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Re: 2nd Term Part VIII - The Thin Red Line
Reading Opie's posts is very instructive, because it gives you an accurate window into the thought process of the non-loonitarian wing of the modern Republican Party. As an older gentleman, Opie remembers a time when you could throw any accusation against Dems of being peaceniks and bumblers in foreign policy and it would stick given the people the party was putting up at the time (from Carter to Dukakis).
The problem with his thinking, and all older Republican conservatives, is that they want you to completely forget the utter disaster that the Bush-Cheney regime was in this arena (amongst others). That's kinda hard to do when 1) that is the only GOP Presidency in a generation (1993-2017....and maybe even longer) for us to judge the party by, and 2) the last two Republican nominees for Prez (McCain, Romney) campaigned on following Bush II neo-con policies to the letter.
Perhaps, had W never become President, the American people would have more appetite to be in places like Syria, Nigeria, or the Ukraine. But you can't take away the years of 2001-2009 and the horrific, deadly and costly blunders those people made. I have a lot of respect for John McCain the soldier. John McCain the policy maker is a joke and a dinosaur. To the extent that anybody who's not still an apostle of the failed neo-con view of the world is mad at Obama over Benghazi, its because we had an outpost there in the first place, not because he didn't carpet bomb the place at the first sign of trouble. If 12 hearings, 1 million documents, and 500 crackpot theories haven't uncovered anything nefarious, I think its time for the righties to give up the ghost. I wouldn't trust the Republican Congress to get to the bottom of a case of Schlitz, let alone something line this. Trust for conservatives on foreign policy died in the sands of Iraq.
Reading Opie's posts is very instructive, because it gives you an accurate window into the thought process of the non-loonitarian wing of the modern Republican Party. As an older gentleman, Opie remembers a time when you could throw any accusation against Dems of being peaceniks and bumblers in foreign policy and it would stick given the people the party was putting up at the time (from Carter to Dukakis).
The problem with his thinking, and all older Republican conservatives, is that they want you to completely forget the utter disaster that the Bush-Cheney regime was in this arena (amongst others). That's kinda hard to do when 1) that is the only GOP Presidency in a generation (1993-2017....and maybe even longer) for us to judge the party by, and 2) the last two Republican nominees for Prez (McCain, Romney) campaigned on following Bush II neo-con policies to the letter.
Perhaps, had W never become President, the American people would have more appetite to be in places like Syria, Nigeria, or the Ukraine. But you can't take away the years of 2001-2009 and the horrific, deadly and costly blunders those people made. I have a lot of respect for John McCain the soldier. John McCain the policy maker is a joke and a dinosaur. To the extent that anybody who's not still an apostle of the failed neo-con view of the world is mad at Obama over Benghazi, its because we had an outpost there in the first place, not because he didn't carpet bomb the place at the first sign of trouble. If 12 hearings, 1 million documents, and 500 crackpot theories haven't uncovered anything nefarious, I think its time for the righties to give up the ghost. I wouldn't trust the Republican Congress to get to the bottom of a case of Schlitz, let alone something line this. Trust for conservatives on foreign policy died in the sands of Iraq.
It's like a bunch of kids poking an arthritic, addled, snarly old dog with a stick. If we didn't have you, we'd have nothing to do but poke at each other.
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