Tag: iraq

Trump tells Jeb Bush that GW Bush lied us into war. Audience of Republicans applauds!

It is a bad state of affairs when the Republican party’s best candidate is also the one virtually guaranteed to lose if he ever won the nomination. The awesome thing about Trump is that he is sticking it to the Republicans on their absolute worst issue in decades and he’s doing it in a way that doesn’t humiliate them for it. Democrats have a nasty way of smearing anyone who disagrees with them, while Trump is exhibiting exactly the right way to do something like this and attack the power structure, not the follower, in cases where appropriate.

“Obviously the war in Iraq was a BIG. FAT. MISTAKE.” – Donald Trump / majority of Americans, including Republicans.

First – notice the bias in this video by CBS on how they chose a thumbnail in where Jeb is smiling and Trump is frowning when the actual video shows an upbeat Trump absolutely demolishing Jeb. It’s not a photoshop or anything – Trump and Bush both made those expressions – it just isn’t a thumbnail that summarizes the content well at all. Take a look –

This is an amazing point in history because everything he said feels true – a majority agrees with it – but its kindov actually *not* true – but for the most part *is* true.

And that is the problem with Donald Trump… he opens himself – in a very GW Bush kind of way, coincidentally – to unfair attacks and smears on himself and his policies by begin factual on a subject but not entirely accurate on a specific word choice within that bubble. That gives enemies an opportunity to attack and not be non-factual when they mislead the public with an attack.

Specifically: The “Buh lied” trope has never been proven and doesn’t have strong evidence to support it. All accounts show that Bush and his top administration officials actually did – and had reasonable reason to – believe that they would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To an extent, they did find such weapons – but never the most scary that they claimed were likely being worked on or hoarded in the country. That lack of validation to their claims plus the objectively bad management of the war has made a clear “wasn’t worth it” label on the effort. It cost billions, slaughtered thousands of innocents, and hurt America. So Trump starts 100% right with saying it was a mistake and then veers off into iffy territory by saying Bush knew he was lying the whole time.

That’s the biggest problem here and with this guy in general: Trump, used the Democrat talking point that Bush “lied” us into war. Which is wrong, but not wrong in the way that matters, because its “basically” right… meaning – it’s directionally right, just not specifically accurate in the exact words used. And that appears to be Donald Trumps whole thing. Probably due to his background in real estate and Hollywood showmanship – he speaks far too casually and that is both his appeal and likely his downfall. He’ll say shit like “we had a beautiful time, it was tremendous – beautiful – absolutely stunning – and then after – we went out, we got some ice cream – it was a beautiful time” and lying liars will call him a liar because he actually got frozen yogurt, not ice cream. (*this is a made-up quote & scenario to illustrate the point, btw. we all know Trump would never get frozen yogurt and is 100% an ice cream man).

Imagine Donald Trump actually won the nomination (lol) and that he somehow won the election (like, if Hillary was caught on video or audio exhibiting all those stories about how nasty and mean she allegedly is to staff behind the scenes, for instance) – the media and his hack enemies would have a Scrooge McDuck moneybin’s wealth of fodder to lie about alleging “Trump lied” for saying things – exactly like this – that are “basically true” but require clarification. When other politicians do this, its called misspeaking, being imprecise, or in this case – just having one wrong opinion stated among 4 other facts about the subject. Doesn’t matter. Republicans need to wise up and learn the game or they will get crushed.

In this situation, however, Republican critics don’t know what to do because they want to hate Trump, but… he agrees with them on the most important issue of the past 18 years… The GW Bush led Iraq war was a bad move. Bush deserves blame at least, impeachment as a moderate compromise, and prosecution for war crimes at most. Trump takes the moderate position here amidst a larger anti-war stance and no one knows what to do.

Except Republicans that is. They like it. Republicans and independent Bush voters on whole never liked the war garbage. It was always a stain that had to constantly be defended and was never articulated well by the administration. That’s why Trump is getting support.. he is literally more liberal in all the best ways – in this case, being more anti-war – than his democrat opponent.

It’s an amazing thing to see. But a dangerous view of where it could lead.

Remember when Bill Clinton thought Iraq’s WMD was a big deal?

Ya… Didn’t think you did. Because you’re more interested in scoring political points than knowing basic bullet points of recent history and American foreign policy.

I’m only indignant because it’s been years of this history revision as if Iraq was a total invention by the current President as being an issue at all when the not-so-distant history is that Iraq has always been on the radar as a looming threat that requires more action than just containment and hoping things go well.

Dude, come on though. It’s been years of this. I used to balk at the “liberal media” cries but the mass cover of how the President directly preceding this one was using the exact same foreign policy based on the exact same national security advice of both his administration, his friends and even his not-so-friends – while attacking that same strategy by a different president of the non-liberal party is kindov an argument ender.

It’s fine to criticize any policy decision, but why does the left rely on such manipulation and distortion to make their emotional appeals? It’s unnecessary. There is plenty of legit criticisms to be made about the war on terror and Iraq as a battlefield in it. Why is literally anyone anywhere still peddling the “Bush lied, people died” nonsense? And why is there not a concerted effort among all mainstream publications to just inform the public and THEN editorialize on what is good or bad or a mix of the two?

Every intelligence agency in the world including those who didn’t support the Iraq invasion like France, the KGB, but also the Mossad, German intelligence – everyone looking into the subject concluded Iraq was probably illegally harboring deadly weapons with the ability to destroy on a mass scale.

If you want to argue that after having 3 thousand innocent civilians murdered on our soil by groups in the Middle East, THAT was the time to all of a sudden drop our foreign policy from the previous administrations regarding a different Middle Eastern enemy then do it. Have the guts to do it.

Don’t be a coward and lie about lies that were never lied about.

Bush administration is royally screwing up Iraq…

Well I’ll tehll yu whut – G. Dubya is gonna turn me into a stinking hippie real quick if he can’t (read: won’t) find a better team of managers to make his bumbling in Iraq not be a stain on his legacy that essentially reads “everything they said about him being a dumbass war loving tool was correct”…

Democrats lied about the “Bush lied” sloganeering for months to try and defeat him in an election just to replace him with an exactly-as-aggressive foreign policy platform (just under a goofier, impossibly less-charismatic candidate with a somehow even more scummier slippery politician as VP than Darth Cheney) – but that doesn’t mean Bush and his administration ever had this thing under control or would do a good job.

At this point, 2 years after invading, an objective analysis can only read that he’s doing a bad job. and he’s not showing any sign of changing strategy…

WTF tho? (in this case, “Why” the fkk?)

Just because Democrats were dishonest and wrong in their talking points against the war (after they were for it at first, and then slowly started to be for it again after the election in all the key pockets that actually matter like spending and voting on troop deployment) doesn’t mean Dubya knows what he’s doing. Deciphering what the administrations plan is exactly is getting more and more shady.

Bush’s argument for why we can’t leave Iraq is that that would invite more of our enemies to flood in and take over. Well… yea, that’s likely true, but… well take this quote from CNN about it:

During a speech billed by the White House as a major policy address, Bush said if U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq, insurgents would “use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against nonradical Muslim governments.”

Critics have charged that the Iraq war has become a breeding ground for terror, while opinion polls suggest that U.S. public support for the war has been waning since spring.

It’s not just “critics charging” that the Iraq war has become a breeding ground for terror… it is verifiably doing exactly that… and that’s what makes it a tough issue to decode. Because on the one hand, the Democrats are just incoherent liars in claiming that the war in Iraq that the overwhelming majority of them supported for years before 9/11, then after 9/11, then when Congress voted on it, then afterward, –then not anymore but in words only while continuing to give it all their political support. But on the other hand – the initial success in the invasion that a coalition of nations agreed was a necessary action to take is being quickly overshadowed by what appears to just be a lack of competency. Idk if that is Bush’s fault or just Governments fault in being bad at basically any and every big undertaking it uses force to implement whether it is confiscatory tax policies, government expansion of power domestically, or the removal and attempted replacement of a dictatorial regime in the middle east. But something is not right and if the administration doesn’t get it right soon then they will just validate all the hippies who claimed there was no plan and no exit strategy.

Those hippies will still be liars about the other claims, but all it takes is to be right about the main aspect of a thing for the public and for history to review it as having been right about the whole thing all together.

So we will see if things improve and whose policies get the credit for it, but if American troops keep coming home in body bags just to “stabilize and rebuild this hornets nest we knocked down” over in the sands of a country most people couldn’t find on a map – Bush’s second term and entire legacy will be one of the worst in modern history. The “try him for war crimes” bumper sticker started out as nonsense, but through doubling down on something that isn’t going well at the cost of American blood and treasure every day, he is making that nonsense a reality.

Get your sh**t together Dubya & Co…