Posted on 09/14/2018 11:39:26 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
Bill McRaven, former chancellor of the University of Texas System and a current UT-Austin professor, resigned on Aug. 20 from the Pentagon’s technology advisory board, multiple news outlets reported Thursday.
His resignation came four days after The Washington Post published an opinion piece he wrote that criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan.
“Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation,” McRaven wrote. “If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken.”
The board McRaven resigned from was a group of technology leaders and innovators tasked with advising the secretary of defense.
McRaven, a retired four-star admiral and Navy SEAL, teaches classes at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. He majored in journalism at UT.
That’s cool, I can get behind that. What’s baffling to me: I can’t square that up with the same guy who is now actually advocating abuse of a government position and misuse of classified information. Sometimes these guys have a brilliant career, are doing all the right things, and then something just happens to them. I don’t get it.
It’s like Chuck Hagel. In the early-80s to mid-90s, he was a co-founder, president, and CEO of a company that made him a multi-millionaire. Everything points to him having a lot on the ball, not just another idiot rich kid that was thrown a figurehead position in one of dad’s companies. He came a LONG way from the kid born in North Platte, Nebraska and worked at the local radio station. He wasn’t born into wealth and privilege like a little Al Gore, he wasn’t 5th generation Harvard like most people that attain high govt. office.
But then I see him at his confirmation hearing for SecDef looking disheveled and not sure where he’s even at. Before the hearing even started, I asked my wife, “Did this guy show up drunk?” And his stammering and hem-hawing through the questions didn’t help. Apperently congress would’ve confirmed Daffy Duck that day for that post. He never got any better. In every public appearance, he just looked and acted like he wasn’t all there. What kind of idiot gets publicly blamed for all the nation’s foreign policy problems, get publicly fired for it, then agrees to stay in the job for another 6 months until a replacement is found? I would’ve left skid marks getting out of there as soon as it left the boss’s pie-hole that I was fired. It’s baffling (at least to me).
The University of Texas system obviously sucks
He went straight from college to an exemplary military career and then into academia. Has never been in the private sector.
Happened to George McGovern who tried to run a hotel after he left office and was shocked at the bureaucracy he had to deal with and went bankrupt.
Nope - most of them are as tragically wrong as Rachel Carson ....
LOL!!
“You’ve gotta be shitting Joker. You’re not a writer, you’re a killer!”
He probably used the George Costanza defense when his Pentagon boss asked him “What the F*** were you thinking?!?!” I can picture McRaven saying to him, “Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? Hey, if somebody had specifically told me that working for a defense contractor and publicly ripping on the very TOP govt. boss was a bad idea, I certainly would NOT have done that!”
Yeah, genius, it’s kinda like being on the corporate board of a large parts vendor for Ford and writing an editorial in a large nationwide newspaper ripping on the president of Ford Motor Company. That doesn’t do much for your career, chief. You’d think that a guy that had a very successful military career and a very political job at a large university would’ve picked up this little tidbit of knowledge along the way. In military terms, it’s like being a squadron CO and writing an editorial that slams the Chief of Naval Operations. MORON!!
What a drama queen idiot.
That may be...but he still is a pathetic loser.
For high ranking officers, the Bronze Star and Legion of Merit are attendance awards.
Yep. The Air Force gives out Bronze Stars to air traffic controllers routinely. Not to disparage the job but what the hell are they doing that is so heroic? I’m betting it’s a way to retain guys in a field that’s hard to keep people.
One has to wonder why a journalism major, SEAL or not, would be chosen to sit on an “innovation board.”
That’s how these guys roll. In a 30-year military career for Admirals/Generals, 15 of those years is spent prancing around Washington and Europe in do-nothing Admiral/General slots, wearing a pretty uniform, living in a house that’s more like a hotel with a full staff, and flying around the world in a Lear-type jet staying at the nicest hotel in town wherever they go. 90% of them are ROD (retired-on-duty, they just mill around smartly and do busy-work). Military Admirals and Generals are ridiculously overmanned, there’s more Admirals than ships and more Army Generals than rifle companies in Europe. The Air Force has more Generals than aircraft squadrons.
After 15 years getting paid 6 figures (it more like a million a year with all the perks, look at what it costs for one single flight in their personal Lear-jet), they slide into retirement and then get right back on the sugar-tit as a contractor, where they’re paid double what they made active duty. The system is set up that way, it’s a total crock. If McRaven is making this kind of screwup, it’s been a LONG time since he’s done any kind of meaningful work or answered to any kind of actual boss.
(I ran across this reply after somebody replied to me on this old thread.)
That right there explains a lot, it really does. I think a lot of people high up in government and military forget that they have an army of people under them performing all of their basic functions and all they have to do is show up everyday and tweak the steering of the dreadnought a bit. They get an attitude, “I’m running the entire Pacific Fleet myself, what’s wrong with these rubes that can’t do their taxes and financial disclosure forms?” More often than not, a big part of the staff’s job is to correct the boss’s screwups and get things back on track without even telling him, so he and his boss think he’s Mr. Perfect and actually he’s screwing it up all over the place.
My dad owned a restaurant until he was in his upper 30s, then cashed out for the sake of his sanity. Not literally, but he got sick of just about living there. When he got a job where he worked 48 hours/week and shouldered 1/1000th of the responsibility of the operation, he felt like every day was a vacation. At the restaurant, every day except Sunday he was there from 7 AM until 10 PM. When I’m channel surfing and I see a person on the Food Network saying wistfully with stars in their eyes, “My dream is to run a restaurant,” boy are they deluded. They think they know something because they’ve been a prep cook for 2 years, reality will hit them HARD. They think they’re going to be a celebrity-chef, the next Emeril, and make millions to have fun being a little Julia Childs. That’s the life of the 0.000001%. Most of them wind up like my dad, working 90+ hours/week just to keep their nose an inch above the water. In the end, you’d be doing just as well financially to work two jobs, Target and WalMart. That would be even better, you’re working the same hours but you’re not carrying the ultimate responsibility of he entire operation, you’re not getting the 3 AM phone call because some drunk ran into the building or you’ve gotta figure out what to do when your idiot prep cook chopped up an entire prime rib to make hamburgers (whoops, that really happened with my dad’s restaurant).
My long-winded point is: I’m not the slightest bit surprised that George McGovern tried to run his own operation and his plane fireballed in. He didn’t have his congressional staff there to do all the grunt-work, most people don’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone.
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