You call the charge (That Trump both agrees with, and echoes) “Bush Lied People Died” a “pragmatic opposition”?
There are plenty of reasons to oppose the Iraq war, many of them not only valid but logical as well, but basing the opposition to the war on the spittle-lipped, vile, unhinged dogma of Code Pink and MoveOn.org are not included in those reasons.
And that is precisely what people like me take issue with Donald Trump (and Code Pink) on.
We're back on optics. I don't know if Bush lied. To lie he'd have to have known his arguments for the war were false and made them anyway. It's entirely possible that Bush believed every word of it.
My argument is that with Iraq now an Islamist breeding ground Trump's opposition to the invasion at the time, as well as his continued criticism, only helps him.
Whether you like it or not W's war, the signature accomplishment of his administration, is unpopular and widely seen as a failure. No matter how much pro-war propaganda the neoconservative think tanks generate they've had no more luck convincing the public to support the war (and future wars they'd like to launch) than Jeb has had gaining votes.
The crux of Trump's distancing himself from Bush and the Iraq invasion is that it cuts him loose from the anchor that's been dragging the GOP down for a decade. Never mind Code Pink, outside the far right and far left no one even remembers them. Trump is riding the wave of popular opinion and it will help him beat the GOP establishment that never met a war or an amnesty that it didn't like.