Pelosi Admires Mattis—Now She Tells Us Politicians are known to be inconsistent, but they’re not always this transparent about it. By Michael Taube
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosi-admires-mattisnow-she-tells-us-11545868973
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was full of praise last week for departing Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “I’m shaken by the news because of the patriot that Secretary Mattis is,” the once and future speaker said at a Dec. 20 press conference, “for what it means to our country, for the message it sends to our troops, and for the indication of what his view is of the commander in chief.”
On Twitter , Mrs. Pelosi added: “General Mattis was a comfort to many who were concerned about the path the Trump Admin would choose to take. His resignation letter is defined by statements of principle—principles that drove him to leave the Administration.”
But if Mr. Mattis’s resignation leaves Mrs. Pelosi shaken, his career doesn’t seem to have stirred her much in the first place. I searched through Google, government documents and her political website for the period 2010-18—which includes then-Gen. Mattis’s tenure as head of U.S. Central Command before his removal by President Obama in 2013. Mrs. Pelosi seems to have had nary a kind word to say about him before last week.
When President-elect Trump nominated him, her prepared statement of Dec. 2, 2016, was decidedly cool: “As Secretary of Defense, General Mattis will have the immense responsibility of improving President Trump’s judgement as Commander-in-Chief,” she said. “We are grateful that the President-elect reportedly found General Mattis’ argument against torture persuasive.”
At a press conference five days later, she said she’d vote for a legislative waiver of the law that prohibits a veteran from leading the Pentagon less than seven years after leaving the military—the first such waiver since George Marshall in 1950. “This is not Gen. Marshall,” she said of Mr. Mattis. “But compared to some of the other people [Mr. Trump] could put forth, you have to make a judgment.”
I emailed Mrs. Pelosi’s chief of staff, Daniel Weiss, to ask if I’d missed anything. He didn’t reply.
This isn’t the first time Mrs. Pelosi has changed her tune dramatically about a public figure. In 2014, after it emerged that economist Jonathan Gruber had attributed ObamaCare’s enactment to “the stupidity of the American voter,” she said: “I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill.”
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