Hillary is more likely to start a war with Iran than Rand Paul

[ieoeja]

188. I'm old enough that I remember the GOP calling us "The War Party".

Republicans opposed Truman's entry into Korea. They didn't much care for his Cold War at the start either.

JFK went to Berlin as the first American president to step into Communist occupied Europe as very much an "in your face" activity.

How does 1968 fall into that? Humphrey was the Vietnam war candidate. While Nixon had a "secret plan" for ending the war as the supposed anti-war candidate (he lied).

Conservatives only became hawks because the Cold War lasted so long. They are Conservative. They don't like change. War became another constant for them.

They also don't like things they don't understand. How could Democrats support the Vietnam war while simultaneously supporting the rights of anti-war demonstrators? Since they supported the latter, they must oppose the war even though most of them supported the war. That is just too complex for Conservative black-and-white thinking.

Then there was the whole truthiness thing. They didn't accuse the news media of being too Liberal because they felt the news media supported Democrats. During Vietnam they accused the news media of being too Liberal because they felt the news media was too honest. They felt that in a "time of war" it was the news media's duty to support the war, right or wrong.

All of these things came to link Democrats with anti-war even though that was never really a Democratic, or Liberal, thing. Anti-war is a small "c" conservative value. War is far more of a small "l" liberal value.

I would argue, in fact, that US national security has largely been a mess since the Conservative take over of national security. Conservative as a value is a poor fit with national security. They do everything in small ways. And they are inflexible. Liberals are faster to adjust to changing conditions. And they enter these things, dare I say, very liberally (as in a big way).