Preach It: ‘People That Are Smart Know The War In Iraq Was A Disaster’

Bush, Donald Trump, Iran, Media

Pompous CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS ANCHOR, imagined he’d still get the upper hand with a post-South Carolina Donald Trump, but ended up changing the subject … quite a bit.

WALLACE: To the larger point, I mean, whether it was lying or whether it was the mandate — particular now that there’s going to be more and more focus on everything you say, do you think you have to be more careful?

TRUMP: …The case of the war — the war in Iraq was a disaster. By the way, I was against it at the beginning. And Joe Scarborough can show you do that because fortunately he found a clip. But the fact that I said they a successful military operation, maybe it might have been successful as an opening operation, but I was opposed to the war. The war in Iraq was a disaster, OK? It may have been the worst decision ever made, ever made in the country. OK? That’s how bad it was.

WALLACE: But, sir, respectfully — I mean, that wasn’t the issue. The issue is whether or not we were lied into war. I don’t necessarily —

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Well, right now that’s for other people to term — I don’t say yes or no. I’m not saying yes or no. I’m saying let somebody else determine. …

… Look, the war in Iraq was a disaster. The reason I won by such a large number is that while the pundits, including yourself, thought I made a mistake when I took on Bush on that issue — and I have nothing against Bush. I don’t even know the president. I never met him.

But when I took on Bush on that issue, I never felt it was a bad thing to do because people that are smart know that the war in Iraq was a disaster. And even Jeb Bush in the end admit that the war in Iraq was not a good thing.

WALLACE: New question, new subject.

MORE.

REQUIRED READING:

“RATIONALIZE WITH LIES”
“WHAT WMD?”
“AXIS OF ILLOGIC”
“BLAME BUSH, NOT THE JEWS, FOR IRAQ”
“BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE”
“IRAQ LIARS & DENIERS: WE KNEW THEN WHAT WE KNOW NOW”
“Why So Many Americans Don’t Support Attacking Iraq”

Smash The Spoils System, Baby: South Carolina Brings It

Donald Trump, Elections, Private Property, Republicans

The menagerie of morons that is American media—these crooked, scripted, bought-and-paid-for insiders—are finally, but not quite, grasping Donald’s appeal to average folks. The gaffes and impolitic statements are the hallmark of a man who tells the truth as he see it, without dressing it up in the raiment of politically enforced propriety. Most ordinary people would do the same if they’d live to tell the tale:

Via The New York Times’ Frank Bruni:

… people voting for [Trump] aren’t evaluating him through any usual ideological lens. They’re not asking what kind of Republican he is. They’re not troubling themselves with whether the position he’s selling today matches the position he was selling yesterday or even what that old position was.

They want to try something utterly different—utterly disruptive, to use the locution du jour—and that leaves them, on the Republican side, with the options of Trump and Ben Carson. Trump has the fire.

Who said so in June in “A Candidate To ‘Kick The Crap Out Of All The Politicians’”? (Watch this space for my forthcoming book.)

… Trump didn’t just win South Carolina, and he didn’t just win it by a margin of 10 points. He won it despite what looked, over recent days, like a concerted effort to lose it. He won it after what appeared to be one of the worst weeks that a candidate could have.

It began at the most recent debate, where he trashed the last Republican president, George W. Bush, and accused him of lying to the American people as he led them into war in Iraq. He sounded like a liberal Democrat. Republican primary voters, especially those in the South, aren’t typically receptive to that.

Over the next days, Trump sounded even more like a liberal Democrat, at least as described by Ted Cruz, who went after him relentlessly, armed with Trump’s own past statements in support of abortion rights and Planned Parenthood. [We libertarians are accused of so sounding, too, because we know you cannot compel free individuals not to do certain things with their private property—their bodies—however, you can defund a thing that ought not to be funded in the first place, because there is no constitutional warrant for it.]

The week got messier from there. Trump picked a fight with the Pope. Trump picked a fight with Apple. It became evident that no personage or brand, no matter how beloved, was safe from his wrath.

TWEETS

The Russell Kirk We love Is …

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, War

… the Russel Kirk who, “Toward the end of his life, … returned to his anti-war beginnings. He went so far as to say that ‘not a single American war … had been absolutely necessary.’ He denounced the neoconservatives as warmongers; and he had no use for National Review. ‘Kirk came to believe that Buckley had sold out to the neocons, claiming in a private letter to [Peter] Stanlis, ‘As Patrick Buchanan remarks, National Review is now the New York office of the New World Order.’”

David Gordon is always streaks ahead of the rest of us mortals. Read David’s review of Russell Kirk: American Conservative, by Bradley J. Birzer (University Press of Kentucky).

I will say that I knew, from my edition of The Conservative Mind, “that Kirk in the 1940s was himself a libertarian, or close to it.” And that: “… he strongly opposed America’s war policy, in particular the use of atomic weapons and the internment of Japanese Americans.”

I didn’t, however, know that Kirk “corresponded with both Albert Jay Nock and Isabel Paterson, both renowned libertarians. Indeed, he favorably discussed them in the first edition of The Conservative Mind.”

Best tidbit from David’s review:

Buckley was a former CIA agent, and the principal point of the [NR] magazine was to reorient the American Right from a noninterventionist foreign policy toward a militant pursuit of the Cold War against Russia and to purge those who dissented from militarism and war. Four of the editors, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Frank S. Meyer, and Willi Schlamm, favored preventive war against Russia. Kendall and Burnham were also former CIA agents; and the late great George Resch told me that Henry Regnery, Kirk’s publisher, called National Review a CIA operation.

READ “The Real Russell Kirk” by David Gordon.

Janice Rogers Brown: The Justice Obama (And Bush) Bypassed

Conservatism, Constitution, Justice, Law, The Courts

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Whoever interviewed the terribly nice Ben Carson the other day went blank (and quickly moved on) when Dr. Carson answered a question about his possible pick for the Supreme Court. (The ignorance jibes with Megyn Kelly, but I can’t be sure.) The good doctor’s pick was a good one: Janice Rogers Brown.

In 2009 (May 26), Judge Brown was “Barely A Blog’s Pick For The Supreme Court,” when we were faced with the choice of clodhopper Sonia Sotomayor (George Bush’s picks were as catastrophic. Remember the goofy Harriet Myers?). I wrote:

Who said the following: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract”?

Answer: Justice Janice Rogers Brown, the black, conservative judge George Bush had also passed-up on nominating for the SCOTUS. (Yes, the Republicans’ new-found fidelity for the Constitution should always be laughed out of court.)

This is just one of Brown’s many just utterances. At the time, President Bush’s lickspittles came close to conceding that he, too, considered Rogers Brown “outside the mainstream,” to use the Democrats’ line.

Janice Brown quotes Thucydides, F.A. Hayek, and Burke. That’s so white male, so yesterday; so wrong.