Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Not the point Sunshine. He made a bad situation 1000 times worse., for no reason. The USA started a war for the first time in its history, for no reason. Then we lost it, for no reason. A more political country would have hung Bush's corpse from a DC lamppost around 2006.

 

This is precious. More than 10 years later, Sunshine can't acknowledge what an ill-conceived and ill-fated exercise Iraq was -- but the people who do see that are the blindly partisan ones

 

Close to Dookie-level good.

 

We're pretty political. Maybe you'll get your wish some day.

 

I've said numerous times the Iraq War was prosecuted terribly. Even way back when you were just a wee listener. W ran it like a liberal PR campaign. It's a black mark against his legacy, and I'm much more open-minded than you.

 

Poorly prosecuted? Iraq was the second biggest fuckup -- in terms of deaths, dollars and strategy -- in US military history after Vietnam.

 

I think the point is that no President has had a successful Middle East policy.

And, even Bush's mistakes were compounded by Obama's mistakes.

Iraq and Afghanistan are worse off than when Obama took office.

Israeli policy is a failure, and our relationship with them is strained.

Yemen, Syria, and Libya have melted down under Obama.

Saudi Arabia continues to export Wahhabism.

And we made a bad deal with Iran, because Obama wants to withdraw from the Middle East, and a failed novelist wrote a "narrative", that he peddled to a friendly, know-nothing, press corp.

 

This is a smart take on Trump a fervent need for the GOP to remake itself for the 21st Century...

Somewhere in that mix are the contours of a platform that is contemporary and conservative and for which there is arguably a broader demographic and geographic appeal. It should not include (for there is no political appetite for these things, and they are unattainable and/or unwise from a policy standpoint): opposition to gay rights; large tax cuts for the rich; protectionism; expelling women from combat in a volunteer army; rooting gays out of the military; obsessing over bathroom assignments; fixating on local ordinances about wedding services; keeping the status quo on entitlements; cutting out (as opposed to reforming) the safety net; never, ever raising taxes on anyone; and mass deportation.

What follows will be different from 1980s conservatism because we are more than three decades removed from Ronald Reagan. Our problems are different — stagnant wages, resurgent and varied enemies, the withering of communal organizations, crumbling infrastructure. We have recognized that the old solutions — a rising tide lifts all boats (not if you have no skills) — are insufficient. ​

 

Damn. Obama really has failed as President of the Middle East.

 

And after so many great solutions had emerged in the previous 60 years!

 

Whole chunks of this are greatly up for debate.

As I look back over 25 years of Middle East policy, I write a few things with great confidence:

1. HW Bush and his team got their Iraq War right.

2. The decision of...whoever to let the Iraqi army disband and to turn off the fucking power in parts of baghdad after the second invasion was really, really dumb.

3. It's a great, unsettling paradox of our time that dictators and kings offset fascist terrorists in Middle East, but it's true, and we often have to choose.

4. Dictatorships and iron-fisted rule are often so dysfunctional that what follows is worse than the dictatorship itself.

5. This goes so much deeper than our Westernized, enlightened asses can handle.

6. That a volunteer army is probably bad for our foreign policy and gets us into shit we shouldn't and wouldn't otherwise be in because our soldiers signed up to fight.