Four things to remind your Republican friends about when they're blathering about the Middle East. [View all]

[TrollBuster9090]

There is no mystery as to why Republicans have gone into a deep state of schizophrenic cognitive dissonance (aka 'gone NUTS!') over Obama's successful track record in the middle east. Here's why:

1. Every president since Reagan has labelled Gaddafi a terrorist menace to world peace, and tried to depose or kill him. They all failed...OBAMA SUCCEEDED. Reagan even bombed Tripoli in 1986 (ostensibly to hit 'military' installations, but really to kill Gaddafi) and failed. That's right...Obama succeeded in getting rid of Gaddafi where even St. Reagan failed. If Bush had gotten rid of Gaddafi, the Republican chest beating would have been a 6.2 on the Richter Scale. But since it was Obama, they've had to do some MAJOR mental/rhetorical gymnastics to find reasons why Gaddafi's elimination is suddenly a BAD thing. (aka 'gone NUTS')

2. Bush tried for 8 years to get bin Laden and FAILED. Obama got him. That's right, in his first term, Obama got the two guys that both Reagan AND Bush Jr. FAILED to get in a total of 16 years. Again, finding reasons why this is suddenly a bad thing has not exactly been good for their sanity. Their 'reasons' generally revolve around the use of drone strikes, or the amount of time Obama went without a congressional declaration of war, none of which would have bothered them if a GOPer had been in the Oval Office. But again, it's simply an example of cognitive dissonance over them not being able to come to grips with the fact that a black, liberal Democrat succeeded in doing what two white, conservative Republicans FAILED MISERABLY to do.

3. After the whole WMD lie fell apart, Bush's 'justification' for invading Iraq became the neo-conservative PNAC dogma that if you spread DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST, terrorism will disappear, because free democracies rarely fight each other or engage in terrorism. So, Bush caused the deaths of 3000 U.S. soldiers and 30 000 U.S. casualties, $2 trillion wasted, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's killed as 'collateral damage,' and up to a million Iraqi refugees displaced in an effort to spread democracy across the middle east...AND FAILED. Obama made two speeches (one in Turkey and one in Egypt) saying that America is NOT an enemy of Islam (which bush said also, but never in the middle east), and KICKSTARTED THE ARAB SPRING without it costing one penny, or taking one life. Naturally, that idea would literally drive Republicans INSANE, and they've had to look for some contorted reasons why democracy in the middle east is suddenly a BAD thing. "Muslim Brotherhood...blah blah blah..."

4. And finally, if pointing these things out to your Republican friends does no good, and they STILL insist on falling back on the "apology tour," "WEAK foreign policy in the middle east" meme...you'll have no choice but to remind them of this: In 1983 Reagan sent U.S. Marines to maintain peace in Lebanon. The Islamic Jihad (an Iranian terrorist organization) drove a truck bomb into the Marine barracks, killing 200 Marines, and Reagan pissed off home like greased lightning. That's right, St. Reagan RETREATED in the face of a terrorist attack. In the aftermath, Reagan traded arms for hostages with the same Iranian terrorist groups, and the level of jihadist terrorism increased, presumably because Reagan had shown such cowardice and lack of resolve in the middle east.

Here's the bottom line: Conservatives had EIGHT YEARS to try and solve America's problems THEIR WAY. They FAILED PATHETICALLY. We deserve at least eight years to try it ANOTHER way. No, the failures were not Bush's fault, per se. It's the fault of the current conservative philosophy, and the current batch of GOP ADVISERS.

There are two groups of advisers floating around, A) the batch that advised Bush and B) the batch that advised Clinton. Obama is currently using the CLINTON ADVISERS. If you elect Romney, he'll just switch back to the same gang of BUSH ADVISERS. Rove on politics, Art Laffer and Phil Gramm on economics, Grover Norquist on tax policy, and the whole PNAC gang of neo-conservatives (Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld ect.) on foreign policy. It may not be a pleasant choice, but given a choice between the CLINTON ADVISERS and the BUSH ADVISERS to run the country, I'll take the Clinton advisers every time.