Look at Dubya....he was a Republican wartime president and did pretty well in handling 9/11 and Afghanistan. Then he went after Iraq; the left went bat guano crazy against that war. Many Republicans defended the President AND that war effort, reflexively. Only years later did many of us retract our knee-jerk defense of the President, but the reality is we defended him (in large part) because we didn't want to give the left an edge. It is arguable that HAD we called balls and strikes in Iraq that Lurch would have won, and thus that makes defending Dubya a political decision. And that's ok, but let's be honest about it.
We just saw this with Coronavirus. Many people debated cogently the merits of partial shut downs - but shut downs spawned draconian statism. While it's hard to remember, but things weren't exactly clear as day three months ago - Wayne Allen Root put it best:
I have many great friends and guests on my national TV and radio shows who are medical experts. Half believe this is the pandemic to end all pandemics. They quote Centers for Disease Control and Prevention models that report as many as 1.7 million Americans could die. So people are rightfully scared out of their minds. American business is shutting down. But the other half of my medical friends and expert guests say this is an overreaction. They predict fewer Americans will die than during the flu season of 2017-18 that killed about 80,000 people. They don't believe we need to close down American business and lock ourselves in our homes. The problem is we won't know who's right until it's over.
I suspect many people talked down any technical merits of even a risk-based shut down because that seemed to make them philosophical allies of the leftist scum who shut down the nation out of political desires and didn't give a rip about commerce or health.
So yea, George Floyd wasn't a great dude. He was intoxicated with fentanyl when he died. But that doesn't excuse his death at the hands of Derek Chauvin. Protesting peacefully is Constituionally-guaranteed right. The rioters and arsonists are criminals and many people of good will undoubtedly smiled when they heard that a rioter trying to blow up an ATM became a Darwin Award recipient.
It's a mad, mad state of affairs. May God have mercy on us.
You and I are on the same page with this except I think it’s too early to say if he was killed by Chauvin. It looks like he was, I agree. But then, It looked like those cops that beat King would easily be found guilty in a criminal court of law. They weren’t. And it was because the Jury saw stuff the rest of us didn’t.
I firmly believe the same thing is going on here, but it remains to be seen what will happen. I’m not saying Chauvin is innocent. My crime seems to be refusing to say he’s guilty until a jury says so.
Personally, I think he’s a thug. But then, that is because I think that that is the only way a cop could survive as a cop in that neighborhood. So there is that...
I have no objections to the invasion of Iraq, or the reasons used to justify it. The invasion went fine. The massive screw up was when George W Bush allowed Paul Bremer to make something I consider to be one of the stupid decisions of which I had ever heard.
Bush allowed Bremer to disband the Iraqi army and ban all past Bathe party members from holding employment in the government. When I first heard this idea, I started screaming at my radio. "You idiots! Do you not know this will take the very most dangerous people in Iraq who do not currently hate us, and make them into our blood enemy that will not rest until they have driven us out? "
It was the stupidest possible thing we could have done. We did not even do that to the Nazis in Germany. Our policy was "If you aren't proven to be involved in crimes or war crimes, we will allow former Nazis to continue doing their jobs with no further trouble to them. "
*THAT* was the common sense way to deal with the problem. Disbanding the Iraqi Army (which employed many many bathists.) denied income to people and left them with free time to plot revenge. The Sunnis were the most dangerous people in Iraq, and with that stupid blunder, we convinced them that we were their enemy and that it was in their best interests to kill us in any manner they could.
I think the bombs started going off a couple of days after this idiotic announcement by Paul Bremer. It turned into exactly the disaster I thought it would.