Dangers to the Republic!

“Those who think that they alone have the right answers, those who demonize those who think differently, and those who refuse to listen and take other points of view into account—these leaders, in my view, are a danger to the American people and to the future of our republic.”

Sounds like one of those crackpot conspiracy emails that circulate daily...


Don Rumsfeld?

Glenn Beck?

Sarah Palin?

That crazy uncle from Alabama who just cant quite accept... you know, the way things are?

RUSSSSSH?

.....

Try Secretary of Defense and former DCIA, Robert Gates for size...

In the tradition of great military leaders before him, like George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary Gates exercised that utmost difficult element of leadership - moral courage - and called it as he sees it. MIL INT will miss Robert Gates. Like other moderate Republicans like Colin Powell, Secretary Gates leaves his party with an important challenge - aim for reality TV/infotainment ratings, or govern.
Secretary Gates, MIL INT salutes your service to a grateful nation and wishes you and your patient family the very best.

Full credit to Checkpoint Washington on this one - the full text is below.

Add former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to the list of retired top officials who see the current American political scene as dysfunctional and dangerous.
“As a result of several long-building, polarizing trends in American politics and culture, we have lost the ability to execute even the basic functions of government, much less solve the most difficult and divisive problems facing the country,” Gates said last week at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia where he received that group’s Liberty Medal.
He cited two causes worth considering.
The first was redistricting of congressional seats which, he said, created safe Republican and Democratic seats but led to party primaries “where candidates must cater to the most hard-core ideological elements of their base.” He wondered how this could be changed to “ensure that more candidates for Congress are forced to appeal to independents, centrists, and at least some members of the other political party to win election, just as presidential candidates must do?”
He also cited the role of an evolving news media. He looked longingly to decades past when three television networks and a handful of major newspapers dominated national coverage and “to a considerable degree, filtered extreme or vitriolic points of view.”
Today, he said, “hundreds of cable channels, blogs and other electronic media” have given wide dissemination to “every point of view, including the most extreme.” The result, according to Gates, though more democratic, “has fueled the coarsening and, I believe, the dumbing down of the national political dialogue.”
He described these two trends, along with some other factors, as polarizing the country at a time when the need is for “more bipartisanship, and more compromise to deal with our most serious problems.”
Citing his time working for eight presidents of both parties over more than 40 years, Gates said, none “had a monopoly on revealed truth.”
And without naming any of today’s leaders or presidential candidates, he warned: “Those who think that they alone have the right answers, those who demonize those who think differently, and those who refuse to listen and take other points of view into account—these leaders, in my view, are a danger to the American people and to the future of our republic.”