends in their own mind types. But I don’t believe most of them would go along with turning our streets into a battleground.
The paramilitary police forces though? Yeah, saw that coming years ago. Those are the ones we have to worry about.
Here’s the general’s statement. I only wish the predictable response from the White House (he’s disgruntled, he begged me for a job, he’s a loser, he’s a Never Trumper) wasn’t still working. Worth the read. It’s beautiful. I’m starting to wonder why he worked for Trump in the first place.
statement:
“I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.
When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that “The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,” and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.”
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Well, that didn’t take long 🙄:
He’s so predictable. You’d think we could figure a way to take advantage of that.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Yes, beautifully written but way too late in the making. Back in 2016, so many forces kicked “Stronger Together” to the curb. Now we have Uncle Joe to kiss it and make it better. So disappointing, for me anyway.
I have to say that the peaceful protests here and around the world have sparked the dying ember of my hopes for a better America. She probably will not heal and rise in my lifetime, but so be it.
RD, thanks for posting, i would have missed it otherwise,
I am heartened that General Mattis did this. It’s scarily unprecedented, though.
The military is civilian ruled, and Mattis broke with that norm.
I understand the nuance of defying military orders that breach ConstitutionaI law.
I am way worried about a military that isn’t adhering to the civilian rule of law.
LA just had a 5.5 earthquake. Yeah, that just happened.
Earthquake near Ridgecrest, where the big one was a few months (?) ago… enough! Just….enough!
I read today that only 46% of 2016 Trump voters approve of his “presidency” as of yesterday.
Still seems too high.
I think that the timing of this made it more powerful. Not that Mattis should have waited for such a crisis, but he is a military man, and even this is rarely done. He did resign earlier, no mater how Trump lies about it. So it was heartening to see this, it might make a difference. Put another way, who else with status was going to say anything? Not the Republicans in Congress, nor their media.
The cost of all of this is going to be to have BLM flooding the airwaves, demanding this and that. One of their spokespeople said that they were demonstrating and other things in Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles to show wealthy White people what it was like to suffer, or words to that effect. BLM did not support Hillary, they attacked her at every turn. They have their own agenda. At this point, Maybe it includes a spike in virus cases, among non-Blacks. We are going to get a spike everywhere because of all of this, even though I applaud some of the heartfelt civil demonstrations.
I guess that at this point, we must simply focus on the primary goal, which is to get rid of Trump and Barr. I do agree with Cats that people who could have done their utmost to get Hillary, elected, did not; and if they had, we would not be here now. But these include people who never admit the were wrong about anything, although some of the more intellectual Never Trumpers are smart and honest enough to do so to some extent. We had such an incredibly obvious choice, and far too many made the wrong one, or simply scorned the whole process, because they are selfish and stupid. I will never forget this, how could any of us? Every time I start to see (I turn them off), some of these smirking NYT columnists, or the omnipresent Eddie Glaude, who hated Hillary,, or any of those who said that they were voting for Stein, or that there was no real choice, I am angered and sickened again by their incapacity to see beyond their own remorselessly self-indulgent perspective, even though it is always demanded that people who share our views must do so.
And to add salt to the wound, William, is hearing the media fawn over Biden, two-time primary loser, Obama’s jovial wing man, the “man” who can bring us all together, heal our grave wounds and get us back to our rightful place in the world. The man who stands in such stark contrast to the dumpster. I mean he is just so presidential in these trying times and he is just killing the primary votes; I am not buying it. I want trump gone, but of all the candidates we had to chose from to clean up this mess and to truly move our asses forward, we get Biden? He is a strutting rooster past his prime with no depth and a quick temper when he is challenged. I am pretty much done with it all.
One of the worst wrong forks in the political history of the last 100 years was the Democrats pulling Obama to the nomination in 2008. The only reason he got the nomination was because his group figured out how to game the caucuses. I bet that he got +300 delegates out of those undemocratic caucuses, because he lost almost all the major primaries. And then of course Brazile would not count FL and MI, until the end, when she halved Florida’s votes, and handed Obama some of Hillary’s delegates in Michigan, just because. It just occurred to me that it was probably Brazile who told Obama to remove is name from the MI ballot, so she could do that.
Hillary was very popular then, and she should easily have gotten the nomination. But as always, the media didn’t want Hillary, they wanted Obama. Then his campaign used the “R” card in South Carolina and beyond, and he got 95% of the Black vote. Then they pushed Hillary/s superdelegates to him. So he was almost handed the nomination, and any Democrat would have won when the economy collapsed.
The end result of this bad (not to mention unethical) decision by the DNC was that during the eight years of Obama, we lost 87 House seats, ten Senate seats, many governorships and state legislatures. We had one chance to take the majority in the Supreme Court, and Obama would not fight for it, nor would he fight McConnell with regard to informing the country of Russian interference. Additionally, people like Axelrod, Plouffe, Favreau have become legendary figures, because the media portrays them as geniuses who outmaneuvered Hillary, when that is not true at all. Now, of course, the support which Hillary never got from them during 2016, is given to BIden. Of course we need Biden to win. But I am certain that eight year of a Hillary Clinton administration would have shown much more progress than the Obama administration did, plus we would not have lost all those seats, because she cared about the Democratic Party at all levels. So obviously this is nothing I can change, but I cannot just pass over it, either. The wrong fork in the road was taken, and it has made a lot of difference; and we cannot really fix it, either. I just hope that we can win this election, and then I have no real sense that we will ride that to a great new Democratic era. Clinton left it perfectly teed up for Gore, and Brazile sabotaged that, too.
Also believe tens of thousands of Americans would not have died on Hillary’s watch during this pandemic nor would we have horrified the world and ourselves with what we have become.