Bill Clinton apparently toyed with joining the ROTC for a time, in order to avoid the draft, but it is believed by some that he strung the ROTC along to delay his drafting, and get a new draft classification. He also unsuccessfully attempted to join the National Guard and the Air Force. (Wikipedia link)
George W. Bush was able to get a position as a pilot with the Texas Air National Guard, and it was alleged that he was able to do so due to his father’s political influence, in spite of low aptitude scores and poor attendance. (Wikipedia link)
I hold longtime establishment politicians who supported Trump to a MUCH higher standard than average everyday Americans who voted for Trump. The latter group often has limited perspective on political and social issues; are too preoccupied with the daily grind of work to read well-reasoned thinkpieces in the Atlantic and the Economist; they get their news in little bite-sized memes. Trump hit the right notes with their dissatisfaction with the perceived pussification of American culture; yeah some of them are motivated by racial bias or irrational fear of immigrants; whatever. I don’t think they’re irredeemable demons and in many cases they fill really critical roles in our society’s infrastructure. They drive the trucks that keep our food and our supplies moving. They climb the utility poles in vicious weather to keep the light and heat on when whole neighborhoods lose power. (I mean, they’re not ALL bastions of rugged American working class grit - plenty of them are lame ass suburban bureaucrats too. But I digress.) My point is - I can kinda, sorta, give many of these Trump voters a pass. I’m highly aggravated with what they COLLECTIVELY wrought on our country by voting the way they did, but on a one-to-one level, I can compartmentalize out their politics in many cases.
Someone like Bob Dole is a very, very, VERY different story.
This is a guy who has NO excuse. He doesn’t come home from work every day covered in grease and aching like hell, just wanting to put down some beers, go on Facebook where he will click the odd Breitbart link or share the same facile jingoistic memes before crashing for the next day of the grind. He’s, as I said, an elder statesman of the Republican party who was in the thick of Washington politics at the highest levels for decades. He is smart. Maybe he can’t fix a blown transformer in the middle of the night, but he understands how the American government is supposed to work.
And along comes someone who is SO manifestly unsuited in every conceivable way to have his little hands anywhere near the reins of power…someone who is a Tasmanian Devil of chaos and disorder, who has no moral compass, who has NO IDEA how to run ANYTHING competently - Dole does not have the excuse of “I feel like he speaks to me when the rest of the country has ignored my plight.” Come on! There’s no fucking excuse! That the genteel and parochial Dole who built his image on war heroism, would bend the knee to someone who is the very opposite of genteel and who is WAY too much of a pussy to go to war against anyone other than the crabs living in his crotch, is such an inversion of every conceivable concept of honor and dignity that a man like Dole would be expected to live up to, that it makes my head explode to think about it.
GAHHH! I really went off on a rant there, but for fuck’s sake, I can’t put it any other way.
Bob Dole seemed like a good man. But by supporting Trump, when he knew better, he demonstrated that in fact he was human garbage. Doubly so for re-election. Fuck his legacy.
Romney did not vote for Trump either time. Pretty sure Bush Sr. did not vote for him in 2016. Bush Jr. sounds like he did not vote for him both times as well. No way McCain voted for him in 2016.
I remember Bush, fils, giving very cryptic answers to a reporter regarding for whom he cast his vote in 2016, so much so that it was reasonable to assume he did not vote for Trump. Whether or not he voted for Clinton was a little harder to judge.
The way I see it, he probably thought he was saving the party - from Ted Cruz. He made the Von Hindenburg mistake, believing that a feral dog could be ultimately tamed and used as an attack dog to defend the conservative party’s causes and interests. That dog ended up owning its masters, the same way it did in late Weimar Germany.
Bob Dole is the absolute epitome of the party-over-country Republican. Wasn’t he the one who coined the phrase “My President - right or wrong” in reference to Nixon? As stated above, if he really cared about his party he would have done more to ensure it wasn’t taken over by the Trump wing, instead of just piling on the bandwagon. He endorsed Roger Marshall in the recent KS Senate race, after Marshall closely tied himself to Trump in the primary. So yeah, screw Bob Dole.
This. Kansans love Bob Dole. While Marshall defeated Barbara Bollier by 12 points and probably didn’t need Dole’s help, an endorsement by Dole for Bollier would have made a huge difference in the final outcome.
Three of the four have political bones to pick with Trump. The only one who has no link to Trump is Carter. Who is the antithesis of Trump as a human being.
This was large-scale virtue signalling before that was a thing. He knew it had no chance of success – it was purely a way to cast opponents as unpatriotic.
Yeah, the way that proposed amendment was played up you would’ve thought that flags were being burned on the scale of a California wildfire. Total stupidity.
Getting out of going to war is correct if you are a conchie. It is a completely DIFFERENT matter if you support the war but think someone ELSE should fight it for you ~ hello Robert Gordon Menzies (WWI) and George W. Bush (Vietnam).