David Brooks and his fellow travelers.

The BBQ Pit
1

“There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.”

—David Brooks

I’m against Trump, spare me please.

Again, I’m against Trump, I view his victory as a worst case scenario among plausible scenarios.

The worst thing that the government has done in many years was the Iraq War of George W. Bush. This is likely going to be a true statement even if Trump wins and serves 8 years. David Brooks loved the Iraq war. It was the greatest thing ever for him and the many Republicans and hawkish Democrats that are appalled by Trump and suggest that supporting him will be akin to support for Hitler.

80 years hence, if someone’s great-great grandchildren discover that they supported the Iraq war and provided cover to its supporters, I surely hope that this will make the little bastards squirm much more than if they discovered a Trump supporter.

The fact that over a decade later, the chearleaders of the Iraq War are still not ashamed to show their face in public is a failure of our society’s morality. They still occupy influential posts in government and media, and almost to a man are unrepentant.

A lot of this is tied up with America’s military worship. In history this period is going to be identified by that characteristic.

The idea that supporters of a blowhard xenophobe should be ashamed? Ok. How about the millions of people killed, maimed, displaced, oppressed, and driven into poverty by the comfy suburbanites of the United States War Party? David Brooks and the Never Trumpers are the people who should be exiled. Nearly all of them supported the Iraq War. Many of them don’t support Trump because of his occasional peaceful statement.

David Brooks, leave us alone and write your apology to your future grandchildren…or one of the now living victims of your disregard for life.

2

That’s silly. Most people had good if erroneous reasons to support the Iraq War. They believed that there were weapons of mass destruction, because they were lied to. Only a select few who lied bear blame.

There are no good reasons to be a Trump supporter. There is no one successfully lying about who he is or what he supports. To support him shows a lot of bad things about you.

Being a Trump supporter is far, far worse than having supported the Iraq war back in the day, even if you believe the Iraq War was worse. (I personally am not so convinced that we wouldn’t get a worse war out of a Trump White House. He wants to ignore NATO allies and wants nukes on the table.)

3

Even if you bought the lies-dubious- still are to blame for cheerleading war.

Hm death or mean words. I choose mean words.

4

This.

WillFarnaby is essentially putting the liars and the Lied-to on exactly the same footing. This is wrong.

5

This from the moron who calls Trump the Peace Candidate.

6

I don’t really find either objectively worse, given the likely global clusterfuck that would occur in the event of a Trump presidency, but believing lies is not a sufficient excuse for supporting the Iraq War. A significant contingent of people knew they were lies and repeatedly pointed out that they were lies, and those people were ignored by people who were aching for revenge at the expense of common sense. I was just a young adult, 18, 19 years old, when all the 911/Iraq War shit went down, and even I saw the writing on the wall.

7

Trump’s pushing seventy, there must have been some time in his life that he pondered the advantages of not blowing things up. Even more so when those things are people. But I don’t think he has a center, no core.

Sure that he has his moments. They are moments.

8

Well, we can be sure that if he started a war, it would be terrific. It would be, like the best war ever!

9

As much as I hate to be a nattering nabob of negativity, I don’t believe it’s ever been more than a supposition/presumption that Bush lied to get us into the war. Proof, if such exists, would be helpful.

10

Still holding out hope those WMD’s will be found?

11

Nope. Brooks and his gang are unrepentant. It has been known for years that they were lies, yet they double down on their evil destruction of society.

12

Thanks for your excellent contribution, as usual. Keep trying.

13

You make it too easy. It’s like being Barry Bonds at a slow-pitch baseball game.

14

I’ve never seen proof of what Bush knew. Do you at least agree that the Bush Administration as an entity lied?

15

Uh, not to belabor the point, but know to whom?

At the time of the war most of the world’s major powers (via their intelligence agencies) believed Iraq to possess WMDs. This included China, Russia, France, England and the U.S. Saddam Hussein himself took pains to create this belief to gain greater power and influence in the region, and he’d used them in the past against his own citizens.

And yet according to the left, Bush, in a supposedly brilliant stroke of Machiavellian genius, knew all this wasn’t true and yet still masterfully misled Congress and the American people and a fair number of our international allies into attacking Iraq on the basis of a lie he concocted for no reason other than to attack it, all while being the most stupid man ever elected to the presidency.

Again I ask, where’s the proof that “Bush lied”?

16

That was quite a thought provoking OP. Should I attack the gutless and honesty-challenged David Brooks or the crackpot WillFarnaby?

I can’t decide!

17

Here is a timeline of the Bush administration’s efforts to go to war with Iraq.

It contains public statements by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfield &etc about the push to attack Saddam Hussein (some of which only became common knowledge later on.)
It begins in the early 90’s with the first Gulf War. At that time, Cheney and his friends didn’t want any nation building in Iraq. Later in the decade, Cheney (who, you’ll recall, was connected with oil company Haliburton,) created a group called the Americans who made going to war with Iraq a political priority. Cheney in particular began scoping out the Iraq oilfields.

To this end, Cheney hooked up with a con-man named Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was an Iraqi politician who fed Cheney info on Iraq’s efforts to acquire WMDs and other justifications for attacking Saddam Hussein. Chalabi’s info, which was passed on to the others in the Bush admin, was discovered to be almost entirely falsified. Further evidence has since emerged that Chalabi was an Iranian agent, bent on causing problems for the US.

Regardless of Chalabi’s dulplicity, Bush himself was always intent on going to war. Chalabi just provided the excuses. Going to war with Iraq was the subject of George Bush’s very first National Security Meeting.

George W. Bush would go on to make multiple statements about his serious wish to attack Saddam Hussein:

I’m stopping here because the dog wants out but I could go on.

I’m tried to limit that list to just things that Bush said, but if you view the whole list, you’ll see that a) Bush personally and repeatedly made false claims about the threat that Iraq posed and b) he also lied repeatedly about his plans to the American public.

Do read the whole link. It includes the lies told by other Bush admin members as well as pushback from other sources about the weakness of the Bush case versus Iraq.

George W. Bush was not the only liar pushing the Iraq war, but he managed the team, he called the shots, and he was right in there, taking his at-bats.

18

Tell us more about how Hillary is peaceful because it’s on her campaign website.

19

The facts were well known at the time, and many many of us were literally screaming them. Those who wanted to go to war anyway decided not to listen. They can not now use the excuse that they were lied to by a small cabal of scapegoats. They share complicity and have no hope of future vindication.

20

Never said Bush lied. I said they were lies. Someone lied, it’s know to everyone now, and Brooks and Co. still love the destruction of a society.