Which assertion? Favorability has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m talking about.
Oh you prefer the “peace” of continual warfare. Gotcha, that’s a tried and true line of the hardcore ideologues that have destroyed the region. You base your claims on nothing but pure speculation.
A clever proposition: it doesn’t matter that no peace groups will endorse Trump, because he’s so pro-peace that the pro-peace voters are just not going to vote.
I have yet to see Trump “hammer” on Hillary on the topic of peace. I’m inclined to think that I’m not the only one who has no idea what you’re talking about.
Would a “peace” candidate be insisting he’d “bomb the shit out of ISIS” then take their oil?
Would a “peace” candidate proclaim that he’d have the military torture captives, and insist that the military had BETTER torture captives if they know what’s good for them?
Donald Trump is not a peace OR a war candidate. He’s a “Say Whatever Stupid Thing Pops Into My Head At Any Given Moment Even If It Completely Contradicts What I Said Ten Minutes Ago” candidate.
PS Why do you suppose the Iraq War’s chief architect, Dick Cheney, is strongly endorsing Trump? Think maybe Cheney knows better than anybody that Trump is a BS artist and doesn’t mean a word he says?
Because he envies his hair. [rimshot]
And besides the company Trump keeps, one has to notice how others on the right can see that it is silly to paint Trump as a dove, even the libertarians at Reason magazine know the score.
OK, if you want to be disingenuous, this assertion:
Nice job of disrespecting everyone on the board, btw. Except, of course, those who agree with that elitist attitude.
The video I posted shows Trump hammering on Clinton. Bernie Sanders hasn’t come close to anything like that.
The peace candidate would do those things if he was only considered the peace candidate because he was facing Clinton. It says a lot that the Democrats put up a big warmonger like Clinton. They are more concerned with redistribution than anything else, which is probably why Bernie shows no signs he cares about foreign policy.
Trump is not a dove. Trump is just relatively peaceful compared to Clinton. In addition, he happens to be the candidate who has made the strongest anti war statements.
Still have no idea what you’re going on about. How does “favorability” have anything to do with how gullible the many Democratic flag-wavers on this board are?
For example, one poster claimed that Hillary Clinton was more peaceful than Trump and cited her words as evidence. Apparently leaving a pile of corpses in your wake is outweighed by giving a speech while running for the nomination of Democratic Party.
What about Diane Rehm?
As pointed before you can not counteract properly the reality that trade wars eventually turn into real wars.
And the record does show that Trump really does forget what he said before the Iraq war.
WTF?! What is this, some bullshit about Benghazi?!
You’re moving the target, much like a certain Republican presumptive nominee. Your words:
This was your initial assertion, to which I replied that favorability ratings contradict that. Every major demographic of the Democratic party views Trump negatively; women, Hispanics, African-American, even white voters. As a matter of fact, the only Democrats who I’ve seen even threaten to vote for Trump are Sanders supporters disgruntled with the fact that Bernie won’t win the nomination.
You then extend that to this board, claiming that Democrats here are gullible as ‘proof’ of your original contention. (And adding to it that one radio personality, Diane Rehm, is gullible as well, a completely superfluous point.) Not only that, but you make no distinctions whatsoever, so I am left with the perception that you meant everyone on this board.
Mind you, not an ounce of evidence provided, just your (clearly) biased opinion. You’d be laughed out of any formal debate. Or am I supposed to be gullible enough to just buy your argument without proof?
I am not in favour of either Clinton or Trump, I’m just speculating what their foreign policy would be. I can’t see that either of them is a “peace” candidate. As far as I can see the choice is “more of the same old continuous warfare” (Clinton) or “Letting two regional powers go at each other and taking the risk of it escalating into something that spreads far beyond the middle east” (Trump). There is no winners here, except arms manufacturers.
Cite? I have much admiration for those who were right*** in 2002*** about the folly of invasion — they weren’t nearly as rare as often thought, though Hillary wasn’t one of them.
However, Trump didn’t oppose the invasion except in hindsight in 2004, a time when only the stupidest and stubbornest still thought it was a good decision.
That seems to be the case as others have pointed out.
Arms manufacturers win much bigger when the American government opens it purse.
You miss my point. Democrats are gullible because they believe someone like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
Libya, Iraq, Etc.
Yes. This is an important aspect when determining this year’s peace candidate, though nobody points this out for Sanders.
I watched that video. It’s clearly one of those things you find on blogs titled, “EPIC TAKEDOWN OF HILLARY!!!” in the same manner than Jon Stewart perpetrated MASSIVE TAKeDOWNS of Wall Street, George Bush, the pharmaceutical industry, the New England Patriots, the TSA, and the Kansas State Senator from the Ninth District who wrote that really dumb bill about that thing that one time. Man, Stewart took down those guys so hard that… it didn’t change anything.
Some choice quotes from that video: “I voted against [Iraq] except I was a civilian so nobody cared. From the beginning, I said it was going to destabilize the Middle East…”
Thankfully, you now acknowledge that Trump said no such thing in public. In fact, his statements were probably more pro-war than anything.
More: “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, have cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.”
Uh, wait, Clinton did vote for the war, but that doesn’t mean the war was her “decision.” The civil wars and revolutions in Syria, Egypt, and Libya, which happened when she was Secretary of State, have not cost anyone trillions of dollars. So, this is another example of how Trump can’t be counted on to say anything near the truth.
“We spent four trillion dollars, and they bomb a city, and I look, and these cities, there’s practically nothing there, and these four, five story buildings are just laying there, and they say nobody was killed… I bet you thousands and thousands were killed every time you see [unintelligible] …”
What the fuck? Who is saying that? The same news reports Trump heard about Arabs cheering in New Jersey when the WTC came down? Literally nothing about that statement is true in any way.
“Iraq is the Harvard for terrorists.”
Uh, okay, Donald. And your “military” high school is the Saudi Arabia of egomaniac know-nothings.
I sincerely hope that Trump brings all this lunacy and more to the debates. It is going to be embarrassing. I’d bet you $15 that Trump can’t name the current prime minister of Canada. I’d prefer to bet you $15 that Trump can’t string three sentences on foreign policy together without misrepresenting a verifiable fact, but I’m pretty sure that nobody would ever take me up on that bet.
I bet you $15 that the unwashed masses do not care. What matters to me is a) Trump is taking a strong antiwar stance (here). b) it is selling. That tells me a lot about how the unwashed masses are feeling. He is actually showing (feigning? I don’t care) compassion for the victims of Clinton and the rest of the gang. That is somewhere Bernie Sanders hasn’t gone, and doesn’t care to go. Most antiwar voices are coming from a strongly, let’s say utilitarian, argument against war. Not a moral argument. Trump usually is utilitarian too, but here he showed courage in mentioning the victims that the US media ignores entirely.
I hate using this terminology because the left is no longer antiwar if it ever was, but Trump is “to the left” of Clinton in certain areas besides Social Security. One is in regards to her NATO expansionist/ Russia policy. Another is in regards to her “taking out regional strongmen and creating chaos and death” policy. (Unfortunately, for Clinton these two would not be mutually exclusive.) This could cause some problems for her in the debate when she is forced to defend intervention after intervention, and she starts scaring the shit out of everyone except Marco Rubio and John Kasich.
A few notes: Clinton was a part of the US govt’s decision to invade Iraq. Period. You are nitpicking Trump’s word choice. Clinton was also the key figure in the decision to intervene in Libya and create chaos there.
Some people (e.g. those always calling for war … and those calling always for peace) take an extremist 1-dimensional view on foreign policy. (Similarly, some have 1-dimensional extremist economic or financial models.)
Others, while anxious to protect the lives of American soldiers and eager for diplomatic solutions, agree that the U.S. does sometimes have an important military role to play on the world stage: protecting its (and the world’s) political and economic interests, combating the rise of Islamist extremism, serving as a counter to possible aggressions by Russia and other players, and so on. To debate whether a specific intervention was smart or dumb would be a digression and would require much study — though certainly it would be easy to agree that the Iraq invasion was orders stupider than anything done in Libya.
On balance, it should be easy to conclude that the Clinton-42 and Obama Administrations have been very good overall on foreign policy. Clinton-44, whatever it is, should be less warlike than, say, Cruz who wanted to carpet-bomb Daesh.
A possible Trump Administration is harder to predict (what will happen if you turn over the nuclear football etc. to a megalomaniac of only average knowledge and intelligence?) but he has given some clues: He’s proposed militant neocon advisors for himself, come out in support of killing families, etc. (though like so much Trumpo-Jumbo, it all may be lies trying to appeal to his base).
TL;DR. Change the question-mark in OP title to an exclamation mark and it would make a good Onion headline.
The extent which WillFarnaby appears to be living in an entirely alternate reality is astonishing to me.
Indeed. His posting history does not allow me to take him seriously.
Iraq was worse than Libya, so far, but Clinton loved both of them, and still loves the Libya intervention. She also didn’t put up a fight when thousands of Iraqi children died as a result of Bill Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq.
The American military protects it’s own interests like any other organization. To suggest they are protecting “America’s” economic interests at large is childish.
Like the rest of the hardcore ideologues in today’s political climate, you only mention the worth of lives of American soldiers. I’m actually not too concerned with the lives of American soldiers. They made a choice to be immoral, ignorant, and/or ambitious and their chickens are coming home to roost. I’m concerned about the military’s instigation of Islamic extremism and the consequences of which we have only recently started to see. I’m also concerned about the innocent people murdered by the government many worship as a “counter” to “aggression”. Trump mentioned them. You did not and have not.