Quote of the Day

The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans dread trying to sleep through the night, America’s political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans.

As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical assessment of Trump’s unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq.

Mueller testified to Congress that “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security.” He also warned that Saddam could “supply terrorists with radiological material” for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving aside any speculation about Mueller’s intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous, to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question.

Far worse than the worship of Mueller is the refusal to scrutinize the abysmal foreign policy record of Joe Biden, currently the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the Democrats in the Senate at that time, Biden was the most enthusiastic of the cheerleaders for war, waving his pompoms and cartwheeling in rhythm to Dick Cheney’s music. Biden said repeatedly that America had “no choice but to eliminate the threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his blustering was uniquely influential.

The former vice president now claims that his “only mistake was trusting the Bush administration,” implying he was tricked into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question—can’t we nominate someone who wasn’t tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden’s recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as his campaign’s foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes?

Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism of Biden’s “inappropriate touching” has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The moral standards of America’s political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war.

Polling well below Biden in the race is the congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard. She alone on the Democratic stage has made criticism of American militarism central to her candidacy. A veteran of the Iraq war and a highly decorated major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, Gabbard offers an intelligent and humane perspective on foreign affairs. She’s called the regime change philosophy “disastrous,” advocated for negotiation with hostile foreign powers, and backed a reduction in drone strikes. She pledges if she becomes president to end American involvement in Afghanistan.

When Chris Matthews asked Gabbard about Biden’s support for the Iraq war, she said, “It was the wrong vote. People like myself, who enlisted after 9/11 because of the terrorist attacks, were lied to. We were betrayed.”

Her moral clarity is rare in the political fog of the presidential circus. She cautions against accepting the “guise of humanitarian justification for war,” and notes that rarely does the American government bomb and invade a country to actually advance freedom or protect human rights.

Gabbard’s positions are vastly superior to that of the other young veteran in the race, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend recently told New York that one of his favorite novels is The Quiet American, saying that its author, Graham Greene, “points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions.”

Buttigieg’s chances of winning the nomination seem low, and his prospects of becoming a literary critic appear even lower. The Quiet American does much more than raise questions about interventions: it is a merciless condemnation of American exceptionalism and its attendant indifference to Vietnamese suffering.

Americans hoping for peace won’t find much comfort in the current White House either. President Trump has made the world more dangerous by trashing the Iran nuclear deal, and his appointment of John Bolton, a man who makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma Gandhi, as national security advisor is certainly alarming.

America’s willful ignorance when it comes to the use of its own military exposes the moral bankruptcy at the heart of its political culture. Even worse, it makes future wars all but inevitable.

If no one can remember a war that ended merely nine years ago, and there’s little room for Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primary, how will the country react the next time a president, and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declare that they have no choice but to remove a threat?

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Trump won by bringing wary nationalists and populists into a conservative party. But the tail cannot wag the dog. Trump’s coalition is big enough to govern as long as he agrees to preserve the four legs of the conservative stool: babies, guns, tax cuts, and a muscular foreign policy.

Republicans, of course, cannot win without populists. Trump understood that before anyone in the party hierarchy. But Trump cannot win without conservative Republicans — and the last month casts doubt on whether Trump understands that.

Coalition politics always requires sail-trimming by all coalition partners. Many Republicans who flocked to former President George W. Bush’s call to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” in the wake of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal have swallowed hard and accepted Trump for the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices and the defeat of Democrats.

Now they wonder when Trump will trim his own sails for them.

The bargain has always been that he’d cut taxes and surround himself with traditional Republican foreign policy experts. The departure of Gen. Jim Mattis from the administration is not just a vacancy in the Cabinet. Coupled with United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s exit, this has Republicans, even those who have steadfastly stuck with the president, worried that there is a vacancy in the coalition bargain.

Trump has lost Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who bit his tongue for years, even as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., spilled his spleen with frustrations over the president’s lack of discipline.

Trump has also been publicly rebuked by Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, perhaps the most populist and Trumpian member of the Senate but a foreign policy hawk nonetheless. An alienated Cotton and an angry McConnell, on top of the normal array of less steely handwringers, are not the building blocks of a strong coalition.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama ran and won on a coalition that was made up of New Deal Democrats and the ascending coalition of young people, minorities, single women, and others. In 2012, he decided to shed the New Deal coalition and focus primarily on the coalition of the ascendant. He won but with less votes than he did in 2008, and it should be noted that his party, the Democrats, suffered deeply up and down the ballot under his new coalition.

The conservative populist coalition that Trump tapped into in 2016 was there long before he came along. Their impact was felt in elections they did vote in, like the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, and also in the ones they didn’t vote in, like the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, when Republican candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney did not inspire the populist portion and they stayed home.

Trump did not create this conservative/populist coalition. His presidency is the result of it. The past few weeks show he’s either forgotten that or he believes that doesn’t matter anymore.

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No matter who wins in November, America is going to face a divide unseen in decades. If Donald Trump wins, he will confront a resident media more hateful than that which confronted Richard Nixon in 1968.

If Hillary Clinton wins, she will come to office distrusted and disbelieved by most of her countrymen, half of whom she has maligned either as “deplorables” or pitiful souls in need of empathy.

Not for half a century has the idea of “one nation under God, indivisible,” seemed so distant.

Quote of the Day

But it raises anew the question: Can the establishment stop Trump?

Answer: It is possible, and we shall know by midnight, March 15. If Trump loses Florida and Ohio, winner-take-all primaries, he would likely fall short of the 1,237 delegates needed for nomination on the first ballot.

How could the anti-Trump forces defeat him in Ohio, Florida and Illinois? With the same tactics used to shrink Trump’s victory margins in Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky to well below what polls had predicted.

In every primary upcoming, Trump is under a ceaseless barrage of attack ads on radio, TV, cable and social media, paid for by super PACs with hoards of cash funneled in by oligarchs.

But Trump, who is self-funding his campaign, has spent next to nothing on ads answering these attacks, or promoting himself or his issues. He has relied almost exclusively on free media.

Yet no amount of free media can match the shellfire falling on him every hour of every day in every primary state.

Our Principles PAC, backed by Nebraska’s billionaire Ricketts family, has poured millions into trashing Trump. American Future Fund is dumping $1.75 million in Florida this week; Club for Growth $1.5 million.

Hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer is backing the Conservative Solutions PAC, which has dumped millions into anti-Trump ads and plans to spend more than $7 million between March 1 and 15, with $4 million of that going into Florida. The super PAC pile-on is unprecedented.

How well Trump fares in Michigan and Mississippi, measured against how well he was doing in polls last week, will reveal just how successful super PAC savagery has been in changing hearts and minds.

Can millionaires and billionaires who back open borders, mass immigration, globalization and the disappearance of nation states into transnational collectives overwhelm with their millions spent in ads the patriotic movements that arose this year to the wonderment of America and the world?

Has that proud 18th century boast of Americans, “Here, sir, the people rule!” given way to the rule of the oligarchs?

Quote of the Day

Reacting to the rise of Donald Trump, National Review’s Rich Lowry recently called on the Republican Party to get over its inordinate attachment to Ronald Reagan and his legacy. He suggests Reagan’s heirs must devise new policies to broaden the GOP’s appeal, and (implicitly) take down Trump. 
 
Meanwhile, such conventional Republican candidates for president as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio still lovingly invoke Reagan’s name nearly a quarter of a century since he left office. In Rubio’s words, it is “time for the children of the Reagan Revolution to assume the mantle of leadership.” 
 
By this he means, of course, people like himself, and not his nemesis Donald Trump who has a history of supporting Democrats, and can therefore be assumed not to be a “movement conservative,” and therefore, not a Reaganite.
 
Moreover, the “children of the Reagan Revolution” revile Trump for his opposition to the things they love the most—open borders, fast track trade deals, and military intervention overseas, which they habitually imply Reagan would have supported.

Well, I worked for Ronald Reagan, and Reagan stood for none of those things.

[…]

The establishment is in a dither over Trump lest the rebellion he is leading presage the end of everything it holds most dear—open borders (paving the way for the disappearance of the old United States and its replacement by “the world’s first global society,” in the words of the late publicist Ben Wattenberg), our endless series of optional, illegal wars that bear scant relation to any discernible US interests, the subversion and overthrow of foreign governments, including secular ones in Moslem countries that protect Christian minorities, and wretched trade deals that enrich the oligarchy while leaving the rest of the nation in the lurch. 
 
Meanwhile, sovereign debt is $20 trillion and we have $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
 
Memo to Rich Lowry: the GOP’s problem is not Reagan and his legacy—it is the noxious brew of policies it is wedded to.
 
Still less is the party’s problem Trump—our only political leader who understands that we cannot go on like this.  

In focusing like a laser on establishment policies millions of Americans find intolerable—open borders, fast track and endless wars—he has become their tribune. That is why he is winning. And that is why I suspect that if my old boss Ronald Reagan were with us now, he would not be averse to the prospect of a Trump victory in November.

Your Morning Quote

If Trump has fallen short of a glide path to the nomination, the war goes on. But if Trump seems to be the near-certain nominee, it will be a time for acceptance, a time for a cease-fire in this bloodiest of civil wars in the GOP.

Otherwise, the party will kick away any chance of keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House, and perhaps kick away its future as well.

While the depth and rancor of the divisions in the party are apparent, so also is the opportunity. For the turnout in the Republican primaries and caucuses has not only exceeded expectations, it has astonished and awed political observers.

A new “New Majority” has been marching to the polls and voting Republican, a majority unlike any seen since the 49-state landslides of the Nixon and Reagan eras.

If this energy can be maintained, if those throngs of Republican voters can be united in the fall, then the party can hold Congress, capture the While House and reconstitute the Supreme Court.

Come the ides of March, the GOP is going to be in need of its uniters and its statesmen. But today, all Republicans should ask themselves:

Are these folks coming out in droves to vote Republican really the bigoted, hateful and authoritarian people of the Post’s depiction?

Or is this not the same old Post that has poured bile on conservatives for generations now in a panic that America’s destiny may be torn away from it and restored to its rightful owners?

Quote of the day

The Bernie Sanders insurgency appears to have been turned back by the vested interests of his party. But like the George McGovern insurgency in ’72, which also relied heavily upon the enthusiasm of the young, Sanders’ socialism may be the ideological future of his party.

The same may be said of the Trump insurgency. Whatever happens at Cleveland, the returns from the primaries look like the passing of the old order, the death rattle of an establishment fighting for its life, and being laughed at and mocked as it goes down.

As in 1964 and 1980, a new Republican Party is taking shape.

Defections are to be expected, and not altogether unwelcome.

Quote of the Day

Academics revere Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Richard Cobden.

But none of them ever built a great nation. Patriots look to Alexander Hamilton and those post-Civil War Republicans who built the greatest national industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen.

Indeed, what great nation did free trade ever build?

As father of a united Germany, Chancellor Bismarck said, when he decided to build Germany on the American and not the British model, “I see that those countries which possess protection are prospering, and that those countries which possess free trade are decaying.”

So it is true today. Unfortunately, it is America, now wedded to the fatal dogma of free trade, that is decaying. – Source

Quote of the Day

Comes via David Cloud’s Friday Church News Notes:

DID YOU OBEY 1 TIMOTHY 2:1-4 TODAY? (Friday Church News Notes, May 9, 2014, www.wayoflife.orgfbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – I am convinced that if the Lord’s Bible-believing churches would earnestly, regularly, and often pray for the nation, great things could happen. This is true for any nation, but here I am referring specifically to America. We are in dire straights. There is no wisdom in high places. If we would stop leaning on the arm of the flesh (e.g., political activity, conservative talk radio, Fox News, complaining and fretting) and instead cast ourselves fervently upon the arms of the Almighty, we might see real supernatural change for the better. Could we not have some special prayer meetings just for this purpose? Could we not pray with fasting? At the very least, could we not bring this matter before God at every meal and in every church service? Is our liberty and our grandchildren’s liberty not worth the effort? Sure, the signs of the end times are everywhere, but the mystery of iniquity has been working for 2,000 years and the reigns of the times are in God’s hands, not the devil’s. Jehovah is the God of the times and the seasons (Daniel 2:20-21). He is the One who “now letteth” or restrains the devil’s program (2 Th. 2:7), and He can restrain as long as He pleases and as much as He pleases. Do we believe that God’s hand has gone slack in these apostate times? “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1-4). “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jeremiah 33:3).

 

Quote of the Day

Reagan was an anti-Communist to his core, having fought them in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s. But he was never anti-Russian, and wanted always to keep the channels open. He ended his presidency as he had hoped, being cheered while strolling through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ronald Reagan never wanted to be a war president, and there were no wars on Reagan’s watch. None. The Gipper was no neocon.