Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Donald Trump can wave the mission accomplished banner; the Bush brand has been vanquished.
Jeb is through;
The Bush family is through,
For a generation or two;
The next president will be
A Socialist Jew.
Trump has gone up against the Holy Grail of Republican rules of behavior and survived: He called the war in Iraq a huge mistake and accused former President George W. Bush of lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to get the country into the war. He also faulted the former president for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that brought down the World Trade Center. “That’s not keeping us safe,” Trump stated. All this and Republicans in South Carolina voters reward him with a vote of confidence.
Before now, it was admissible for Republican politicians to admit the war was a mistake, but no Republican politician was allowed to say that the president lied to the country to get into the war. Although many rank and file Republican voters feel that the president did indeed lie about weapons of mass destruction, their leaders can’t belly up to such an admission – it imbues the entire party of duplicity. Trump can say the truth and still get rank and file Republican voters to vote for him – fact is Trump can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes; he’s said as much. Trump supporters want to rid the People’s House of Barack Obama so badly that they would tolerated anything, anything.
No less a political prognosticator than the great Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball predicted that the Republican establishment would destroy Trump with his base for going over the line by calling the ex-president a liar. When Trump himself was asked if he thought that breaking the Republican code of silence on the Bush lie would hurt him in the South Caronia primary, Trump said that he didn’t think this would hurt him.
Apparently Trump had a better feel for where the votes stood on this issue than most other Republican politicians and media talking heads. What he was more afraid of, he said, was the robo-calls to SC voters accusing him of being supportive of the removal of “Our” flag. Cruz was placing robo-calls to Republican voters using the dog-whistle term “Our” for the Confederate flag. Trump was concerned that the Johnnie Rebs would still be upset about the removal of their flag – Trump’s favorite currency is green, so his flag is the stars and stripes – and would vote against him being reminded by the Cruz robo-calls that Trump is a Yankee and wanted their flag removed.
Now one wonders which flag Cruz is most loyal to.
I think, though I don’t know why, that Donald Trump’s main objective in entering the 2016 presidential was to prevent the country from rewarding the Bush Family with another turn at leadership after the fiasco W. put the country through. The thought of Trump breaking a path in the frozen political sea for Hilary Clinton also crosses my mind, but in order for this to be true, I would have to be convinced that they are both giving award winning acting performances. Still, I can’t drop the feeling that there is some shenanigan going on between them.
If there is anything to this, it will come out when that vast right-wing conspiracy that’s been after the Clintons for three decades now disclose it. If Trump is indeed clearing the way for Hilary (they Clintons did go to his wedding) as payoff, the only thing that could go wrong now would be that after getting a taste of the power his vast following gives him The Donald may want to go all the way.
Authenticating the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has to be the job of the IAEA or International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s doubtful that the IAEA provided a clearance on this important matter.
The secondary concern would have been that Saddam Hussein had the money to purchase the WMD from a nation state like North Korea. The ultimate issue for the previous Administration was whether or not the US could maintain a permanent presence in Iraq very much like the infamous Berlin Wall that came down in 1989.
When the decision was made to topple Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration really didn’t consider the prospect of a future President redefining the mission in Iraq, as well as, the withdrawal timetable. If this argument had been given enough weight, President Bush may not have pursued the war commitment.
The other problem is the cost of the war. The costs of sending troops to the other end of the world is an expensive proposition. The unitized costs of deploying troops could go as high as a million dollars per soldier when you consider transportation, military equipment, visits home, medical costs, battlefield injuries and much more. Clearly, the decision to go to war in the first place needed a serious second thought.