Well
!
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being cleareyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held,” Mr. Mattis wrote. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
Secretary Mattis, General Mattis, thanks from the heart for your best efforts at doing what was hard to do and working for someone very hard to work for, and apparently impossible to work with.
We are now exposed: the DoD will be subjected to the tender ministrations of ... whomever the President tweets to tomorrow.
Some idiot like William Cohen. (Perry's successor for Clinton).
I can't even guess who'd take the job, but I am sure someone will.
I'll be drinking in the morning over this one.
Mr President,
you don't know what you've got til it's gone.
It's a song lyric, but I think you need to take it to heart.
Further comments censored.
But Mr. Mattis’s core complaint was that Mr. Trump had lost sight of the import of the competition for global power with Russia and China, who want “a world consistent with their authoritarian model.”
Mr. Mattis was the primary author of a new American defense strategy with a central goal of taking on “revisionist” powers — an approach that some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers say the president never fully read. {Well, it wasn't on CNN, nor Twitter, so why would he read it?}
Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria, which was opposed by virtually every high-level administration official, but lauded by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was the last straw.
Along with both the military and civilian leadership at the Pentagon, Mr. Mattis viewed the withdrawal as an abandonment of Kurdish fighters and other American allies, and a ceding of critical territory to Russia and Iran.
So angry was Mr. Mattis at the Syrian withdrawal that neither he, nor any other senior Pentagon official, would defend it publicly, despite requests from the White House to do so. As a result, Mr. Trump appeared by himself in a video showing him in front of the White House on Wednesday, announcing that victory over the Islamic State had been won.
the silence was deafening.