Which just goes to show that O hasn't yet purged all the perceptive servicemen and servicewomen from the ranks:
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said says he doesn't regret anything he wrote in his controversial new book and calls the memoir "an honest account."
And in an interview Sunday with CBS News, he offered perhaps his harshest yet criticism of President Obama's wartime leadership: that he didn't reach out to American troops and make them believe he supported their sacrifice.
"You say about President Obama that as much as you admired him on so many levels, he never really had a passion for pursuing the war in Afghanistan, and that kind of bothered you," CBS News correspondent Rita Braver asked Gates.
The emphasized phrase is why I haven't posted anything about the rollout of Gates' memoir. Anybody who professes to admire anything about Barack Obama is completely forfeits any credibility to say....well, pretty much anything about anything and be taken the slightest bit seriously, much less comment on anything to do with President Redlines.
"It's one thing to tell the troops that you support them. It's another to work at making them believe that you believe as president that their sacrifice is worth it, that the cause is just, that what they are doing was important for the country, and that they must succeed," said Gates.
"President (George W. ) Bush did that with the troops when I was Secretary. I did not see President Obama do that," he said. "As I write in the book, it was this absence of passion, this absence of a conviction of the importance of success that disturbed me."
Gates had to serve as SecDef for over three years under Generalissimo Dumbo to figure this out? I guess that explains why he was dimwitted enough to do so. And I hope that the proprietor of this site never features Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War as a Book Of The Week.
There is a particular turn of phrase that, I think, nails Gates' problem:
"So why was I so angry all the time? Why did I want to leave all the time? . . . It's just because getting anything done in Washington was so damnably hard," he said.
Lawmakers in Congress were "uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic Constitutional responsibilities, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical . . . too often putting self and reelection before country."
Sounds an awful lot like "country before party," doesn't it? Sound familiar?
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