Timex
5728
Ya know? Obama’s foreign policy was… Not good. I understand that this may not make folks here happy to hear, but the fact that Bush’s was bad, doesn’t make Obama’s good. It wasn’t good.
Remember when Obama and the Democrats laughed at Romney for calling out Russia as one of our greatest international threats? Calling ISIS the JV team?
Trump is clearly orders of magnitude worse and more incompetent, but Obama wasn’t actually GOOD when it came to foreign policy. Which isn’t to say he did nothing got. The iran deal was a success. But a lot of bad shit went down while the US was largely withdrawing in response to it’s over extension under Bush.
Mattis is criticizing Obama, but Obama isn’t in office. That’s a big difference.
He was pretty harsh about both;
To be fair, his critiques of Obama were pretty specific and not exactly unforeseen; Mattis was pissed Obama didn’t more strongly enforce the “red line” with Assad, felt that it was wrong for Obama to outright call for Mubarak to step down (preferring softer measures to accomplish the goal), thought more action should have been taken against Iran for its assassination attempt of a Saudi diplomat in the US and shooting down a drone, and also thought it was foolish to pull troops out in 2011 because of the power vacuum it would create. I actually agree with much of that criticism (although not all).
With Trump, he basically called him a disrespectful and foolish for how he treated allies and basically did an ELI5 on how Trump shouldn’t allow Russia and China dictate the future of US foreign policy.
Nobody needs someone like DJT for anything.
Maybe the U.S. can declare bankruptcy, or get a loan from Dad.
That’s why he tried to defraud them with bogus blood testing technology.
(Mattis can never fail, he can only be failed.)
Or maybe the U.S. can steal dad’s money while he’s on his death bed. Whatevs.
For America it was astoundingly good. For all the misteps (which honestly every administration has had a bunch like that) Obama put together a workable and coherent strategy agianst isis that the american people could get behind and brought Iran back into the international community and on a path to peaceful coexistence. Temporarily anyway.
Timex
5735
No. It was not.
ISIS didn’t exist prior Obama. It rose up under his watch, and he discounted them as irrelevant at first.
Oh is this going to be “if only the US had stayed in Iraq” argument? Thanks Obama.
Timex
5737
Oh, so we are only considering the beneficial results of his actions.
Then yeah, Obama was great.
I mean he could have stayed in Iraq by violating Iraqi sovereignty…
I think you have to be pretty blinded by the desire to score points off Mattis (and/or Timex) to claim that he was responsible for Theranos.
If members of the board aren’t responsible for what companies do, who is?
Timex
5741
The theranos conspiracy theory about how Mattis was secretly trying to defraud the government is a good one.
The people who are actually committing the fraud?
More to the point of your accusation, he had no connection with Theranos - beyond being suckered into believing they had a real product, as many others were - while serving in the military, or while Theranos was pursuing a military contract. He joined the board after he’d retired, and after the proposed military contract had long since died.
That he “tried to defraud” the military is a straightforward lie. Dunno if it’s your lie, or just one you prefer to believe.
That’s a charitable view of the events IMO. While still serving, he was an advocate of Theranos within the military. Based on what, exactly? And after leaving the military, he joined the board. Why, exactly?
The entire enterprise was a fraud. If the board is not responsible in a situation like this, then there is never any case where a board is responsible for any company. And that’s an absurd outcome.
From https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup-ebook/dp/B07BW911F7/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Bad+blood&qid=1572118004&sr=8-1
The idea of using Theranos devices on the battlefield had germinated the previous August when Elizabeth [Holmes] had met James Mattis, head of the U.S. Central Command, at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco. Elizabeth’s impromptu pitch about how her novel way of testing blood from just a finger prick could help diagnose and treat wounded soldiers faster, and potentially save lives, had found a receptive audience in the four-star general. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis was fiercely protective of his troops, which made him one of the most popular commanders in the U.S. military. The hard-charging general was open to pursuing any technology that might keep his men safer as they fought the Taliban in the interminable, atrocity-marred war in Afghanistan. After meeting Elizabeth, he’d asked subordinates at CENTCOM to set up a live field test of the Theranos device.
(The project died once the army medical service discovered Theranos didn’t have FDA approval)
His motivations don’t have to be any more complicated than a concern for the well-being of his troops and the conviction that here was a technology that might benefit them.
Legally I wouldn’t know. Ethically I think a board is responsible for the decisions it actually makes. I don’t think it makes sense to hold someone who’s been lied to responsible for the actions of the people who did the lying.
A Marine combat veteran no less. Unbelievable. I guess he might have gotten a pass if he hadn’t been a slacker and gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor. /s
Theranos was trying to sell their technology to the DOD. The DOD, however, balked because there was no FDA approval. So Theranos’ CEO made a request to Mattis to intervene, and he tried to intervene.
Previously, in mid-2012, a Department of Defense official evaluating Theranos’s blood-testing technology for the military initiated a formal inquiry with the Food and Drug Administration about the company’s intent to distribute its tests without FDA clearance. In August 2012 Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes asked Mattis, who had expressed interest in testing Theranos’s technology in combat areas, to help. Within hours, Mattis forwarded his email exchange with Holmes to military officials, asking “how do we overcome this new obstacle”. In July 2013 the Department of Defense gave Mattis permission to join Theranos’s board provided he did not represent Theranos with regard to the blood-testing device and its potential acquisition by the Departments of the Navy or Defense.[82]
He tries to intervene, then retires and joins the board of the company. He sits on the board for 4 years while supposedly never realizing that the entire company is based on a fraud. Either he’s stupid, or he’s cashing in.
Mattis can never fail. He can only be failed.
