“Mad Dog’s” leash held by big-government deep-state
One sort of exception, Mad Dog James Mattis, essentially fired by both Obama and Trump, picks the deep state as his focus of allegiance. Media will bankroll his appearances as long as he is critical of Trump.
This collection of insightful articles about Trump’s military critics are from The Federalist and American Thinker. The first two authored by Andrea Widburg, an informative and prolific writer at AT. Bold our emphasis.
There’s a cancer amongst the pensioners of the Pentagon
Colin Powell, who hasn’t voted for a Republican in the last 16 years, excited the mainstream media when he announced that he was again going to vote for a Democrat. Powell is a joke, and probably a high-level leaker, so he deserves to be ignored. However, he represents something more serious, which is retired admirals and generals using the goodwill they earned serving in the military in service to the Deep State.
Whatever respect I had for Powell died when I learned that he was one of the loudest voices telling Bush Sr. to pull out of the First Gulf War, allowing Saddam Hussein to stay in power and therefore contributing indirectly to the Iraq War. I’ve also long suspected that he was the main source for Bob Woodward’s nasty Plan of Attack, which painted Bush as a dummy and Powell as a prescient saint.
The problem, though, isn’t Powell, who’s yesterday’s news. It’s the long list of retired military officers attacking Trump, most of whom escaped Obama’s firing of almost 200 military officers.
Those firings had the smell of a purge about them, especially considering Obama’s vision for the U.S. military. His practical, strategic, and tactical demands on the military (e.g., draw-downs, aiding America’s enemies, unduly restrictive rules of engagement) and his extensive efforts to turn our military into a social justice experiment (e.g., women in combat, so-called transgenders in the military, etc.), hinted that his decisions about officers were not primarily aimed at ensuring that our military was the best, most honorable fighting machine in the world. Obama had other goals in mind.
The most touted anti-Trump statement came from William H. McRaven, the admiral (now retired), who oversaw the Osama bin Laden mission. It was under McRaven that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind 9/11, got a private, respectful burial at sea, one that ensured “that bin Laden’s body was be handled in accordance with Muslim traditions[.]” How nice.
McRaven took to the pages of the New York Times last October to launch a fiery attack against Trump for announcing that he was going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. To McRaven, that made Trump such a disastrous president that he should be removed — “the sooner, the better.” Language like that has the smell of a military coup about it. Oh, and Trump did pull out those U.S. troops, saving lives. He also ordered a hit on Qassem Soleimani, saving more lives.
General Barry McCaffrey (ret.), a Clinton White House holdover, is also an anti-Trump hysteric. When Trump announced that he didn’t want to have the federal government (and American taxpayers) pay for the New York Times and Washington Post, McCaffrey called it a “watershed moment in national history,” and said Trump was Mussolini:
The White House Trump statement telling the entire Federal Government to terminate subscriptions to the NYT and Wash Post is a watershed moment in national history. No room for HUMOROUS media coverage. This is deadly serious. This is Mussolini.
— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) October 25, 2019
Can you imagine being led into battle by a man so easily given to hysterical exaggeration?
To understand the nonsense from the next Deep State military official, a little context is necessary. Last year, Trump ordered special forces to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Obama had released from Camp Bucca in 2009. Baghdadi, an ISIS leader, was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and was a sexual sadist, among other things. Trump, understanding that Arabs are a shame-based culture, made sure the world knew that Baghdadi was not a hero or a martyr at the end, but was a miserable coward, whining and crying, frightened of a dog, and hiding behind a child.
Obama’s Joint Chiefs vice chair, Admiral James Winnefeld (ret.), was appalled that Trump treated a sadistic mass murderer with so little respect. According to Winnefeld, Trump should have shown that human piece of trash the “respect that is due under Islam.” (Now do you know why Winnefeld and Obama got along?)
And of course, there’s James Mattis, who got the treatment he deserved from Marine captain John M. Dowd (ret.).
Democrats are undoubtedly planning on using all these NeverTrump Democrats to support Biden. The media will troop these retired officers out in their snazzy uniforms and make much of their service. When they do so, it’s up to you to remember who these men are and what they value.
We can honor them for their service, but we need to recognize that this does not make them intelligent or even decent men. Just think of John McCain, an arrogant military officer; an incredibly brave POW; and a vicious, petty, disloyal RINO politician.
One retired Marine isn’t putting up with Mattis’s nonsense
• Ret. Marine general James Mattis, who served as Trump’s defense secretary, resigned over a year ago but has apparently been nursing a grudge since then. Last week, he took to the pages of the left-wing Atlantic magazine to air that grievance.
• Mattis revealed a small mind. His facts were wrong and his arguments foolish and simplistic. The Democrat media, of course, celebrated the article despite its fundamental flaws. Retired Marine captain John M. Dowd, however, decided that he wasn’t going to sit there and take that nonsense, so he struck back. What he wrote is red meat for conservatives and Trump-supporters.
• To understand what Mattis wrote for the Atlantic, you have to know that while he does love the Marines, he’s a leftist at heart. He supports the global warming agenda, is hostile to Israel, shied away from fights with the mullahs, wanted so-called transgenders in the military, wouldn’t leave Afghanistan, and ultimately quit because he wanted to keep U.S. troops in Syria (reminder: the disaster leftists predicted for Trump’s pullout never materialized).
• If you need more evidence that Mattis is a leftist politician, he hung out with limousine leftists:
• Jeff Bezos threw a party at his newly renovated Washington DC home last night.
Yes, Lauren Sanchez was there.
Also in attendance:
Ivanka Trump
Jared Kushner
Kellyanne Conway
Bill Gates
Mitt Romney
Jim Mattis https://t.co/2MrqWiiKi4
• — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 26, 2020
• It came as no surprise to those who understand the real Mattis, rather than the propaganda version, that he was smarting at his inability to drive Trump into the arms of the Deep State and is worried that Trump will be re-elected. That’s why he decided to use the Atlantic to denounce Trump as a threat to the Constitution. So he authored an insanely stupid manifesto.
• The manifesto opens with Mattis calling looted stores, burning cities, and dead police officers “a small number of lawbreakers.” He ignores the fact that Trump has done nothing to stop the protesters from having their say and has, in fact, completely respected federalism by leaving the states to handle matters, warning only that if chaos threatens, he has the legal authority to step in and will do so.
• Mattis’s little lecture about using the military carefully is redundant. Trump knows and has already acted consistently with this knowledge.
• Mattis blathers on about Trump fostering disunity, ignoring that leftists have played “resistance” theater since Trump’s election. Mattis seemingly missed the inauguration day marches, the spying, the Russia hoax, the Kavanaugh slander, the Ukraine hoax, Pelosi ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech, etc. The attacks have never stopped, but Trump has still managed to focus on the American people’s welfare.
• As if to prove that he now hangs out only with leftists, Mattis concludes with Trump’s walk across the park to a historic church that “peaceful protesters” had tried to burn to the ground. To Mattis, this was an abuse of presidential power. Sigh. If the lunkheaded former general expanded his friendship circle, he’d know that the park service had no contact with Trump and was fighting back against protesters pelting officers with dangerous projectiles.
• Mattis may also be part of yet another, broader resistance attempt. There’s a rumor afoot that Anderson Cooper is planning to attack Trump through a town hall with leftist military men who hate him:
CNN person w/ direct knowledge: @andersoncooper has been planning a town hall for months w/ Gary Cohn, Jim Mattis, John Kelly & McMaster to air in September. They will make stuff up & say that Trump is unfit for office. Mattis & Kelly signed on. Cohn & HR on the fence.
• — Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) June 5, 2020
• Cooper doesn’t understand that conservatives will not be impressed. They really hate leftist officers, for they understand that these men are political panderers, the lowest of the low.
• Still, military men have each other’s backs, so until a couple of days ago, there was no pushback from people who ought to recognize Mattis for the Benedict Arnold he is. Finally, though, retired Marine captain John M. Dowd, a former Marine Corps judge advocate and a Trump attorney, had enough. He wrote a letter aimed directly at Mattis’s honor.
• Dowd’s letter is savage. You can tell that it was written in a white-hot passion. He talks about Obama’s forcing divisions on the country, about the revolting attacks Democrats have launched at Trump every day, and about Trump’s prison reform being better for the black community than anything Obama did. Then he goes in for the kill, directly castigating Mattis for being too much of a political coward to take out Qassem Soleimani, even as the Iranian general was killing American troops all over the Middle East. It’s a mean letter, and Mattis deserves every word of it.
• I thought this letter from respected retired Marine and Super Star lawyer, John Dowd, would be of interest to the American People. Read it! pic.twitter.com/I5tjysckZh
• — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2020
• Jim:
• I slept on your statement and woke up appalled and upset. You lost me. Never dreamed you would let a bunch of hack politicians use your good name and reputation – earned with the blood and guts of young Marines.
• You did what you said you would – engage in this discourse. Marines keep their word.
• The phony protesters near Lafayette park were not peaceful and are not real. They are terrorists using idle hate-filled students to burn and destroy. They were abusing and disrespecting the police when the police were preparing the area for the 1900 curfew. Jim, this is the new nihilism. See Dan Henninger in WSJ today.
• Marines support the police in harm’s way.
• Did you forget that President Bush used active duty Marines to quell the riots in LA? President Trump has countless cities and some snowflake governors and mayors wetting themselves in the use of force to protect innocent lives and property. The AG of Massachusetts thinks burning property is good protest. Three more policemen were stabbed and shot in NYC last night.
• Think about it. Should he be upset about the obvious failure of leadership? Where are you Jim?
• Marines go to the fight.
• No one divided this country more than Obama. He abandoned our black brothers and sisters. He gave guns to the cartels. He apologized for our precious sacrifice and generosity overseas. You remember, he fired you.
• President Trump has done more to help our minority brothers and sisters in three years than anyone in the last fifty. Ask the black pastors. Ask the leaders of the black colleges and universities. He got them funded. Ask them about the prison reform which ended the draconian sentences imposed on young black men by the laws enacted by Biden and his hacks. You need to bone up on your homework and stop listening to Uncle Leon.
• I understand, you had to stick to the assigned narrative which did not include three years of corrupt investigations and evidence to destroy the President, his office, and his lawful free election. Nancy has no tolerance for dissent in the ranks – including those with stars.
• You said nothing of the ugly, hate filled, disgraceful comments of Pelosi, Schumer, Perez and other Democrat hacks defaming the President and his office. You said nothing of the unlawful sanctuary cities and the unlawful release of hoodlums. You said nothing of the resistance movement to paralyze our courts and our government operations. You said nothing of the obstruction and subversion of our immigration laws. You said nothing of MS-13 killers and the drug cartels who own huge sections of our major cities. Jim, do you thin that hateful rhetoric and those corrupt actions were inspiring and unifying? Do you think the DI’s at Parris Island would find such behavior as unifying?
• Maybe, your problem, is a lot deeper. Perhaps you ought to explain how and why you (and John Allen), as CG Central Command, did not engage and take out Iranian Major General Soleimani who roamed the Middle East and wreaked havoc and death of our American boys with his infamous IEDs?
• Why did it take President Trump to have the instincts and balls to take him out (of course over the objection of the geniuses in the Pentagon)?
• Looks like the Persian mullahs were a one horse sleigh and Trump nailed the horse . . . forever. It has been quiet ever since. Perhaps, your anger is borne of embarrassment for your own failure as the leader of Central Command. Did you applaud when the President recognized the central problem in the middle east? Did you applaud the President when he wanted to save American lives by bringing them home in one piece?
John M Dowd
No, West Point Grads Don’t Need To Learn Anything From The Resistance
The contradiction between their virtue-signaling platitudes and what they say reveals the hypocrisy of these ‘concerned’ graduates of West Point.
By John Lucas and James R. McDonough at The Federalist
Last Thursday, a group of West Point graduates calling themselves “Concerned Members of the Long Gray Line” published an open letter attacking, without directly naming, President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (West Point class of 1986), and several other members of the class of ’86 who have served in the current presidential administration. The letter was coyly framed as advice to this year’s class of West Point graduates, but it’s clear the intent is to generate negative news coverage of their political opponents. It worked.
CNN and other media outlets gleefully republished excerpts of the letter, happy to portray Pompeo and the other West Pointers in the administration as deceitful, oath-breaking toadies who have made a “Faustian bargain and endeavor to please their commanders and advance their careers” at the expense of troops in combat.
The letter’s clear message is that Pompeo and the other West Pointers in the Trump administration are dishonorable deplorables who have failed to uphold West Point’s motto of “Duty, Honor, Country,” not to mention their oath of office and the Constitution. The “Concerned Members” would have us know that by making their “Faustian bargain,” these failed fellow graduates “prize loyalty to individuals over the ideals expressed in the Constitution.”
The American people should not be duped. This is utter nonsense. It is both false and not representative of West Point graduates. Make no mistake about it: although ostensibly addressed to the graduating class of 2020, the ultimate target of this political screed is not them, or even Pompeo or his West Point classmates. It is the current commander in chief.
Although the signers attempt to portray themselves as pure and motivated by only altruistic motives of “Duty, Honor, Country,” their letter is part of a dishonest and hypocritical effort most likely intended to promote the “Resistance.”
These People Don’t Represent West Point
Who are these “Concerned Members”? With approximately 500 supposed signatories as of the time the letter was published (less than 1 percent of living West Point graduates, according to data from a source at West Point’s Association of Graduates), this article will not try to characterize each person. But we know something about many of them. Some are Democrat politicians. Some are self-styled members of “the Resistance.” At least one was booted out of the Army early.
Some are blatant hypocrites. We know that because while proclaiming their courage and what they say is their “lifetime commitment is to the enduring responsibility expressed in the Cadet Prayer: ‘to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong,’” they were too cowardly to sign the letter. Fifty-nine identified themselves only as “Anonymous.”
Similarly, although their letter clearly is an attack on the president and Pompeo and other accomplished West Point graduates, the authors engage a ruse of their own by not naming their targets, thus attempting to retain a patina of deniability. They are not exactly Horatius at the Bridge.
The Military Is Legitimately Used to Stop Riots
We also know they are not the least bit concerned with the next phrase of the Cadet Prayer that they quote: “never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won.” That is because they dishonestly accuse the president of threatening “to use the Army in which you serve as a weapon against fellow Americans engaging in these legitimate protests.” No honest person could join in that calumny.
First, federal troops have been routinely deployed to quell domestic civil unrest and riots, beginning with Shay’s Rebellion in 1786. The reader may well wonder if the “Concerned Members” are equally incensed by President Eisenhower (West Point class of 1915) having deployed the 101st Airborne when the governor of Arkansas and white supremist mobs sought to block black children from attending Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957.
Second, and fundamentally, the inflammatory assertion that threatening to use federal troops against innocent and “legitimate protests” is a falsehood. As we know, the administration considered deploying troops to protect American citizens and their property, not from “peaceful protestors,” but from mobs that were killing, beating, burning, and looting. This mayhem and insurrection occurred while numerous elected “leaders” stood idly by or actively excused and encouraged their orgy of destruction.
The inclusion of this falsehood in the letter also casts a dark shadow over the authors’ proclamation, “We will not tolerate those who ‘lie, cheat or steal.’” Indeed, the contradiction between their virtue-signaling platitudes and what they say reveals the “Concerned Members’” hypocrisy.
This Isn’t Advice, It’s Propaganda
The “Concerned Members’” presumptiveness in thinking that it is necessary for them to supplant the four years’ of ethical and leadership training at West Point is sorely misplaced. Could the signatories really believe that in the past four years, West Point, this hallowed institution—with all its historical traditions, strong leadership, and ethical underpinnings—failed to get that essential point across to the newly minted lieutenants in the class of 2020? Do these young officers really require a reminder from the Resistance that they have taken an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and that they must not betray that oath by selling their souls to the devil?
The answer to that is apparent. The letter reveals itself as propaganda. It is not a necessary letter to newly minted lieutenants about to take up the burden of faithfully performing their duty of accomplishing the assigned missions and of defending honorable subordinates.
Instead, it is a political statement, another in a string of engineered statements presuming all is wrong with America save for the dedicated few who view themselves as keepers of the flame and resisters of the unworthy deplorables now serving in positions of great responsibility in government.
Such a letter does not serve well those to whom it is ostensibly addressed. The new officers from the West Point Class of 2020 can be trusted to do their duty well, to face the daily challenges they are bound to meet in war and peace, and to know the difference between right and wrong. They will serve our country well, as West Point graduates have done for more than 200 years, despite this self-serving and unnecessary letter.
John Lucas is a practicing attorney in Tennessee who has successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man and then graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger and fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. Col. (Ret.) James R. McDonough is a West Point graduate, class of 1969. He is the author of the book “Platoon Leader,” a memoir of small unit leadership in combat in Vietnam that is studied at West Point and in ROTC today and since its publication in 1985.
