Today is the 56th anniversary of what I used to consider the greatest radio station on the planet in its best format:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 2
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The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the first of its 13-show U.S. tour at the Milwaukee Auditorium:
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British album today in 1966 was the Rolling Stones’ “Aftermath”:
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At some point writers usually are given a copy of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
What follows is not nonfiction. But what follows here isn’t good writing either, as compiled from current and past popular fiction by BrainJet in the spirit of the famous Bulwer–Lytton Bad Writing Contest.
We begin with the immensely popular, yet immensely bad, 50 Shades of Grey:
I am all gushing and breathy—like a child, not a grown woman who can vote and drink legally in the state of Washington.
Jeez, he looks so freaking hot. My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.
Someone named Ron Miller wrote something called Silk and Steel, in which …
Her legs were quills. They were bundles of wicker, they were candelabra; the muscles were summer lightning, that flickered like a passing thought; they were captured eels or a cable on a windlass. Her thighs were geese, pythons, schooners. They were cypress or banyan; her thighs were a forge, they were shears; her thighs were sandstone, they were the sandstone buttresses of a cathedral, they were silk or cobwebs. Her calves were sweet with the sap of elders, her feet were bleached bones, her feet were driftwood. Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears.
Stephenie Meyer, writer of the Twilight manglings of vampires, contributed:
Aro laughed. “Ha ha ha,” he giggled.
(Technically, a laugh and a giggle are not quite the same thing. “Ha ha ha” isn’t a giggle either.)
“Stop!” I shrieked, my voice echoing in the silence, jumping forward to put myself between them.
Claire Delacroix, not Yoda, wrote this in Unicorn Vengeance:
Like the wolf he was named for was he, he realized, for his life was solitary above all else.
(As one comment pointed out, however, wolves are pack animals, which makes this sentence not only badly constructed but based on a false premise.)
Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame wrote elsewhere:
Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.
(And how did he know that? Did Vetra run test flesh burnings?)
Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.
Just because you’re popular doesn’t mean every word is a pearl. Lee Child, Jack Reacher’s creator:
It was about as distinctive as the most distinctive thing you could ever think of.
Dean Koontz in Whispers:
“For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.”
Tom Clancy in Red Storm Rising:
“Fighter weather,” agreed Lieutenant Colonel Bill Jeffers, commander of the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the “Black Knights,” most of whose F-15 Eagle interceptors were sitting in the open a bare hundred yards away.
Bad writing is not a recent thing. Langston Hughes wrote in Thank You, M’Am:
He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now.
(I think that’s a double negative. Or something.)
Not many people may realize the human cartoon Rambo came off a serious movie, “First Blood,” which came from a novel that included …
One man came running off the corner to stop him, but Rambo kicked him away and then he was whipping left around the corner, and for now he was safe and he really got that cycle going.
This was found in a novel spun off the new “Star Wars” movie:
The TIE wibbles and wobbles through the air; careening drunkenly across the Myrran rooftops – it zigzags herkily-jerkily out of sight.
One wonders if any of these writers had editors. As one comment put it:
Our readers today are so illiterate, they wouldn’t know bad writing if their phones depended on it.
At least the creator of this list took the time to read more than one book, which based on another comment may not have been necessary:
I feel like just posting every sentence from 50 Shades of Grey would have been sufficient to make this list. Literally nothing ever written is as horrible as anything in that sad excuse for a book.
The existence of this list was derided as jealousy of successful writers by some. The counter to that is that popularity and quality are not the same thing, and all you need do is look at the Kardashians.
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Today in 1976, after a concert in Memphis, Bruce Springsteen scaled the walls of Graceland … where he was arrested by a security guard.
Today in 2003, a $5 million lawsuit filed by a personal injury lawyer against John Fogerty was dismissed.
The lawyer claimed he suffered hearing loss at a 1997 Fogerty concert.
The judge ruled the lawyer assumed the risk of hearing loss by attending the concert. The lawyer replied, “What?”
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Two weeks ago I wrote here about Gannett’s swallowing up of what used to be Journal Communications, formerly Wisconsin’s largest media company.
Having gobbled up Journal Media Group, Gannett is now looking south, reports the Chicago Tribune:
Gannett announced Monday an offer to buy Tribune Publishing, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, for $815 million, including the assumption of $390 million in debt.
The unsolicited, all-cash offer, which translates to $12.25 a share, represents a 63 percent premium over Friday’s $7.52 a share closing price, as well as a premium over the $8.50 share price at which Tribune recently issued common shares, Gannett said.
Robert Dickey, president and CEO of Gannett, said in an interview Monday the company has been eyeing Tribune Publishing since June, and that it sees $50 million in savings annually and a platform for expanding its recently launched USA Today Network online. He said Tribune Publishing markets such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Orlando specifically “filled a number of geographic gaps” for Gannett.
Poynter provides a preview:
A hostile $815 million bid for Tribune Publishing by Gannett, owner of USA TODAY and 100 other properties, inspired anxiety in Tribune newsrooms for reasons that Gannett shouldn’t deny. Staffers I spoke with at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun — three of Tribune’s best-known dailies — are nervous, partly because of Gannett’s lingering image of being in a different league qualitatively, even with the success of USA TODAY (of which I am a fan). After nearly a decade of internal tumult, including bankruptcy, they’re well-practiced at being shell-shocked. This time, the news reinforced their falling fortunes. Not long ago you would have needed far more money just to buy either the Tribune or Times, forget all 11 papers.
Whether you’re “the best orthopedic surgeon in town” or a “sleazeball lawyer,” reputations are hard to lose. Thus, here was industry analyst Ken Doctor’s Cliff’s Notes on Gannett in a phone chat: “Middle-brow, small towns, tight rein on management, publishers ascendant and editors not as strong, excellent financial engineers, best balance sheet in the business, still searching for its community voice.” And there are few Pulitzer Prizes around their newsrooms.
It is not necessarily true that size means mediocrity, and it is not true that chain ownership of media properties is necessarily a bad thing. It depends on who the owner is. And that requires some state media history.
I became a Journal Communications employee in 1994, as editor of the late great Marketplace Magazine. Journal owned the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel (which would merge in 1995), the most established AM radio station in the state, the first commercial TV station in the state, and numerous weekly newspapers. Journal was an employee-owned company, heavily invested in Wisconsin and the Milwaukee area specifically (though even then Journal owned out-of-state TV and radio stations), and the preferred employer for us media types.
At the time Gannett owned only the Green Bay Press–Gazette and the Wausau Daily Herald. The big print competitor was Thomson Newspapers, a British company that owned the Appleton, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Marshfield and Wisconsin Rapids newspapers. The Oshkosh and Stevens Point newspapers were independently owned until Thomson purchased the Stevens Point newspaper and, after the Oshkosh newspaper was sold to an out-of-state company, Thomson bought the Oshkosh newspaper one year after its sale.
Gannett already had a reputation for trying to kill its competition, in Green Bay’s case the Green Bay News–Chronicle, a newspaper started by striking Press–Gazette employees in the early 1970s. The News–Chronicle’s owner, Frank Wood, brought in Richard McCord, who had experience with Gannett in New Mexico, for a project to save the Newx–Chronicle, which prompted a book, The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Versus the Gannett Empire. (Long story short: Gannett ended up buying the News–Chronicle and closing it. Wood’s sons, however, are still in print, and own the portion of Journal I used to work for.)
Gannett’s business practices were one thing. How Thomson ran its newspapers was another thing. A friend of mine in Appleton told the story about how, in the early days of his marriage when he and his wife lacked money for entertainment, they would have a nightly contest to find typographical errors in the newspaper, with the loser having to do the dishes that night. To call the rest of Thomson’s newspapers “mediocre” would have been a compliment.
Thomson then came upon what management thought was a great idea. In this country, unless you’ve been in the profession for a long time, journalism requires a four-year degree. In Britain, journalism is considered a trade instead of a profession, requiring the British equivalent of a two-year degree. (Which is interesting given that one of the things journalism students learn is libel law; in Britain libel is a criminal offense, and lacking a First Amendment newspapers are forced to apologize for misreporting.)
Whether Thomson wanted to drag down reporter salaries lower than they already were, or wanted its reporters to do whatever editors wanted to them to do, Thomson decided to create the Reader Inc. Editorial Training Center. According to Editor & Publisher:
Motivated by high editorial staff churn and difficulty landing journalism graduates for the long haul, Thomson Newspapers is launching an in-house journalism school for aspiring reporters with as little as a high school diploma or equivalency.
The plan to spend over $1 million of corporate training funds was propelled by the desire to reverse the trend shared by many newspaper companies — the revolving door of reporters on community beats. Thomson executives say the turnover creates confusion and diminishes credibility in the 58 community papers Thomson operates in North America.
Dubbed the Reader Inc. Editorial Training Center, after Thomson’s Reader Inc. initiative aimed at fostering newspaper readership, the center will ensure “new journalists bring a passion for readers to their work, unencumbered by lofty preconceptions of what journalism is all about,” says Stuart Garner, president and CEO of Stamford, Conn.-based Thomson Newspapers.
The venture, apparently the only U.S. effort of its kind, mirrors features of the Thomson Editorial Training Center in Great Britain, which became Trinity Editorial Training Center after Toronto-based Thomson Corp. sold some U.K. properties in 1994. The school has trained thousands of journalists in the past two decades, says Jim Jennings, vice president and editorial director, Thomson Newspapers, who directed the British program in the 1990s.
“We brought the best of what we had done and added a North American feel,” Jennings says. Thomson plans a program in August 1999, and three programs per year starting in 2000. Recruiting will start in a few months in each newspaper’s own circulation area.
The initiative raises the longstanding argument over whether journalism schools should be trade schools or should provide a broader perspective of how the world operates. Eric Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of Illinois, calls the Thomson training course a dangerous move because journalism shouldn’t be about technical training. “We believe you must know something about the world before you begin reporting about it,” he says. “We want [journalism students] to take political science, meteorology, [and] biology to give them a broad understanding about what the issues really are. … If you don’t do that, you run a serious risk of simply transcribing notes.”
Thomson’s Jennings says Meyer is absolutely right. “Journalists need a broad-based education,” he says. But Jennings doesn’t think academic journalism programs are always the right answer.
Meyer believes the move is only designed to save Thomson money. “They very often look for the least expensive solution,” he says. “If they can hire 100 reporters at $15,000 per year instead of $25,000, they are saving a lot of money.
I was aware of one “graduate” of the Thomson School of “Journalism,” a person who made my life difficult at a later employer by blocking (or so I thought) coverage of my employer in the newspaper he worked for because (we believed) he had been asked to leave my employer. He denied that was the case, but once he left, magically the newspaper started covering my employer much more.
I predicted in Marketplace that Thomson would end up buying out Gannett’s Wisconsin newspapers because it didn’t make sense for Gannett to own just two newspapers in the state. I was correct, though I got the buyer and seller confused. In 2000, Gannett ended up buying all of the Thomson newspapers when Thomson decided to get out of newspapering.
In between my stints at Journal, Journal made the decision to sell its stock privately, in order to grow. That ended up, as you know, with the ultimate death of Journal, when Journal and Scripps “merged,” with Scripps controlling Journal’s former broadcast properties and, one year later, Gannett buying Journal’s remaining print properties. Change is not necessarily positive change.
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Lawrence W. Reed writes:
Last Sunday, at a height of 35,000 feet, I was reading the generally anticapitalist but profit-seeking New York Times while speeding from Salt Lake City to Atlanta at 400 miles per hour in a giant, metallic, winged tube whose precursor was invented by two profit-seeking bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio (on their own nickel, by the way).
I peruse the Times mainly for the obituaries. Even that paper will sometimes offer a kind word about a capitalist once he’s been taxed good and hard or is gone altogether. That’s where I learned of the death from Alzheimer’s disease of Richard K. Ransom, founder of Hickory Farms, on April 11, 2016. He was 96.
The obit explained that not long after returning from fighting for his country in the Pacific theater of World War II, a young Ransom was tired of driving a vegetable truck around rural Ohio for his parents’ wholesale produce business. So he started selling hand-cut cheeses at flower shows and boat shows. Soon he added summer sausage, then expanded to county fairs around the Midwest.… By the time he sold it in 1980, Hickory Farms was a $164-million-dollar-a-year specialty food business, with outlets in every state but Mississippi.
One of the pioneering features of his stores was the free sample. Lots of them. Free cheese. Free sausage. Free crackers. Imagine that: giving free food to people whether they actually became customers or not. But of course, an awful lot of them did, because they liked what he offered.
Ransom appears to have lived a good and full life: active in community affairs and philanthropy; married to the same woman for 63 years; a son and 3 daughters; 9 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren; a leader on the boards of local banks, a private school, and the Toledo Zoo; and a fundraiser for children’s charities ever since he witnessed the suffering of children on the island of Okinawa, Japan.
An April 13 story in Toledo’s daily newspaper, the Blade, quoted a longtime associate’s summation of him: “He had really good basic values — honesty, integrity. He could relate to people and could make great friends that would last.”
I never had the pleasure of meeting Ransom, but as I read his obit, I thought to myself:
Here’s a man who built a fine enterprise from scratch. It brought employment and goods and services to a great many people. It was successful enough during his tenure that it surely put him in what some would disdain as “the 1 percent” of income earners, though his personal wealth was an insignificant fraction of what he created and a small price to pay for the risks he took. He and his company paid millions in taxes over the years, much of which was squandered by politicians and bureaucracies. Then he founded a wonderful charity that locates families who will adopt children in foster care. He was a generous, long-time donor to Assistance Dogs of America as well.
And yet there’s a ubiquitous barbarian mindset afoot that wants us to view people like Ransom with suspicion and disgust so we can feel good about demagogues who will “protect” us from them. This barbarianism typically makes no distinction between creators who make their fortunes the honest way on their own and the far smaller number who use their political connections to do it. We’re to punish them all and empower the noncreators in government to buy votes with the fruits of their life’s work. Something in history, economics, and basic morality tells me that this evil way of thinking cannot end well, and never, ever has.
I’m reminded of the words of Tacitus some 2,000 years ago: “When men of talents are punished, authority is strengthened.”
By what twisted principle of justice do we sneer at successful people like Ransom? Did the wealth he created — including the relatively small portion he enjoyed himself — make someone else poorer? Would the rest of us have gotten as much out of him if, instead of a life in business, he had pursued the life of a reclusive hermit or a cloistered monk or even that of a tenured, socialist academic?
It seems obvious to me that Ransom baked a bigger pie; he didn’t simply claim a larger slice for himself. He gave the world far more than he took. He didn’t think he was entitled to much, other than the freedom to peacefully put his talents and ideas to work for others as well as himself. I have known a great many such people. In fact, I shun the ones who (unlike Ransom) sully the reputation of capitalism with their very uncapitalist seeking of favors from government. They don’t donate to groups like FEE, I might add, and I’m proud they don’t.
Inebriated with never-ending anger and victimhood, so-called progressives and democratic socialists can’t bring themselves to single out a Richard K. Ransom and praise his accomplishments, let alone the profit motive that played an important role in them. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has built a national campaign around denigrating success. He says, “We are living in a world where greed has become for the wealthiest people their own religion, and they make no apologies for it.”
Not some of the wealthiest, but all of the wealthiest, by virtue of their wealth itself, are irretrievably “greedy” according to Sanders’s flippant declaration. Their greed is nothing less than a “religion,” he pontificates. And, of course, allof them must be taxed more, so people like Bernie can buy votes with their money. He’s telling you, whether he’ll admit it or not, that wealth must be punished because it’s not his or yours. It’s theirs.
In any other walk of life but the dirty business of politics, demonizing an entire class of people with such sweeping verdicts would be dismissed as the meanest, most superficial bigotry. We would see through the demagogue’s flimsy logic. We would immediately think of the many exceptions we personally know. If someone stupidly, offensively proclaimed that all people of a particular viewpoint are bad and must be punished, decent people would rise to the defense of those of that perspective whom they know to be good and undeserving of retribution. We would condemn the demagogue for his carelessness, for his cruelty, and for his ignorance.
But in wide swaths of today’s America, this antisocial behavior turns out huge, cheering throngs to beg for more.
In a genuinely free, capitalist economy, rich people don’t cause poor people. Five hundred or a thousand years ago, the gap between rich and poor was immense and intractable. Mobility from one income level to another was minimal. Most people were economically frozen in place because the rich enjoyed the one thing that ensured and enforced that deep freeze — political power. Not until that power was diminished by ideas that blossomed in the Enlightenment were the enterprising Richard K. Ransoms of the world able to work their magic.
When I hear the class-warfare nonsense of the wealth-destroying Bernies of the world, I feel as though I need a good, hot shower. The millions of hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs that Bernie and his friends lump with the few bad eggs don’t deserve such treatment.
RIP, Richard K. Ransom. No one ordered you to, but you did so much to lift people up. You created the wealth that the barbarians in our midst only talk about, steal, and squander. By every measure, you were so much better than they are.
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It is time for our annual observance (more like Roman Catholic martyred-saint days, certainly not a celebration) of Tax Freedom Day, described by the Tax Foundation as …
… the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year. Tax Freedom Day takes all federal, state, and local taxes and divides them by the nation’s income. In 2016, Americans will pay $3.34 trillion in federal taxes and $1.64 trillion in state and local taxes, for a total tax bill of $4.99 trillion, or 31 percent of national income. This year, Tax Freedom Day falls on April 24th, or 114 days into the year (excluding Leap Day).
But it’s not April 24 for those of us in Wisconsin:
The total tax burden borne by residents of different states varies considerably due to differing state tax policies and the progressivity of the federal tax system. This means a combination of higher-income and higher-tax states celebrate Tax Freedom Day later: Connecticut (May 21), New Jersey (May 12), and New York (May 11). Residents of Mississippi will bear the lowest average tax burden in 2016, with Tax Freedom Day arriving for them on April 5. Also early are Tennessee (April 6) and Louisiana (April 7).
Of course, Wisconsin isn’t a “higher-income” state, though we certainly are a “higher-tax” state, and have always been, as the maps show:
It does make you wonder, however, why we must be sentenced to taxes in the highest quarter of U.S. states when (1) our government services are not to the level of our taxes and never have been, and (2) we are not a wealthy state and never have been, and given our punitive taxes never will be. (Remember: Every corrupt politician, every stupid idea coming from government, and every misstep by government, are all something you’re funding with your taxes.)
Measured another way, we’re still paying for government after today:
Since 2002, federal expenses have surpassed federal revenues, with the budget deficit exceeding $1 trillion annually from 2009 to 2012. In calendar year 2016, the deficit will grow significantly, from $592 billion to $698 billion. If we include this annual federal borrowing, which represents future taxes owed, Tax Freedom Day would occur on May 10, 16 days later. The latest ever deficit-inclusive Tax Freedom Day occurred during World War II on May 25, 1945.
Measured any way, this is ridiculous:
Proof that there is less difference than you might believe between Democrats and Republicans is that the state Legislature, controlled by Republicans as the result of the past three elections, has failed to push forward a Taxpayer Bill of Rights to enact strict constitutional controls on spending and taxes. This is despite the fact that state and local government is literally twice the size it should be, as measured by growth in population and inflation. TABOR is vital in order to prevent future legislators — and someday the Democrats will control the Legislature — from spending more money than we overburdened taxpayers have. We voters are supposed to vote for Republicans because they’re the fiscally responsible party, which is like voting for the GOP because it favors gun rights and Democrats don’t. “Rights,” properly defined, should not be up to one party to defend; rights are protection of citizens from government, which is why government must be permanently limited from spending taxpayer money.
We won’t even discuss a federal balanced budget here, since we’re not writing about fantasy.
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Thomas C. Reed starts with this hard-to-argue premise:
Republicans, contemplating an avalanche of Donald-detonated losses in the fall, dream of a savior emerging from the Cleveland convention. Some seeJohn Kasich as a possible redeemer. But the nomination of a man, however good, who won only his home state would be anathema to the Trumpistas and Cruziacs.
The sight of House Speaker Paul Ryan parachuting across the Cuyahoga River would draw a rabid response from the zealots gathered below. “See, there’s the proof. The system is rigged!”
How about handing the parachute to a military hero? A political outsider, but a proven leader; a man or woman who can reach out to all Americans, who can stiffen the collective spines of our allies in this time of troubles.
Isn’t it time for another Eisenhower?
After leading the World War II crusade in Europe, Ike returned to the U.S., eventually to serve as president of Columbia University. He only entered the political arena in June 1952 at the urging of Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R., Mass.) and Lodge’s Texas allies. Those men saw Ike as a counter to the isolationist voices urging America’s withdrawal from the world stage. In November ’52, five months after entering the political arena, Eisenhower won the presidency in a landslide.
It’s time for a farsighted handful of men and women, like those who recruited Ike, to stand up and be counted. The Eisenhower Brigade—a group of policy advisers, convention activists and financiers—must coalesce into a force to be reckoned with at the Republican convention.
They need not focus on a name, a candidate, until after the California primary on June 7. The campaign to nominate Ike kicked into gear only a month before the 1952 Republican convention.
Who might merit the support of this Eisenhower Brigade?
Some have suggested James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former commander of U.S. Central Command, the forces deployed throughout the Middle East. Mr. Mattis devised America’s counterinsurgency concepts. His troops respected him, his intellect and his 7,000-volume library.
Another military option the Eisenhower Brigade should consider: Stanley McChrystal,the retired U.S. Army general who, as commander of the Special Operations Command, nailed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Mr. McChrystal’s unflattering remarks to a journalist about Vice President Biden in 2010 got him fired as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan—but that would be to his credit in the presidential race. Mr. McChrystal now enjoys academic status as a member of the Yale faculty.
My candidate would be retired U.S. Navy Adm. William McRaven, former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, the folks who got Osama bin Laden.
Two years ago, Mr. McRaven retired from the Special Forces Command (70,000 troops, airmen and sailors), and in January 2015 he assumed new duties as chancellor of the University of Texas—a remarkable parallel to the Eisenhower trajectory. His commencement speech to the UT class of 2014 drew wide attention and was adapted inthese pages as “Life Lessons From Navy SEAL Training.”
A deadlocked convention turning to a military hero would allow the Trumpistas to proclaim victory: “We won. We beat the establishment.” And if Democrats nominate an untrusted woman awaiting her FBI moment, the result could be an Eisenhower-scale landslide.
The Hudson Institute’s Rebecca Heinrichs touts Mattis:
We are just months away from the Republican National Convention, and neither Donald Trump nor Sen. Ted Cruz are likely to have the necessary 1,237 delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot. This means a dark horse candidate is a possibility. Given the complexity of the security environment and years of seemingly aimless warfighting, it is critical we have a national security candidate, preferably one who is an “outsider.” Several are eminently qualified, and among them one stands high above the rest: General James “Mad Dog” Mattis.
Among his higher-profile military achievements during more than four decades in the Marine Corps, Mattis led the successful 2003 charge in Baghdad and beat back insurgent attacks in Fallujah. Although his war-fighting prowess is enough to give him notoriety, he is most famous for his tough, colorful talk and his willingness to say unpopular things.
He once said to a recently surrendered group of Iraqi generals, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you ‘fool’ with me, I’ll kill you all.” In a speech dubbed “Dispelling the PTSD Myth,” Mattis challenged, “There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.” Few people could get away with a comment like that, but few people have enough credibility with veterans as Mattis.
His most recent command was head of U.S. Central Command where he did as well as any person could humanly do at implementing the strategies and operations as laid out (or as completely absent, as the case may be) by the civilian leaders in Washington. He did this all while pushing for greater clarity of mission and for full support to execute it.
He also sought to provoke his civilian bosses to think about how their decisions would cause second- and third-order consequences. For a perfect sampling of his teaching style and concerns, take a look at his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rather than giving the standard “this is how we are achieving the president’s strategy” story, he told the senators which question they should ask. A few of the questions included:
Is political Islam in our best interest? If not, what is our policy to support the countervailing forces? In light of worldwide challenges to the international order we are nonetheless shrinking our military. Are we adjusting our strategy and taking into account a reduced role for that shrunken military?
Unsurprisingly, in an administration unfriendly towards dissenters, the general’s questions, style, and objections earned him early retirement with little fanfare.
This is not the first time someone has suggested the warrior-poet-sage run for the highest office. He has had a fan following in the Marine Corps for years and others have already promoted the idea of his candidacy. But it has always seemed impossible, until in a recent interview with the Daily Caller, Mattis, although clearly not excited about the idea, did not rule out the possibility of a run (so you’re saying there’s a chance!). With renewed hope, here are four basic reasons Mattis would make a timely, excellent president.
1. He Understands and Loves America
Anyone who has spent time with him will tell you that Mattis, although an extraordinarily outstanding man among impressive men, is humble. He does not consider himself better than his subordinates or better than the political class that makes modern warfighting so difficult.
There is nothing pretentious or elitist about him, and we can be confident he will not be remarking about the high prices of arugula.
He also seems to understand, at the most basic level, how and why the Constitution is the way it is. A man like Mattis, of strong will and clear ideas about how things ought to happen, willfully subordinated himself to his civilian leaders and explained that his duty was to be heard, not obeyed.
In an interview with Peter Robinson on “Uncommon Knowledge,” he explained the challenge of working with political leaders and how he understood his role in implementing America’s military aims. He said his job was and continues to be to try to give his best military advice without creating animosity with the political leaders, because, as he said, it is all “[p]art of maintaining a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It needs military defenders but at the same time it does not exist for a military purpose.”
2. He Possesses Moral Clarity
President Obama’s tepid warfighting, his (and Hillary Clinton’s) inability to even utter the name of our foes, let alone their motives, his emotionless responses after horrific acts of terror, and his satisfaction with loserdom against a winnable foe have left a bulk of the American citizenry yearning for a strong leader who is unwilling to lose.
This is the appeal of Donald Trump, of course. But Trump has leadership all wrong. Yes, Trump wants to win, but besides the fact that he has no idea how to do that, his style, tone, and instincts, including his full defense of targeting women and children, turn manliness on its head. What is the point of fighting if the targets are the very things good men find worthy of defending?
Enter Mattis, a man who, when talking about the wickedness of militant Islamists, and his “sorry not sorry” attitude about snuffing them out, frequently describes their mistreatment and brutalization of women.
You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. (2005)
Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible. We may not want this fight, but the barbarity of an enemy that kills women and children and has refused to break with al-Qaeda needs to be fought. (January 2015)
Having dealt with this enemy since 1979… we are up against an enemy that means what they say and we should not patronize them. When they say ‘girls don’t go to school’ you’re not going to talk them out of it… their views of the role of women, their views of modernity, their views of tolerance for people who think differently are fundamentally different than ours. (March 2015)
Here are the opening remarks of a speech he delivered: “Ladies, the wonderful ladies who exemplify grace & courage, who represent our better angels and what we fight for” (March 2014).
At a time when our country is seriously adrift regarding eadership and lacking in moral clarity, a President Mattis will give us a much-needed recalibration.
3. He Will Win
General Mattis knows how to win. He knows what is necessary to achieve military objectives, and therefore military victories. He knows how to identify the problem, and rout the enemy so it no longer wants to fight Americans. He understands what many in the political class do not: military battles are not merely fought with weapons; they are also a contest of wills. Or, as he said, “In my line of work, the enemy gets a vote.”
He understands the psychological and ideological side of warfare far better than the political classes in both the Bush and Obama administrations. For example, as a recently retired general, he testified before the Congress and said, “Specifically, if this threat to our nation is determined to be as significant as I believe it is, we may not wish to reassure our enemies in advance that they will not see American ‘boots on the ground’…If a brigade of our paratroopers or a battalion landing team of our Marines would strengthen our allies at a key juncture and create havoc/humiliation for our adversaries, then we should do what is necessary with our forces that exist for that very purpose.”
Catch that? Strengthen our allies and humiliate our adversaries. These objectives seem to have been underappreciated during the Bush years and inversely pursued during the Obama years.
Winning takes guts and sacrifice, but according to Mattis, current threats can be defeated. The real challenge is in identifying which adversaries warrant the threat of or the full force of American military might. Or, as Mattis asks, what does America want to do and what is it willing to tolerate? These questions aren’t easy for any commander in chief. But Mattis knows as well as anyone can what the U.S. military can achieve, and whose destruction is worth precious American blood and treasure.
4. He Is a Perpetual Student of History and People
Like Trump and Cruz, Mattis is not a successful professional politician, and that would be appealing to people; but unlike Trump, who is decidedly incurious, Mattis has a voracious appetite for reading, learning, and applying the lessons he learns. An administration run by a man like this suggests two departures from what we’ve witnessed from the Obama administration.
One, Mattis would look at things as they are and always have been, rather than as he wishes them to be or hopes to make them. Two, unlike President Obama, who seems to be in a constant state of surprise, Mattis cannot be surprised.
When asked why he always carried with him a copy of “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” among other books, he explained, “It was good for me to be reminded that I faced nothing new under the sun… the bottom line is the fundamental impulses, the fundamental challenges, and the solutions are pretty timeless in my line of work.”
The great challenge for America is that men like Mattis don’t want to run for political office. And who could blame them? Between the demagoguery, brutal and slanted media coverage, and the kinds of base discourse that makes for good TV, it looks like a miserable undertaking. As Ben Boychuk recently penned, “We need a candidate like Mattis this year of all years. But we don’t deserve him.”
But as Schramm said after his evening with the general, “One claim he made left us skeptical. [Mattis] spoke of his upcoming retirement, telling us how keen he was to go back to Walla Walla, Washington, and relax for the rest of his days…Later that evening [my friend] Mac remarked how foolish it would be for such a fine man, such a ‘master of war,’ to be retired. Surely in times like these there was more work for such a man to do.”
Well, we truly might not deserve him, but in times like these there is more work for such a fine man to do. I hope this master of war serves our messy, wonderful country just one last time.
No one knows what kind of campaigner Mattis, or someone else on this list, might be. No one can say with any certainty what any of these candidates’ positions on issues, including non-military issues, might be. No one therefore knows what kind of a president one of these retired military might be. But could Mattis be any worse than Trump? Could Mattis be any less popular among non-partisan voters than Trump or Cruz?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 