2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumThe Intercept: Donald Trump Calls Hillary Clinton “Trigger Happy” as She Courts Neocons
"DONALD TRUMP DERIDED Hillary Clintons hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.
Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger
On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy, Trump told the crowd. She is, shes trigger happy. Shes got a bad temperament, he said. Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.
And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the other side to this story, noting: Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks for the people of the Middle East.
Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. They bomb a city and its obliterated, obliterated, he said. Theyll say nobody was killed. Ill bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.
If we wouldve done nothing, Trump argued, we wouldve been in much better shape.""
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/12/donald-trump-calls-hillary-clinton-trigger-happy-as-she-courts-neocons/
NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)MSNBC's Chris Matthews, the host of the town hall, tried to pin Trump down on what circumstances might compel President Trump to deploy the United States' nuclear arsenal.
"Look, nuclear should be off the table, but would there a time when it could be used? Possibly," Trump said.
Matthews asked Trump to tell the Middle East and Europe that he would never use nuclear weapons, but Trump continued to evade. Asked again if he'd use nuclear weapons in Europe, Trump held firm. "I am notI am not taking cards off the table," Trump responded.
But yeah, Clinton's trigger-happy for playing a role in enforcing a UN Security Council Resolution in Libya.
NWCorona
(8,541 posts)RiverNoord
(1,150 posts)Trump will go through periods of lucidity when he actually directs criticism precisely where Clinton is weak.
She really is courting neocons, and that's extraordinarily bad news. Most of them should have been imprisoned for crimes against humanity and/or treason years ago.
Let a few of them run amok in State or DOD and who knows who or what we'll be targeting next...
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)We are in the soup... deep soup.
reddread
(6,896 posts)considering the not so much precarious as abyssmal environmental prospects facing America and the world in the very near future,
we may only be able to make a symbolic gesture for the faint electronic record that alien Terra specialists will might decipher.
if they have reason.
RiverNoord
(1,150 posts)it back on Trump himself, pointing out how insane his statements have been.
Which doesn't work against someone like Trump. He's better at BS than she is. It's hard to know if he's actually being truthful or just bullshitting.
Clinton is at ease lying, but not good enough at it to make it convincing.
Right now we've got 2 presumptive nominees, the contest between whom will probably be decided by who is the better bullshitter.
You're right about where we are...
leveymg
(36,418 posts)That's the one area where the hideous caricature of a billionaire is actually less hideous than that caricature of a Secretary of State.
RiverNoord
(1,150 posts)but the incredible thing is that she hasn't called out a single neocon, ever, over the insanity of the Iraq war.
Always with some variation of 'the intelligence community got it wrong on WMDs.'
And she damn well knows the truth - Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld conspired to co-opt the 'intelligence community' with complete bullshit, generated by Douglas Feith and many others through a con job office explicitly set up in the Pentagon for the purpose.
I still remember wincing in pain and despair when Colin Powell started his BS about 'mobile WMD labs' cruising around Iraq, in front of the UN General Assembly.
Never having directed blame appropriately at the architects of the Iraq debacle makes me think that she's got associated stuff to keep under wraps. I hope it's not that she simply recognizes the usefulness of various neocons to her, because, if that's the case we are in a really bad place...
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Hillary, herself, observes she "fell in love with Israel about twenty years ago."
This article in Counter-Punch casts her as the neo-interventionist Svengali behind the thrown as First Lady:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/hillarys-neocon-problem/
Was Hillary in on Bills political choices? Recently speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Clintons secretary of labor Robert Reich said that Bill never made an important decision without consulting the first lady. What are the programs to which Hillary can claim advisory credit during her husband tenure? NAFTA, welfare reform (ending welfare as we know it, said Bill), balancing the budget (inflicting austerity measures), the 1994 crime bill (three strikes and youre out), bank deregulation (a sonata for the Great Recession). All of these projects, says author Thomas Frank, were for working Americans and people of color absolute disasters. And one might add to his list the expansion of NATO and the assault on Yugoslavia.
As secretary of state, Hillary backed CIA director Petraeus plan to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, from which Obama eventually backed away, thanks to Russias intervention and defense of Syrias sovereignty. As a good neocon soldier for American exceptionalism, Clinton aligns herself with whatever appears at the moment to be the national interest center of political gravity (promoting the oil industry, arms sales, the pro-Zionist alliance, divide and rule aid to opponents of secular nationalism, right-to-protect military and economic interventions). The distraction over her emailgate and the Benghazi investigation hides the real crimes of her active support for the bombing of Libya, the overthrow of the government, and the resulting chaos and ISIS organizing in the country, not to mention her backing for the Honduran coup detat. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates says that it was Hillary who pushed Obama into the decision on Libya, for which the president now publicly expresses regret, calling the present condition of the country (his words) a shit show.
Her champions who cheer her work with women and children ignore the thousands of women and children in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, who were slaughtered under her leadership in the State Department. Speaking on regime change, even a right-wing former Pentagon analyst, Michael Maloof, didnt believe it was appropriate to attack Iraq. Now with Libya, he says, its the same. And Hillary Clinton was very much responsible for that.
A much longer, and more detailed article by Robert Parry unfortunately only traces back to 2002, but is worth the read: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/23/is-hillary-clinton-a-neocon-lite-2/
RiverNoord
(1,150 posts)I'll have to take some time, when I have some time, to read through and see what I think of it.
Thanks again for the info, although I'm sure I'm not going to like it .
leveymg
(36,418 posts)February 25, 2016
Exclusive: Hillary Clintons cozy ties to Washingtons powerful neocons have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton would pursue, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israels interests.
In a Washington Post op-ed published on Thursday, Kagan excoriated the Republican Party for creating the conditions for Trumps rise and then asked, So what to do now? The Republicans creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out.
Then referring to himself, he added, For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
While many of Kagans observations about the Republican tolerance and even encouragement of bigotry are correct, the fact that a leading neocon, a co-founder of the infamous Project for the New American Century, has endorsed Clinton raises questions for Democrats who have so far given the former New York senator and Secretary of State mostly a pass on her pro-interventionist policies.
The fact is that Clinton has generally marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented an aggressive regime change strategy against governments and political movements that dont toe Washingtons line or that deviate from Israels goals in the Middle East. So she has backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results.
Yet, with the failure of Republican establishment candidates to gain political traction against Trump, Clinton has clearly become the choice of many neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who favor continuation of U.S. imperial designs around the world. The question for Democrats now is whether they wish to perpetuate those war-like policies by sticking with Clinton or should switch to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who offers a somewhat less aggressive (though vaguely defined) foreign policy.
Sanders has undermined his appeal to anti-imperialist Democrats by muting his criticism of Clintons regime change strategies and concentrating relentlessly on his message of income inequality for which Clinton has disingenuously dubbed him a single-issue candidate. Whether Sanders has the will and the time to reorient his campaign to question Clintons status as the new neocon choice remains in doubt.
A Reagan Propagandist
Kagan, who Ive known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagans State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Departments chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clintons patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative regime change in Ukraine in 2014.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
Later in 2014, Kagan told The New York Times that he hoped that his neocon views which he had begun to call liberal interventionist would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. The Times reported that Clinton remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes and quoted Kagan as saying:
I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue its something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.
Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bushs disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton.
NuclearDem
(16,184 posts)The billionaire businessman was asked by the hosts of Fox News' "Fox and Friends" how to fight ISIS but also minimize civilian causalities when terrorists often use human shields.
"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families," Trump said.
Trump said he would "knock the hell out of" ISIS, and criticized the U.S. for "fighting a very politically correct war."
So, now Donald Trump's concerned about civilian casualties?
RiverNoord
(1,150 posts)He's just lucid enough at times to make an actual argument that strikes directly on point.
Which means that, in the back of his bizarro mind, lurk valid criticisms of Hillary Clinton's campaign that might just pop out in extremely effective ways.
frylock
(34,825 posts)/s
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)Perhaps he meant it as a compliment. They are buddies after all.
Both of them should be made to live in the Middle East.