There is really no difference between calling our national leaders "fools" or calling them "incompetents" and you do so because you want to divert attention away from ideology especially your own ideology, or lack of coherent ideology.
Consider the team that George W. Bush put together at the commencement of his administration: they were all tested, all luminaries, all extraordinarily successful men who were universally applauded in Republican circles and in many Democrats venues as well. These men were not stupid, clearly they were not fools, they were to borrow a phrase from David Halberstam, "all the best and brightest" much like the team put together by John F. Kennedy which got us deeply into Vietnam under Lyndon B. Johnson.
Today we conservatives criticize the conduct of the Vietnam war because Lyndon Johnson placed too many restrictions on the military in a failed attempt to prevent the war overwhelming his domestic policy. We criticize George Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq because he capitulated on spending domestically in order to keep the Iraq war alive. The war also ruined his administration.
How does "ideology" apply? The paleo conservative has a ready answer, tend to your own garden, said Voltaire.
Enter Donald Trump who is certainly no paleo conservative, indeed he is no conservative at all. But he is courting conservative votes so he does not want you to know that he has already turned left and will turn father left as his grasp on the nomination closes. He miscalculated just before the vote in Iowa and began his left turn a little too early but his victory in New Hampshire which confirmed polling and his walkaway lead in the polls in South Carolina have convinced Trump that he clearly has the nomination within easy reach. Accordingly, he has begun to court the left and he has not been at all discreet about showing leg to the Democrats and worse, he has brazenly attacked Republicans and other conservatives in the last debate calling, without any evidence whatsoever George Bush a liar and Ted Cruz a worse liar. His ego is so large that he believes he can blow through all these ideological traps and snares by the power of his personality so long as he keeps talking about "competence."
So Donald Trump in the debate tells us that George Bush is a liar and that he, Donald Trump, alone stood against the war in Vietnam. The problem is all the available evidence is that Trump is lying once again. He boasted that he could produce fifty exemplars in writing of his opposition to the war. He has produced none. He later recanted and said that he was not an elected politician so all his pronunciatmentos were not written down.
Trump does not attack Barack Obama for the neo-communist he is. Likewise, he praises and contributes to the political fortunes of the communist mayor DeBlasio. Immediately upon learning that Barak Obama commenced his political career in the apartment of William Ayres, we conservatives knew he was a radical leftist and probably a communist. Donald Trump has evaded effective criticism for his renegade ideology because he invites no inquiry into ideology. He tells us that if a man knows how to bribe a politician, secure government financing, obtain buildable section of property, connive with crooked union bosses, hire cheap illegal immigrant labor, he can build a building and make a billion dollar empire and, if he miscalculates, he can bankrupt the bad deals. So good is Donald Trump in causing conservatives to divert their eyes from his biography to his shiny objects that a whole segment of desperate conservatives have been seduced.
Call your adversaries "incompetent" or "liars," call them anything except "conservative" and a desperate electorate yearning for the restoration of that Shining City on the Hill will eagerly open themselves to the selection of a new Huey Long, a demagogue who will seduce conservatives by telling them what they want to hear. George Bush and the Congressional Republicans betrayed conservatism after they got elected and took office. Donald Trump is betraying conservatives even before he gets their nomination.
