Posted on 10/07/2014 2:27:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Republican Party has played Marley’s Ghost for the past half-dozen years, dragging behind it the sins of the foreign-policy utopians who persuaded George W. Bush to bet the farm on nation-building in the Middle East. Bush’s 2004 Second Inaugural, written with the help of the Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol and the Washington Post‘s Charles Krauthammer, was the high-water mark of foreign-policy overreach and the cusp of Republican fortunes. By the 2006 congressional elections, the electorate had had enough, and the public’s disgust with the pointless sacrifice of blood and treasure helped propel the junior senator from Illinois into the White House. The Bushies who blundered so badly–occupying Iraq, pushing for the West Bank elections won by Hamas, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against the Egyptian military–are still fighting for what is left of their reputations. And their greatest fear is that a Republican leader will come along untainted by their mistakes, and able to admit what we Republicans should have admitted years ago: the Bush administration made some big mistakes.
That leader is Sen. Ted Cruz, who said Sept. 24,
I think we stayed too long, and we got far too involved in nation-building…. We should not be trying to turn Iraq into Switzerland.
Cruz is a foreign policy hard-liner, not an isolationist, but he is a tough-minded realist in a party contaminated by the ideological impulse to export America’s political system to the Middle East. His way of looking at things is close to that of the original Reagan foreign policy team, for example, Prof. Angelo Codevilla, whose new book I reviewed recently. Codevilla argued that “U.S. viceroys spent most of a decade fruitlessly trying to negate the Shias’, Sunnis’, and Kurds’ democratically expressed mutual antagonism.” The much-lauded “surge” “consisted of turning over to Sunni insurgents the tribal areas into which the Shia were pushing them. Rather than defeating them, the U.S. government began arming them.” And the result: “After a bloody decade, Iraq ended up divided along ancient ethno-religious fault lines but more mutually bitter.”
Codevilla was one of the architects of the Strategic Defense Initiative that helped win the Cold War, and his views are shared by other key members of the Reagan team, for example, my old mentor at the Reagan National Security Council, Dr. Norman A. Bailey. When Sen. Cruz calls his foreign policy “Reaganite,” he can claim agreement with key Reagan aides.
That explains why the neo-conservatives are throwing mud at him. If Cruz is right, the Republican Party doesn’t need them any more. As Eliana Johnson points out at National Review, Kristol et. al. have signed on with Marco Rubio. The neo-cons detest Cruz, Johnson reports:
Cruz has repeatedly said he embraces a Reaganite foreign policy. He made headlines in recent weeks for walking out of an event when a group of Arab Christians booed his vocal defense of Israel, and he has used his seat on the Armed Services Committee to travel abroad during his time in office. But those [neo-conservatives] I spoke with were, across the board, unimpressed. They universally characterized his worldview as shallow, opportunistic, and ever shifting to where he perceives the base of the party to be.
Hilariously, the Washington Post‘s resident neo-con, Jennifer Rubin, quotes the above neo-con appraisal as purported evidence that Cruz really is shallow and opportunistic. In a screed titled, “Ted Cruz is Morphing into Sarah Palin,” Rubin cites Eliana Johnson as an authority, when Johnson merely quoted Rubin’s neo-conservative friends. Ms. Rubin really needs an editor. Here we have the neo-cons quoting the neo-cons to demonstrate that anyone who disagrees with them must do so for stupid or wicked motives. These are people who live in a little world of their own imagining.
Otherwise Ms. Rubin swings her handbag wildly at the Texas senator:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is fast becoming the king of useless fights and empty gestures. First came his destructive government shutdown gambit. Then came his half-baked idea for fighting the Islamic State. Then he set up a showy albeit unnecessary confrontation with a Christian group, managing to be the only one on the right these days magnifying differences between Jews and Christians.
The latter claim is a nasty misrepresentation of Cruz’s principled stand on behalf of the state of Israel, as I wrote in this space recently.
All this is cheap and dirty. The neo-cons will not (and cannot) take on the conservative foreign policy sages who don’t believe in their fairy-dust approach to nation-building. Instead, they vilify Cruz as an opportunist. It is true, to be sure, that the base of the party has had enough of the neo-cons, but the fact that Sen. Cruz appeals to the base of the party is not by itself evidence of opportunism. It might be evidence of electability. The American electorate does not have oracular powers, but it is not entirely stupid, either. Americans revolted against the sacrifices demanded of it in pursuit of nation-building abroad, and were right to do so.
Does anyone remember the foreign policy debate during the 2012 presidential election? Mitt Romney sat through it like a punching bag, terrified to defend the disastrous Bush record on foreign policy. Foreign policy alone did not lose the election for Romney, to be sure (his silver-spoon arrogance reflected in the 47% gaffe probably sank him). Nonetheless, the Marley’s Ghost syndrome weighed on Republican fortunes in 2012. It’s time to remove the chain. With it, though, will perish foundation funding, donor grants, think-tank jobs, television gigs, editorial positions and other perks that the leftovers of the last Republican administration still enjoy. No doubt Sen. Cruz will take a lot more incoming fire. He has one advantage over his neo-con critics, though: He is talking sense, and they are defending the indefensible.
As a matter of record, I argued in this space that Sen. Cruz showed tactical brilliance in the 2013 budget standoff, long before the foreign policy debate erupted. Apart from observing that he had been a star student of my friend Robert P. George at Princeton, I hadn’t followed his career closely. Now Sen. Cruz has my undivided attention. Perhaps we have a Republican leader with the intelligence, background and self-confidence to lead the party out of the Bush morass.
Dont vote dem. The Bushes gave us their boy Obama
A vote for third is a vote for Hillary eek eek eek A vote for third is a vote for Hillary eek eek eek A vote for third is a vote for Hillary eek eek eek A vote for third is a vote for Hillary eek eek eek A vote for third is a vote for Hillary eek eek eek A vote for third is a vote for Hillary eek eek eek.. LOL Did I sound PartyBot Shill Monkey enough?
I wanted to be the first one in the thread to sing that old reliable "our guy stinks" standard from the old party song book. LOL. It's real good for using when the Sears and Roebuck catalog runs out.
That is not true. GHW Bush was an opponent but did not attack Regan. Cruz needs to be a team player. He can not win on his own. Nor can any other conservative for that matter. That is why democrats win because they do not eat their own.
And the "Bushies" aren't the actual Bush team, they're the people "Spengler" disagrees with about some points of foreign policy, so the title doesn't give correct info about what's going on in the article.
I suspect that in practice Ted and the Bushes aren't all that far apart on foreign policy. "Spengler" plays up rhetorical differences but ignores the similarities.
But in terms of electoral politics (which the article is not about), is it really realistic to attack Bush and expect "Bushies" won't fire back?
Dude/Dudette, sarcasm is not your strength. You’re NOT being effective in defense of all thing Bush.
But keep trying if that’s your want.
And when you defend the Bushes, be sure to reemphasize that they firmly believe that Islam is the “Religion of Peace” and that America is well served by having an open southern border policy. That will add to your believability.
Booshies = SHAMNESTY. 100% Liberals.
Actually they win because we have a press with no integrity who hides all their faults and inflates our missteps.
Oh, and election fraud.
The first order of business should be to destroy Karl Rove and McCain, along with their left wing political advisors. Represent them as the traitors and losers that they are. Make them radioactive.
“The original Bushies attacked Ronald Reagan.”
They coined the phrase “voodoo economics.”
Right, and implied Reagan was not compassionate, while they were “compassionate conservatives.”
They want to destroy the GOP and re-make the GOP-e remnant into a new Whig party.
The fascist elites have promised members of the GOP-e that they could retain all their personal rights, perks, and privileges a member of a permanent minority party. They would just play the part of the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters.
I said the Bushies attacked Reagan, not Bush himself.
Bul#%^st
“Mohammedan societies are primitive, savage, and parasitic.”
“Iraq established its education system in 1921, offering both public and private paths. In the early 1970s, education became public and free at all levels, and mandatory at the primary level. The Ministry of Education was in charge of pre-school, primary, secondary, and vocational education, while the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research [MOHSR] is in charge of tertiary education and research centers.
“From 1970-1984, there was almost complete gender parity in enrollment, illiteracy among 15-45 age group declined to less than 10%, dropout/repetition rates were the lowest in the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] region, spending in Education reached 6% of Gross National Product [GNP] and 20% of Iraq’s total government budget.
“Today, illiteracy is widespread in comparison with before, standing at 39% for the rural population. Almost 22% of the adult population in Iraq has never attended school, and a mere 9% have secondary school as highest level completed. As far as gender equity, 47% of women in Iraq are either fully or partly illiterate, as women’s education suffers from differences across regions, and especially between the North and South.”
“The US, with some UN assistance, has carried out a massive rehabilitation of Iraq’s educational system, but the nation is only slowly recovering from 40 years of misrule, three wars and the collapse of its educational infrastructure.”
Pardon me but you must have been asleep here in 2005 when Travis McGee (a better known freeper than mere me)and myself and many others were zotted at the behest of the Harpies I already alluded to
I’ve let bygones be bygones after a year off but I can’t erase my memory
You can Google if you must....its all well preserved
Some of us came back after the Mad Ivan WideAwakes exodus
They can hate on Cruz all they like. You don’t fight just the fights you can win. If you know you are going to win its not a fight. The left has never looked at things that way. They push, they get in your face, they lie, they threaten and force their way into a chink in the armor and just keep pushing. If we don’t have someone countering the leftist messaging of the media and fighting the good fight then we have already lost.
I will fully be supporting TED CRUZ....ALL THE WAY TO THE WHITE HOUSE.
“Bushie” — see also “RINO”.
Christ Like?
No man. What conservatives want is someone who is pro american. bushes are open borders guys. Democrats advocate for americans to die fast. bushes advocate for americans to die slow.
that’s about it.
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