lo yeeOn
2016-09-30 02:10:40 UTC
"Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than
politicians of our day." (Walinsky from his thoughtful essay)
And Walinsky certainly included Obama and Hillary in the group who are
the "politicians of our day".
This post is intended to be a refutation to jdeluise_and_cohorts'
follow-ups earlier regarding Trump and the Iraq war.
jdeluise <***@gmail.com> wrote in message:
If anything, Trump expressed that he didn't know or care about the
Iraq invasion when on Stern's show. But support it he did...
Additionally, saying Trump's rhetoric is "non-interventionist" is a
complete fabrication.
Citing the 2002 Stern show to support one's assertion that Trump is or
was a supporter for the Iraq War is grasping at straws.
James Taranto addressed this huge distortion
:
Lately the "fact checkers" have been waging a campaign to portray
Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war,
contrary to his assertions that he was an opponent.
[NBC News' Lester Holt and his ilk chose the Stern show as the basis
of their assertion.]
Yet, Taranto pointed out that Trump was on record as having opposed to
the war in late 2003, as Neil Cavuto who interviewed Trump at the time
has recently pointed out. Furthermore,
Five years later, according to PolitiFact.com, Trump was calling for
President Bush's impeachment because, as he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer,
"he got us into the war with lies."
And if that isn't enough an anti-war stand, we can look to this year's
South Carolina primary, a state he needed to win to take Jeb Bush out
(and win the GOP nomination) and a state which was widely seen as
pro-George W Bush and pro-Iraq war. So, it wasn't without huge
political risks to Trump that he chose to make the Iraq war his
campaign issue in that crucial GOP state.
As I said, if one cannot repent having made a wrong judgment call even
though one has made repeated attempts to right the wrong since, what
then is there more to discuss?
Now to claim Trump's by-now well-established "non-interventionist"
rhetoric as "a complete fabrication" must be viewed as below any
person who has a degree of honesty under his skin.
For the latest, as I have cited before, Adam Walinsky has this to say:
Here it is. John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest
commitments and energies to the prevention of war and the
preservation of peace. To them that was not an abstract formula but
the necessary foundation of human life. But today's Democrats have
become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries,
academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention,
promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the
natural resources of corrupt governments.
We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now
American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a
remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized
countries. Generals and admirals announce our national policies.
Theater commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer
to trouble or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military
movement or action.
. . .
Commit to our own domestic peace and security, rather than persist
in a vain effort to control the lives and affairs of 200 foreign
nations.
This, as I understand it, is the platform of Donald Trump. It was
not the Republican Party platform, and he had to overcome much
opposition within his party to gain the nomination. But it is his
platform. It is the platform he has restated again and again, with
determination, and with the courage and persistence to outlast his
critics. It is a platform that, even in these troubled days, could
fulfill the hopes of the greatest Americans of all parties.
Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than
politicians of our day. Most important, he offers a path away from
constant war, a path of businesslike accommodation with all
reasonable people and nations, concentrating our forces and efforts
against the true enemies of civilization. Thus, to dwell on his
faults and errors is to evade the great questions of war and peace,
life and death for our people and our country. You and I will have
to compensate for his deficits of civility, in return for peace, we
may hope as Lincoln hoped, among ourselves and with all nations.
So, I'm really curious about the fuss from some of you, especially
those who have claimed to be "progressives" and "opponents" of the
Iraq war all these years but would not accept Trump's position about
it, in his latest capacity as a maverick politician who is leading the
Republican electorate in this crucial election cycle, questioning the
Iraq war and by extension other interventionist wars, for the good of
the world as well as the American people at home.
lo yeeOn
--------
1) I was RFK's speechwriter and I'm Voting for Trump. Here's Why.
The Democratic Party has become something both JFK and RFK would
deplore - the party of war.
By Adam Walinsky September 21, 2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/rfk-trump-2016-democratic-party-speechwriter-214270
I was a Democrat all my life. I came to Washington to serve President
John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the president
was murdered and his brother struck off on his own, I joined his
Senate campaign and staff as his legislative assistant and
speechwriter, until his presidential campaign ended with his own
assassination. I ran on a (losing) Democratic ticket in the New York
state elections of 1970. When I was working to enact my own program of
police reform in the 1980s and 1990s, then-Governor Bill Clinton was
chairman of my National Committee for the Police Corps.
This year, I will vote to elect Donald Trump as president of the
United States.
So profound a change, and a decent respect for old friendships,
requires me to deliver a public accounting for this decision.
Here it is. John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest commitments
and energies to the prevention of war and the preservation of peace.
To them that was not an abstract formula but the necessary foundation
of human life. But today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a
home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists
for every foreign intervention, promoters of color revolutions, failed
generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments.
We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now
American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a
remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized countries.
Generals and admirals announce our national policies. Theater
commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer to trouble
or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military movement or
action.
Nor has the Democratic Party candidate for president this year,
Hillary Clinton, sought peace. Instead she has pushed America into
successive invasions, successive efforts at "regime change". She has
sought to prevent Americans from seeking friendship or cooperation
with President Vladimir Putin of Russia by characterizing him another
as "Hitler". She proclaims herself ready to invade Syria immediately
after taking the oath of office. Her shadow War Cabinet brims with the
architects of war and disaster for the past decades, the neocons who
led us to our present pass, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya,
Yemen, in Ukraine, unrepentant of all past errors, ready to resume it
all with fresh trillions and fresh blood. And the Democrats she leads
seem intent on worsening relations with Russia, for example by sending
American warships into the Black Sea, or by introducing nuclear
weapons ever closer to Russia itself.
In fact, in all the years of the so-called War on Terror, only one
potential American president has had the intelligence, the vision, the
sheer sanity to see that America cannot fight the entire world at
once; who sees that America's natural and necessary allies in this
fight must include the advanced and civilized nations that are most
exposed and experienced in their own terror wars, and have the
requisite military power and willingness to use it. Only one American
candidate has pointed out how senseless it is to seek confrontation
with Russia and China, at the same time that we are trying to suppress
the very jihadist movements that they also are attacking.
That candidate is Donald Trump. Throughout this campaign, he has said
that as president, he would quickly sit down with President Putin and
seek relaxation of tensions between our nations, and possible
collaboration in the fight against terrorists. On this ground alone,
he marks himself as greatly superior to all his competitors, earlier
in the primaries and now in the general election.
. . .
The legacy of JFK & RFK is "being abandoned by today's Democratic
Party".
Theirs is the legacy that is being abandoned by today's Democratic
Party. We have broken one Middle Eastern nation after another.
Hundreds of cities and villages lie in ruins, hundreds of thousands
are dead, millions are refugees; and, for all the press and political
thundering against the menace of ISIS, Al Qaeda, or Islamic terrorism
generally, our military leaders offer no prospects of victory. They
cannot tell us what victory would require or mean; though they are
quick to assure us, as in Libya today, that this conflict will go on
indefinitely. They cannot even explain how some of our current allies
(example Turkey) are bombing and shelling others of our purported
allies (example the Kurds). So a Democratic administration, carrying
on the work of the Bush presidency, without thought and without
question, year after year, has kept sending more young men and women
into the grinder.
***Tulsi Gabbard***
Scores of Democratic elected officials once spoke and worked
tirelessly to end our disastrous war in Vietnam. Today there is only
the voice of the marvelous Democratic member of Congress Tulsi
Gabbard, a reservist who has twice deployed to Iraq and knows of what
she speaks. And it is a Democratic president who sends an endless
parade of drones to nations all over the world, flaunting for all to
see America's unique military technology, coupled with our seeming
complete carelessness in how that technological prowess destroys
people and nations.
Most amazing of all, however, is that as we proclaim that the
terrorists threaten Europe, threaten the United States, threaten
Western civilization itself - as we face all this, we do not
concentrate our military might against this unique threat.
Where are we sending our warriors, our ships, our planes? Why to
Russia, which the U.S. general who commands NATO has announced is the
prime "existential" threat to America. As you read this, ground, air
and naval forces of NATO, led and largely paid for by the United
States, have been moving about the Western borders of Russia, carrying
out the largest military maneuvers since World War II. At the same
time, our most powerful carriers and naval air forces have been
steaming about the South China Sea, there perhaps to find encounters
of unknowable potential with the rising forces of China, our second
said to be "existential" enemy.
There are no Russian terrorists ravaging France or Italy or America.
ISIS is not to be found on Russian soil. The only Russian terrorists
who have attacked the West are the Islamists whom President Putin
first asked us to join in the fight against in 1999. The only Chinese
terrorists are Uighurs who are attacking not us but China itself. It
would seem elementary common sense that America would have long since
sought, not to fight with Russia and China, but to cooperate with both
to suppress the terrorists and the terrorism that have plagued us for
over a generation, including the ISIS that is terrorizing Europe
today.
. . . False hopes and vain promises of victory have burnt up the
caches of idealism and patriotic commitment with which we began the
wars a generation ago.
. . . But, ominously, there is more to come, more that already stares
us in the face. The dire events of this summer have shown us the true
danger that lurks here at home. This is not a danger imported from
Syria or Iraq or Russia. Our greatest menace is the danger of our own
history, our inheritance to the latest day.
For the fact is that while we chased a chimera of peace and justice in
lands far from our own, imposing ourselves and our concepts on
strangers who rejected our teachings, we were neglecting our own
country and our own people, our own neighbors, our own children and
our own friends. And now we can see the result. The violence we took
to other countries bounces back to our own. The money we squandered on
bombs in Iraq was not available for our own schools. The brilliant
young men and women, who gave up their bodies and their lives on
distant battlefields, were not here to teach and mentor and guide the
young people of the ghetto. They were not here to police the mean
streets, to suppress and eliminate the crime that is the greatest
cause of poverty. They were not here to bring the protection and the
blessings of the American Constitution to the least among us. They
were not here to protect American cities and enrich American lives.
And they were not here to keep Americans and American children from
murdering American police officers. This is our true present danger.
. . .
So my hope for America is this. First, we must begin immediately to
end our involvement in endless, unnecessary and therefore murderous
wars. We need our best young people to help us here at home. We need
to stop the reckless military spending on more destructive
armaments. We need to breathe free again.
. . .
Second, we must at the same time begin to recover our domestic
peace. There are many ills to be cured, many shortcomings to be
righted.
But nothing can be accomplished in the midst of a war against police,
an insurrection against the Constitution itself. Our clear priority is
reinforcement of our police and police departments. We need many more
and better police. We need them to be better trained, not as warriors
but as shepherds, as leaders and teachers of the young, as peacemakers
in communities that have not known real peace for many years. We need
our very best young people, not getting their legs blown off by IEDs
in Afghanistan, but saving all of our lives in St. Louis and Chicago
and Detroit and Baton Rouge and all the other wasted places in our own
land.
Donald Trump has been mocked mercilessly for saying, "America first".
But to demand that all the actions of government, at home or abroad,
be first directed at the interests and well-being of our own country
is not old-fashioned or outmoded. Rather it represents the deepest
wisdom and tradition of American statesmen from the founders on. Only
with a clear vision of what is truly in the interests of our nation
and our fellow citizens, and a full commitment to those interests, can
we act wisely at home and in the world beyond.
. . .
Commit to our own domestic peace and security, rather than persist in
a vain effort to control the lives and affairs of 200 foreign nations.
This, as I understand it, is the platform of Donald Trump. It was not
the Republican Party platform, and he had to overcome much opposition
within his party to gain the nomination. But it is his platform. It is
the platform he has restated again and again, with determination, and
with the courage and persistence to outlast his critics. It is a
platform that, even in these troubled days, could fulfill the hopes of
the greatest Americans of all parties.
Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than
politicians of our day. Most important, he offers a path away from
constant war, a path of businesslike accommodation with all reasonable
people and nations, concentrating our forces and efforts against the
true enemies of civilization. Thus, to dwell on his faults and errors
is to evade the great questions of war and peace, life and death for
our people and our country. You and I will have to compensate for his
deficits of civility, in return for peace, we may hope as Lincoln
hoped, among ourselves and with all nations.
Truly, America first, last and always; for ourselves and for our
posterity. These are the reasons why I will vote for Donald Trump for
president.
Adam Walinsky worked in the Department of Justice during the Kennedy
administration and later served as legislative assistant and
speechwriter to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
2) http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-iraq-1475077154
By James Taranto
Sept. 28, 2016 11:39 a.m. ET
844 COMMENTS
This column has long argued that the journalistic genre known as "fact
checking" is a corruption of journalism. "The `fact check' is opinion
journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news," we wrote in
2008. "The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a
judgment."
Eight years later, we'd amend that slightly. "Fact checking" doesn't
pretend to be straight news exactly, but something more authoritative.
The conceit of the "fact checker" is that he has some sort of
heightened level of objectivity qualifying him to render verdicts in
matters of public controversy.
Lately the "fact checkers" have been waging a campaign to portray
Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war, contrary
to his assertions that he was an opponent. In Monday's debate, Hillary
Clinton pleaded for their help: "I hope the fact checkers are turning
up the volume and really working hard. Donald supported the invasion
of Iraq." Moderator Lester Holt obliged, basing a question to Trump
on the premise that the matter was settled: "You supported the war in
Iraq before the invasion."
Trump somewhat inarticulately rebutted the claim: "The record shows
that I'm right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very
lightly, the first time anybody's asked me that, I said, very lightly,
I don't know, maybe, who knows."
What Trump actually said on Sept. 11, 2002, when Stern asked him if he
favored an invasion, was: "Yeah, I guess so." That was an affirmative
statement, but a highly equivocal one. Is it fair or accurate to
characterize it as sufficient to establish that Trump was a
"supporter"? In our opinion, no. He might well have had second
thoughts immediately after getting off the air with Stern.
He certainly had second thoughts in the ensuing months, and he came to
oppose the invasion long before Mrs. Clinton did. Even FactCheck.org
was unable to come up with any other Trump statement supportive of the
decision to go to war. By December 2003, according to the site's
timeline, Trump was observing (in an interview with Fox News Channel's
Neil Cavuto) that "a lot of people" were "questioning the whole
concept of going in, in the first place".
Five years later, according to PolitiFact.com, Trump was calling for
President Bush's impeachment because, as he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer,
"he got us into the war with lies."
Trump repeated that last claim in a February debate in South Carolina
(in the transcript at the link, the second Trump quote is erroneously
attributed to moderator John Dickerson):
Trump: George [W.] Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But
that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have
destabilized the Middle East.
Dickerson: But so I'm going to - so you still think he should be
impeached?
Jeb Bush: I think it's my turn, isn't it?
Trump: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I
want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass
destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There
were no weapons of mass destruction.
When Trump said that, it shocked many conservative commentators and
intellectuals, including the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last:
Nine months ago, if you had asked Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Jerry
Falwell Jr., or Ann Coulter whether they would endorse a figure who
takes the Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of Iraq ("Bush
lied, people died"), one suspects they all would have recoiled at
the prospect. Yet in the hours after Trump insisted that George W.
Bush intentionally lied the country into war, not one of the major
figures who have endorsed him was willing to contradict his claim.
. . .
One needn't be an admirer of George W. Bush, or a believer in his
freedom agenda, or even a supporter of the Iraq war to understand
how pernicious this is. Whatever your views on the wisdom of Iraq,
no serious person believes that Bush masterminded a massive fraud,
with the help of his cabinet and the entire national security
apparatus; that his "lies" then managed to fool the governments and
intelligence agencies of a dozen allies; and that, somehow, none of
the evidence of this scheme ever managed to leak into the open.
[End Jonathan Last Quote]
Which leads to an obvious question: Where were the "fact checkers" in
February, when Trump made that patently false claim? The only related
"fact check" we could find was one from FactCheck.org, rebutting
Trump's denial, a month later, that he had said what he said: "I
didn't say lie. I said he may have lied. I don't know." It was a
rare example of a "fact check" that simply checked a fact.
A funny thing happened after the South Carolina debate: Trump won the
state's primary and went on to win the nomination. The Republican
electorate did not see Trump's opposition to the Iraq war, or even his
endorsement of the "Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of
Iraq", as disqualifying.
"[Trump] secured the Republican nomination against a field of 16
candidates described last summer by George F. Will as `the most
impressive since 1980, and perhaps the most talent-rich since the
party first had a presidential nominee, in 1856,'" notes William
Voegeli in the Claremont Review of Books:
How did Trump achieve this? One crucial difference from all those
competitors is that he could deplore the Middle East policies of
both Presidents Bush and Obama as "a tremendous disservice" and a
"disaster". No other GOP candidate possessed so much leeway to
denounce the war in Iraq, the most recent Republican president
"signature ideas", as the New York Times' Ross Douthat termed it. At
the other end of the spectrum of 17 candidates, Jeb Bush's campaign
never recovered from making a terrible first impression: the 12
years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom had, apparently,
been too little time for him to form an opinion as to whether,
knowing what we do now, his brother's decision to invade that
country had been a good idea.
It's not hard to see why Republican voters might have been more
attracted by Trump's repudiation of the Iraq war than repelled by the
bumptious and scurrilous way in which he expressed it. That conflict
turned out to be a strategic disaster for the U.S., in part (as Trump
has noted) because of Obama's decision to withdraw all troops in 2011.
It also turned out to be a political disaster for the GOP. After
re-electing George W. Bush, voters turned against the war. They also
turned against the Republican Party, handing control of Congress to
the Democrats in 2006 and the White House to an antiwar Democrat two
years later, after he defeated the still pro-war Mrs. Clinton for the
party's nomination.
The Iraq war helped make ObamaCare, and much else that is anathema to
GOP voters, possible. Trump offered Republicans an opportunity to move
beyond the Iraq mistake. Under the pretense of "fact checking",
journalists now are furiously attempting to scuttle that opportunity.
Worst Appeals to Authority
"Dan Rather: Hillary Clinton `Calm and Substantive' in first debate"
- headline, USA Today, Sept. 27
since 2015.
Well that's a sorry excuse...
And it's obviously relevant now that he is running for POTUS and
claiming that he was against the war when he was a private citizen, and
is criticizing those who were for the war.
politicians of our day." (Walinsky from his thoughtful essay)
And Walinsky certainly included Obama and Hillary in the group who are
the "politicians of our day".
This post is intended to be a refutation to jdeluise_and_cohorts'
follow-ups earlier regarding Trump and the Iraq war.
jdeluise <***@gmail.com> wrote in message:
If anything, Trump expressed that he didn't know or care about the
Iraq invasion when on Stern's show. But support it he did...
Additionally, saying Trump's rhetoric is "non-interventionist" is a
complete fabrication.
Citing the 2002 Stern show to support one's assertion that Trump is or
was a supporter for the Iraq War is grasping at straws.
James Taranto addressed this huge distortion
:
Lately the "fact checkers" have been waging a campaign to portray
Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war,
contrary to his assertions that he was an opponent.
[NBC News' Lester Holt and his ilk chose the Stern show as the basis
of their assertion.]
Yet, Taranto pointed out that Trump was on record as having opposed to
the war in late 2003, as Neil Cavuto who interviewed Trump at the time
has recently pointed out. Furthermore,
Five years later, according to PolitiFact.com, Trump was calling for
President Bush's impeachment because, as he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer,
"he got us into the war with lies."
And if that isn't enough an anti-war stand, we can look to this year's
South Carolina primary, a state he needed to win to take Jeb Bush out
(and win the GOP nomination) and a state which was widely seen as
pro-George W Bush and pro-Iraq war. So, it wasn't without huge
political risks to Trump that he chose to make the Iraq war his
campaign issue in that crucial GOP state.
As I said, if one cannot repent having made a wrong judgment call even
though one has made repeated attempts to right the wrong since, what
then is there more to discuss?
Now to claim Trump's by-now well-established "non-interventionist"
rhetoric as "a complete fabrication" must be viewed as below any
person who has a degree of honesty under his skin.
For the latest, as I have cited before, Adam Walinsky has this to say:
Here it is. John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest
commitments and energies to the prevention of war and the
preservation of peace. To them that was not an abstract formula but
the necessary foundation of human life. But today's Democrats have
become the Party of War: a home for arms merchants, mercenaries,
academic war planners, lobbyists for every foreign intervention,
promoters of color revolutions, failed generals, exploiters of the
natural resources of corrupt governments.
We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now
American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a
remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized
countries. Generals and admirals announce our national policies.
Theater commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer
to trouble or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military
movement or action.
. . .
Commit to our own domestic peace and security, rather than persist
in a vain effort to control the lives and affairs of 200 foreign
nations.
This, as I understand it, is the platform of Donald Trump. It was
not the Republican Party platform, and he had to overcome much
opposition within his party to gain the nomination. But it is his
platform. It is the platform he has restated again and again, with
determination, and with the courage and persistence to outlast his
critics. It is a platform that, even in these troubled days, could
fulfill the hopes of the greatest Americans of all parties.
Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than
politicians of our day. Most important, he offers a path away from
constant war, a path of businesslike accommodation with all
reasonable people and nations, concentrating our forces and efforts
against the true enemies of civilization. Thus, to dwell on his
faults and errors is to evade the great questions of war and peace,
life and death for our people and our country. You and I will have
to compensate for his deficits of civility, in return for peace, we
may hope as Lincoln hoped, among ourselves and with all nations.
So, I'm really curious about the fuss from some of you, especially
those who have claimed to be "progressives" and "opponents" of the
Iraq war all these years but would not accept Trump's position about
it, in his latest capacity as a maverick politician who is leading the
Republican electorate in this crucial election cycle, questioning the
Iraq war and by extension other interventionist wars, for the good of
the world as well as the American people at home.
lo yeeOn
--------
1) I was RFK's speechwriter and I'm Voting for Trump. Here's Why.
The Democratic Party has become something both JFK and RFK would
deplore - the party of war.
By Adam Walinsky September 21, 2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/rfk-trump-2016-democratic-party-speechwriter-214270
I was a Democrat all my life. I came to Washington to serve President
John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the president
was murdered and his brother struck off on his own, I joined his
Senate campaign and staff as his legislative assistant and
speechwriter, until his presidential campaign ended with his own
assassination. I ran on a (losing) Democratic ticket in the New York
state elections of 1970. When I was working to enact my own program of
police reform in the 1980s and 1990s, then-Governor Bill Clinton was
chairman of my National Committee for the Police Corps.
This year, I will vote to elect Donald Trump as president of the
United States.
So profound a change, and a decent respect for old friendships,
requires me to deliver a public accounting for this decision.
Here it is. John and Robert Kennedy devoted their greatest commitments
and energies to the prevention of war and the preservation of peace.
To them that was not an abstract formula but the necessary foundation
of human life. But today's Democrats have become the Party of War: a
home for arms merchants, mercenaries, academic war planners, lobbyists
for every foreign intervention, promoters of color revolutions, failed
generals, exploiters of the natural resources of corrupt governments.
We have American military bases in 80 countries, and there are now
American military personnel on the ground in about 130 countries, a
remarkable achievement since there are only 192 recognized countries.
Generals and admirals announce our national policies. Theater
commanders are our principal ambassadors. Our first answer to trouble
or opposition of any kind seems always to be a military movement or
action.
Nor has the Democratic Party candidate for president this year,
Hillary Clinton, sought peace. Instead she has pushed America into
successive invasions, successive efforts at "regime change". She has
sought to prevent Americans from seeking friendship or cooperation
with President Vladimir Putin of Russia by characterizing him another
as "Hitler". She proclaims herself ready to invade Syria immediately
after taking the oath of office. Her shadow War Cabinet brims with the
architects of war and disaster for the past decades, the neocons who
led us to our present pass, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya,
Yemen, in Ukraine, unrepentant of all past errors, ready to resume it
all with fresh trillions and fresh blood. And the Democrats she leads
seem intent on worsening relations with Russia, for example by sending
American warships into the Black Sea, or by introducing nuclear
weapons ever closer to Russia itself.
In fact, in all the years of the so-called War on Terror, only one
potential American president has had the intelligence, the vision, the
sheer sanity to see that America cannot fight the entire world at
once; who sees that America's natural and necessary allies in this
fight must include the advanced and civilized nations that are most
exposed and experienced in their own terror wars, and have the
requisite military power and willingness to use it. Only one American
candidate has pointed out how senseless it is to seek confrontation
with Russia and China, at the same time that we are trying to suppress
the very jihadist movements that they also are attacking.
That candidate is Donald Trump. Throughout this campaign, he has said
that as president, he would quickly sit down with President Putin and
seek relaxation of tensions between our nations, and possible
collaboration in the fight against terrorists. On this ground alone,
he marks himself as greatly superior to all his competitors, earlier
in the primaries and now in the general election.
. . .
The legacy of JFK & RFK is "being abandoned by today's Democratic
Party".
Theirs is the legacy that is being abandoned by today's Democratic
Party. We have broken one Middle Eastern nation after another.
Hundreds of cities and villages lie in ruins, hundreds of thousands
are dead, millions are refugees; and, for all the press and political
thundering against the menace of ISIS, Al Qaeda, or Islamic terrorism
generally, our military leaders offer no prospects of victory. They
cannot tell us what victory would require or mean; though they are
quick to assure us, as in Libya today, that this conflict will go on
indefinitely. They cannot even explain how some of our current allies
(example Turkey) are bombing and shelling others of our purported
allies (example the Kurds). So a Democratic administration, carrying
on the work of the Bush presidency, without thought and without
question, year after year, has kept sending more young men and women
into the grinder.
***Tulsi Gabbard***
Scores of Democratic elected officials once spoke and worked
tirelessly to end our disastrous war in Vietnam. Today there is only
the voice of the marvelous Democratic member of Congress Tulsi
Gabbard, a reservist who has twice deployed to Iraq and knows of what
she speaks. And it is a Democratic president who sends an endless
parade of drones to nations all over the world, flaunting for all to
see America's unique military technology, coupled with our seeming
complete carelessness in how that technological prowess destroys
people and nations.
Most amazing of all, however, is that as we proclaim that the
terrorists threaten Europe, threaten the United States, threaten
Western civilization itself - as we face all this, we do not
concentrate our military might against this unique threat.
Where are we sending our warriors, our ships, our planes? Why to
Russia, which the U.S. general who commands NATO has announced is the
prime "existential" threat to America. As you read this, ground, air
and naval forces of NATO, led and largely paid for by the United
States, have been moving about the Western borders of Russia, carrying
out the largest military maneuvers since World War II. At the same
time, our most powerful carriers and naval air forces have been
steaming about the South China Sea, there perhaps to find encounters
of unknowable potential with the rising forces of China, our second
said to be "existential" enemy.
There are no Russian terrorists ravaging France or Italy or America.
ISIS is not to be found on Russian soil. The only Russian terrorists
who have attacked the West are the Islamists whom President Putin
first asked us to join in the fight against in 1999. The only Chinese
terrorists are Uighurs who are attacking not us but China itself. It
would seem elementary common sense that America would have long since
sought, not to fight with Russia and China, but to cooperate with both
to suppress the terrorists and the terrorism that have plagued us for
over a generation, including the ISIS that is terrorizing Europe
today.
. . . False hopes and vain promises of victory have burnt up the
caches of idealism and patriotic commitment with which we began the
wars a generation ago.
. . . But, ominously, there is more to come, more that already stares
us in the face. The dire events of this summer have shown us the true
danger that lurks here at home. This is not a danger imported from
Syria or Iraq or Russia. Our greatest menace is the danger of our own
history, our inheritance to the latest day.
For the fact is that while we chased a chimera of peace and justice in
lands far from our own, imposing ourselves and our concepts on
strangers who rejected our teachings, we were neglecting our own
country and our own people, our own neighbors, our own children and
our own friends. And now we can see the result. The violence we took
to other countries bounces back to our own. The money we squandered on
bombs in Iraq was not available for our own schools. The brilliant
young men and women, who gave up their bodies and their lives on
distant battlefields, were not here to teach and mentor and guide the
young people of the ghetto. They were not here to police the mean
streets, to suppress and eliminate the crime that is the greatest
cause of poverty. They were not here to bring the protection and the
blessings of the American Constitution to the least among us. They
were not here to protect American cities and enrich American lives.
And they were not here to keep Americans and American children from
murdering American police officers. This is our true present danger.
. . .
So my hope for America is this. First, we must begin immediately to
end our involvement in endless, unnecessary and therefore murderous
wars. We need our best young people to help us here at home. We need
to stop the reckless military spending on more destructive
armaments. We need to breathe free again.
. . .
Second, we must at the same time begin to recover our domestic
peace. There are many ills to be cured, many shortcomings to be
righted.
But nothing can be accomplished in the midst of a war against police,
an insurrection against the Constitution itself. Our clear priority is
reinforcement of our police and police departments. We need many more
and better police. We need them to be better trained, not as warriors
but as shepherds, as leaders and teachers of the young, as peacemakers
in communities that have not known real peace for many years. We need
our very best young people, not getting their legs blown off by IEDs
in Afghanistan, but saving all of our lives in St. Louis and Chicago
and Detroit and Baton Rouge and all the other wasted places in our own
land.
Donald Trump has been mocked mercilessly for saying, "America first".
But to demand that all the actions of government, at home or abroad,
be first directed at the interests and well-being of our own country
is not old-fashioned or outmoded. Rather it represents the deepest
wisdom and tradition of American statesmen from the founders on. Only
with a clear vision of what is truly in the interests of our nation
and our fellow citizens, and a full commitment to those interests, can
we act wisely at home and in the world beyond.
. . .
Commit to our own domestic peace and security, rather than persist in
a vain effort to control the lives and affairs of 200 foreign nations.
This, as I understand it, is the platform of Donald Trump. It was not
the Republican Party platform, and he had to overcome much opposition
within his party to gain the nomination. But it is his platform. It is
the platform he has restated again and again, with determination, and
with the courage and persistence to outlast his critics. It is a
platform that, even in these troubled days, could fulfill the hopes of
the greatest Americans of all parties.
Flawed as he may be, Trump is telling more of the truth than
politicians of our day. Most important, he offers a path away from
constant war, a path of businesslike accommodation with all reasonable
people and nations, concentrating our forces and efforts against the
true enemies of civilization. Thus, to dwell on his faults and errors
is to evade the great questions of war and peace, life and death for
our people and our country. You and I will have to compensate for his
deficits of civility, in return for peace, we may hope as Lincoln
hoped, among ourselves and with all nations.
Truly, America first, last and always; for ourselves and for our
posterity. These are the reasons why I will vote for Donald Trump for
president.
Adam Walinsky worked in the Department of Justice during the Kennedy
administration and later served as legislative assistant and
speechwriter to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
2) http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-iraq-1475077154
By James Taranto
Sept. 28, 2016 11:39 a.m. ET
844 COMMENTS
This column has long argued that the journalistic genre known as "fact
checking" is a corruption of journalism. "The `fact check' is opinion
journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news," we wrote in
2008. "The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a
judgment."
Eight years later, we'd amend that slightly. "Fact checking" doesn't
pretend to be straight news exactly, but something more authoritative.
The conceit of the "fact checker" is that he has some sort of
heightened level of objectivity qualifying him to render verdicts in
matters of public controversy.
Lately the "fact checkers" have been waging a campaign to portray
Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war, contrary
to his assertions that he was an opponent. In Monday's debate, Hillary
Clinton pleaded for their help: "I hope the fact checkers are turning
up the volume and really working hard. Donald supported the invasion
of Iraq." Moderator Lester Holt obliged, basing a question to Trump
on the premise that the matter was settled: "You supported the war in
Iraq before the invasion."
Trump somewhat inarticulately rebutted the claim: "The record shows
that I'm right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very
lightly, the first time anybody's asked me that, I said, very lightly,
I don't know, maybe, who knows."
What Trump actually said on Sept. 11, 2002, when Stern asked him if he
favored an invasion, was: "Yeah, I guess so." That was an affirmative
statement, but a highly equivocal one. Is it fair or accurate to
characterize it as sufficient to establish that Trump was a
"supporter"? In our opinion, no. He might well have had second
thoughts immediately after getting off the air with Stern.
He certainly had second thoughts in the ensuing months, and he came to
oppose the invasion long before Mrs. Clinton did. Even FactCheck.org
was unable to come up with any other Trump statement supportive of the
decision to go to war. By December 2003, according to the site's
timeline, Trump was observing (in an interview with Fox News Channel's
Neil Cavuto) that "a lot of people" were "questioning the whole
concept of going in, in the first place".
Five years later, according to PolitiFact.com, Trump was calling for
President Bush's impeachment because, as he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer,
"he got us into the war with lies."
Trump repeated that last claim in a February debate in South Carolina
(in the transcript at the link, the second Trump quote is erroneously
attributed to moderator John Dickerson):
Trump: George [W.] Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But
that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have
destabilized the Middle East.
Dickerson: But so I'm going to - so you still think he should be
impeached?
Jeb Bush: I think it's my turn, isn't it?
Trump: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I
want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass
destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There
were no weapons of mass destruction.
When Trump said that, it shocked many conservative commentators and
intellectuals, including the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last:
Nine months ago, if you had asked Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Jerry
Falwell Jr., or Ann Coulter whether they would endorse a figure who
takes the Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of Iraq ("Bush
lied, people died"), one suspects they all would have recoiled at
the prospect. Yet in the hours after Trump insisted that George W.
Bush intentionally lied the country into war, not one of the major
figures who have endorsed him was willing to contradict his claim.
. . .
One needn't be an admirer of George W. Bush, or a believer in his
freedom agenda, or even a supporter of the Iraq war to understand
how pernicious this is. Whatever your views on the wisdom of Iraq,
no serious person believes that Bush masterminded a massive fraud,
with the help of his cabinet and the entire national security
apparatus; that his "lies" then managed to fool the governments and
intelligence agencies of a dozen allies; and that, somehow, none of
the evidence of this scheme ever managed to leak into the open.
[End Jonathan Last Quote]
Which leads to an obvious question: Where were the "fact checkers" in
February, when Trump made that patently false claim? The only related
"fact check" we could find was one from FactCheck.org, rebutting
Trump's denial, a month later, that he had said what he said: "I
didn't say lie. I said he may have lied. I don't know." It was a
rare example of a "fact check" that simply checked a fact.
A funny thing happened after the South Carolina debate: Trump won the
state's primary and went on to win the nomination. The Republican
electorate did not see Trump's opposition to the Iraq war, or even his
endorsement of the "Code Pink, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org view of
Iraq", as disqualifying.
"[Trump] secured the Republican nomination against a field of 16
candidates described last summer by George F. Will as `the most
impressive since 1980, and perhaps the most talent-rich since the
party first had a presidential nominee, in 1856,'" notes William
Voegeli in the Claremont Review of Books:
How did Trump achieve this? One crucial difference from all those
competitors is that he could deplore the Middle East policies of
both Presidents Bush and Obama as "a tremendous disservice" and a
"disaster". No other GOP candidate possessed so much leeway to
denounce the war in Iraq, the most recent Republican president
"signature ideas", as the New York Times' Ross Douthat termed it. At
the other end of the spectrum of 17 candidates, Jeb Bush's campaign
never recovered from making a terrible first impression: the 12
years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom had, apparently,
been too little time for him to form an opinion as to whether,
knowing what we do now, his brother's decision to invade that
country had been a good idea.
It's not hard to see why Republican voters might have been more
attracted by Trump's repudiation of the Iraq war than repelled by the
bumptious and scurrilous way in which he expressed it. That conflict
turned out to be a strategic disaster for the U.S., in part (as Trump
has noted) because of Obama's decision to withdraw all troops in 2011.
It also turned out to be a political disaster for the GOP. After
re-electing George W. Bush, voters turned against the war. They also
turned against the Republican Party, handing control of Congress to
the Democrats in 2006 and the White House to an antiwar Democrat two
years later, after he defeated the still pro-war Mrs. Clinton for the
party's nomination.
The Iraq war helped make ObamaCare, and much else that is anathema to
GOP voters, possible. Trump offered Republicans an opportunity to move
beyond the Iraq mistake. Under the pretense of "fact checking",
journalists now are furiously attempting to scuttle that opportunity.
Worst Appeals to Authority
"Dan Rather: Hillary Clinton `Calm and Substantive' in first debate"
- headline, USA Today, Sept. 27
If anything, Trump expressed that he didn't know or care about the Iraq
invasion when on Stern's show. But support it he did...
Additionally, saying Trump's rhetoric is "non-interventionist" is a
complete fabrication.
Opinion of a private citizen is irrelevant. He is a politicianinvasion when on Stern's show. But support it he did...
Additionally, saying Trump's rhetoric is "non-interventionist" is a
complete fabrication.
since 2015.
claiming that he was against the war when he was a private citizen, and
is criticizing those who were for the war.