Tuesday, August 12, 2014

GOP Hopefuls Criticize Obama for Iraq But Ignore How Disater Began

Modern day Pharisee Mike Huckabee - who makes a nasty whore seem virtuous
Proving yet again that hypocrisy and selective amnesia are two of the main attributes of today's Republican Party, GOP shysters in Iowa made an effort to criticize Barack Obama on events in Iraq but conveniently ignored how America's ongoing disaster in that country began: deliberate lies perpetrated on the American people by the GOP's own cretinous George W. Bush and the ever scheming Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  But for the fool's errand launched by these two war criminals, history would be very different and thousands of young Americans would not have lost their lives and billions and billions of dollars would not have been squandered.  A piece in Slate looks at the hypocrisy and lies on display in Iowa at a hate group sponsored forum.  Here are highlights:

AMES, Iowa—When he ran for president in 2008 and the Republican caucuses in Iowa made him a contender, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee did not have much to say about Iraq. It was John McCain’s issue, Ron Paul’s issue. The most memorable comment Huckabee had about America’s war was that it had been, indeed, worth starting, and that when it came to the missing WMD, “just because you didn’t find every Easter egg didn’t mean it wasn’t planted.”

When he arrived at the Iowa FAMiLY Leader’s annual summit for social conservatives on Saturday, though, Huckabee summoned his inner hawk. Huckabee closed a half-hour speech by asking where the Obama administration had been while the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria burned through Iraq.

The thousand-odd social conservatives in attendance social conservatives broke into cheers—not as loud as their cheers when Sen. Ted Cruz had called for the repeal of Obamacare, but plenty loud.

It had taken a while for Iowa to turn against the Iraq War, but in 2006 Democrats captured two congressional seats thanks to the backlash, while Barack Obama and John Edwards defeated Hillary Clinton in no small part because of the war. Since then, the Republican party’s libertarian, America-first segment has also found fertile soil in Iowa. Ron Paul nearly won the 2012 caucus vote, and his forces went on to take over the delegation and—until this year—the whole state party.

But the renewed hostilities in Iraq have rattled conservatives. At events in Iowa and at the summit this past weekend—Huckabee was joined there by fellow prospective 2016 GOP nominees Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Santorum—Republican politicians and evangelical thinkers tried to fold the ISIS situation into various grand theories of foreign policy without bringing up how the war had started. For Huckabee, it was obvious that America had failed Christians.

Did that raise any questions about whether America should have invaded Iraq? Definitely. But that’s not what the gathered Republicans with national ambitions wanted to discuss.

The day before the summit, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had campaigned at a supporter’s home in Knoxville, where some of the voters said they had lost friends or relatives in Iraq and feared that they’d sacrificed for naught.  But Jindal avoided any talk of the origins of Iraq’s latest woes. “It is not acceptable for this radical terrorist group to, one, occupy land in Iraq and Syria and, secondly, be threatening to slaughter Christians and minorities in Iraq,” said Jindal.

Those who did discuss Iraq, like Huckabee, fit it into a story of Obama-driven weakness. “Sadly, what’s happening in Iraq is the latest manifestation of the failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy,” said Cruz to reporters. “The Sunnis and Shiites are fighting a sectarian civil war that has been raging for 1,500 years. They have been battling since 632. For the president to think that we can somehow cause the Sunnis and Shiites to lay down their arms, embrace, and sing ‘Kumbaya’ is the height of hubris and ignorance.”
Like Huckabee, Cruz was deploying one of the arguments against invading that had originally been used—and dismissed—at the start of the Iraq War. (Cruz ignored a follow-up question about whether the war had been worth it.) Meanwhile, the idea of “independent Kurdistan,” which was poison when Democrats supported it, had now become a perfectly mainstream position to flog in Iowa.

There's more, but the take away is that the nastiest whore has more virtue than today's would be GOP presidential hopefuls.  As for the members of the GOP base in attendance, most belong in a mental institution!
 


 

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