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Northern Ireland26360 Posts
On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite.
No stranger than the right’s conception of interventionism only referring to American folks being on the ground somewhere and other interactions being non-interventionist.
Notwithstanding where the rough lines were drawn to begin with on entering these conflicts in the first place.
Hey it’s all personal preference really, the US has enormous power to wield in pressuring other countries, I’d prefer they exert similar levels of pressure on the rowdy Saudis as is exerted on an Iran, but c’est la vie.
From the accounts I read the cutting loose from the Kurds was done almost as shambolically as possible, so there is that too.
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On April 13 2021 13:45 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. Leftist like the Kurds a lot and have supported their cause for decades.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with being sympathetic to the Kurds per se; they're one of the more sympathetic parties in the Middle East, warts and all. They aren't angels but neither is anyone else in the region.
But it turns out that you can drum up a whole lot of support for the kind of Iraq interventionism these same leftists claimed to oppose by framing it as "Trump bad, must stay in Iraq for years and years because of the KURDS!" and you have a brand new rallying cry for supporting another decade of blind-idiot involvement in an expensive and highly questionable military venture. Turns out that principles like non-interventionism are more loosely held than mere disdain for team red. And now that "team red" is about leaving Iraq rather than entering like it was under Bush, we have to drum up a good-sounding excuse to stay in.
The entire line of argument is a strawman anyways since the worst way to help the Kurds is for the US to continue to be involved under the pretense of "don't abandon the Kurds."
On April 13 2021 22:20 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. No stranger than the right’s conception of interventionism only referring to American folks being on the ground somewhere and other interactions being non-interventionist.
True, even if something of a whataboutism. Not the only hypocrisy around, but hopefully we could strive for better.
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On April 13 2021 20:38 Silvanel wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 13:45 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. Leftist like the Kurds a lot and have supported their cause for decades. Any decent person should be supporting their cause.
yeah basically this. left or right conceptions are kinda limiting and cloak what's important and besides the point.
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On April 13 2021 22:23 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 13:45 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. Leftist like the Kurds a lot and have supported their cause for decades. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with being sympathetic to the Kurds per se; they're one of the more sympathetic parties in the Middle East, warts and all. They aren't angels but neither is anyone else in the region. But it turns out that you can drum up a whole lot of support for the kind of Iraq interventionism these same leftists claimed to oppose by framing it as "Trump bad, must stay in Iraq for years and years because of the KURDS!" and you have a brand new rallying cry for supporting another decade of blind-idiot involvement in an expensive and highly questionable military venture. Turns out that principles like non-interventionism are more loosely held than mere disdain for team red. And now that "team red" is about leaving Iraq rather than entering like it was under Bush, we have to drum up a good-sounding excuse to stay in. Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 22:20 WombaT wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. No stranger than the right’s conception of interventionism only referring to American folks being on the ground somewhere and other interactions being non-interventionist. True, even if something of a whataboutism. Not the only hypocrisy around, but hopefully we could strive for better.
You only get a picture like that if you completely leave out everything related to ISIS. Guess that doesn't fit the narrative your trying to build.
People were against invading Iraq under false pretences about WMD's that never existed.
Once there they wanted an orderly withdraw leaving behind a functional country.
ISIS shows up in the wake of the withdraw and the US has little appetite for another war so wages it by proxy via the Kurds.
ISIS is defeated and the Kurds now find themselves up against Assad and his Russian backers.
Trumps yells "so long suckers" and leaves the Kurds to die.
Shockingly people are not ok with using the Kurds to fight ISIS and then letting them get butchered, possibly having flashbacks of other parties the US abandoned to die when they were no longer useful and how that directly lead to 9/11.
And somehow this is because the Left simply hates Republicans...
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Northern Ireland26360 Posts
On April 13 2021 22:23 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 13:45 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. Leftist like the Kurds a lot and have supported their cause for decades. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with being sympathetic to the Kurds per se; they're one of the more sympathetic parties in the Middle East, warts and all. They aren't angels but neither is anyone else in the region. But it turns out that you can drum up a whole lot of support for the kind of Iraq interventionism these same leftists claimed to oppose by framing it as "Trump bad, must stay in Iraq for years and years because of the KURDS!" and you have a brand new rallying cry for supporting another decade of blind-idiot involvement in an expensive and highly questionable military venture. Turns out that principles like non-interventionism are more loosely held than mere disdain for team red. And now that "team red" is about leaving Iraq rather than entering like it was under Bush, we have to drum up a good-sounding excuse to stay in. The entire line of argument is a strawman anyways since the worst way to help the Kurds is for the US to continue to be involved under the pretense of "don't abandon the Kurds." Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 22:20 WombaT wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. No stranger than the right’s conception of interventionism only referring to American folks being on the ground somewhere and other interactions being non-interventionist. True, even if something of a whataboutism. Not the only hypocrisy around, but hopefully we could strive for better.
Aside from the general pacifistic elements, warnings from the left were couched in not destabilising a potential powder keg of ethno-religious conflict.
On the one hand hindsight is 20/20, on the other there’s the kind of things quality journalists like Robert Fisk (RIP) were warning about over and over again in the lead up.
Not to mention the important caveat that the justification of going to war was that Saddam had WMD, not that he was a bad guy. A claim that not only turned out to be wrong, but was a claim it’s pretty plausible to argue that the people in power at that time knew to be untrue.
The wider left isn’t immune from hypocrisy in all sorts of areas but in this the general stance of ‘we fucked this up and we were against this to begin with but now we’re embroiled it’s our duty to try and stabilise it’ isn’t a particularly strange stance to hold.
Again I think I the term interventionism is a total red herring, it basically is used to refer to military endeavours and thus anything else isn’t interventionist, despite clearly being so. Blockading Cuba sure as fuck isn’t leaving them to get on with things, nor is the imposition of sanctions on Iran.
What interventionism and who’s doing it is really the question of the day I suppose. I can’t speak for everyone of a left leaning persuasion, but a targeted multilateral effort across cultural and economic lines from say, the US, Europe and the Anzac countries to push Saudi Arabia to liberalise, or China to stop their current treatment of the Uighurs would be interventionist too, but an acceptable form of it to me.
The US’s tilt under Trump was both to shaft previous allies as well as distance the country from multilateralism, the latter kind of being a crucial component of a world in which America doesn’t want to be the world’s police but yet have the world play ball.
If you want to go it alone, go it alone, but Americans clearly don’t want the downside of what that may require, if you want to be genuinely isolationist, do that but there’s zero change of the US actually doing that. If you want a network of allies and aligned countries to shoulder their part of the burden then cultivate those relationships.
Foreign policy was a giant fucking mess under Trump, mostly because he’s a fucking idiot who doesn’t know how to negotiate anything without holding much better cards, and his propensity to go for short term gain but long term pain.
Turfing out the Kurds gets a ‘we’re out of Iraq’ press conference, who’s wanting to work with the US as an ally in that region after that?
In a more concerning area, Trump’s hitching of the flag to the British Brexit movement may have helped him in the short term and with optics, given the parallels between the two. On the considerably more negative side the US now has a weaker European bloc as an ally (let’s not even talk the NATO stuff), without the U.K. and oh quel surprise the EU is making deals with the very China that Trump is positioning as the current enemy of America.
What would constitute a leftist foreign policy will diverge pretty considerably, indeed at a more fundamental level one could include things like preventing corporate evasion of tax across borders and the likes as a key component of that. A leftist foreign policy beyond that I’m not sure it looks necessarily but leftism isn’t synonymous with pacifism in this regard.
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On April 13 2021 23:03 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 22:23 LegalLord wrote:On April 13 2021 13:45 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. Leftist like the Kurds a lot and have supported their cause for decades. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with being sympathetic to the Kurds per se; they're one of the more sympathetic parties in the Middle East, warts and all. They aren't angels but neither is anyone else in the region. But it turns out that you can drum up a whole lot of support for the kind of Iraq interventionism these same leftists claimed to oppose by framing it as "Trump bad, must stay in Iraq for years and years because of the KURDS!" and you have a brand new rallying cry for supporting another decade of blind-idiot involvement in an expensive and highly questionable military venture. Turns out that principles like non-interventionism are more loosely held than mere disdain for team red. And now that "team red" is about leaving Iraq rather than entering like it was under Bush, we have to drum up a good-sounding excuse to stay in. On April 13 2021 22:20 WombaT wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. No stranger than the right’s conception of interventionism only referring to American folks being on the ground somewhere and other interactions being non-interventionist. True, even if something of a whataboutism. Not the only hypocrisy around, but hopefully we could strive for better. You only get a picture like that if you completely leave out everything related to ISIS. Guess that doesn't fit the narrative your trying to build. People were against invading Iraq under false pretences about WMD's that never existed. Once there they wanted an orderly withdraw leaving behind a functional country. ISIS shows up in the wake of the withdraw and the US has little appetite for another war so wages it by proxy via the Kurds. ISIS is defeated and the Kurds now find themselves up against Assad and his Russian backers. Trumps yells "so long suckers" and leaves the Kurds to die. Shockingly people are not ok with using the Kurds to fight ISIS and then letting them get butchered, possibly having flashbacks of other parties the US abandoned to die when they were no longer useful and how that directly lead to 9/11. And somehow this is because the Left simply hates Republicans...
This seems like a complete and utter non-sequitur.
It's true that there was a terrorist organization called ISIS, and that an ethnic group called the Kurds, spread out in a breakaway region somewhere between Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, were one of the more effective groups that combated ISIS' advance. It's also true that the US gave material support to said Kurds as part of its strategy to combat ISIS. It's also true that ISIS is mostly defeated at this point, rendering this entire line of commentary pretty moot relative to the more historic and relevant conflict of the Kurdish breakaway region in that area and the opposition of those four regional governments to its existence. And of course, rather than being "up against Assad and his Russian backers," the Kurds negotiate a peace with these groups in the absence of US involvement.
Under no administration has the US advocated for the recognition of the Kurdish breakaway state, nor has the US ever been a particularly meaningful mediator for conflict between the Kurds and Syria, Iraq, Iran, or Turkey. The US still considers the Kurdish faction in Turkey (PKK) to be a terrorist organization, for one. So what is the "don't abandon the Kurds" war cry but a trumped up excuse for more interventionism in response to Trump making the sensible-for-once decision to implement a highly popular withdrawal from the region?
When principles are more loosely held than a general sense of "stick it to team red," you can be opposed to Iraq involvement under Bush but suddenly be strongly in favor of Iraq involvement the moment Trump actually acts on the promise to withdraw. Just make up an excuse like "support the Kurds" paying little heed to how helpful that involvement is to said Kurds.
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Northern Ireland26360 Posts
I’m a tad biased given where I’m from, the US can lend its considerable heft to help get scenarios if not 100% resolved, at least considerably improved when the will is there.
That will seems rather lacking when a proportion of the population isn’t going ‘I’m 185th Irish, but I don’t get what these brown folks are going for’ mind.
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On April 14 2021 00:00 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2021 22:23 LegalLord wrote:On April 13 2021 13:45 Liquid`Drone wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. Leftist like the Kurds a lot and have supported their cause for decades. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with being sympathetic to the Kurds per se; they're one of the more sympathetic parties in the Middle East, warts and all. They aren't angels but neither is anyone else in the region. But it turns out that you can drum up a whole lot of support for the kind of Iraq interventionism these same leftists claimed to oppose by framing it as "Trump bad, must stay in Iraq for years and years because of the KURDS!" and you have a brand new rallying cry for supporting another decade of blind-idiot involvement in an expensive and highly questionable military venture. Turns out that principles like non-interventionism are more loosely held than mere disdain for team red. And now that "team red" is about leaving Iraq rather than entering like it was under Bush, we have to drum up a good-sounding excuse to stay in. The entire line of argument is a strawman anyways since the worst way to help the Kurds is for the US to continue to be involved under the pretense of "don't abandon the Kurds." On April 13 2021 22:20 WombaT wrote:On April 13 2021 10:34 LegalLord wrote:
It's strange how "don't abandon the Kurds" turns out to be the modern left-leaning cry for a more interventionist foreign policy after many years of allegedly campaigning for the opposite. No stranger than the right’s conception of interventionism only referring to American folks being on the ground somewhere and other interactions being non-interventionist. True, even if something of a whataboutism. Not the only hypocrisy around, but hopefully we could strive for better. Aside from the general pacifistic elements, warnings from the left were couched in not destabilising a potential powder keg of ethno-religious conflict. On the one hand hindsight is 20/20, on the other there’s the kind of things quality journalists like Robert Fisk (RIP) were warning about over and over again in the lead up. Not to mention the important caveat that the justification of going to war was that Saddam had WMD, not that he was a bad guy. A claim that not only turned out to be wrong, but was a claim it’s pretty plausible to argue that the people in power at that time knew to be untrue. The wider left isn’t immune from hypocrisy in all sorts of areas but in this the general stance of ‘we fucked this up and we were against this to begin with but now we’re embroiled it’s our duty to try and stabilise it’ isn’t a particularly strange stance to hold. ... What would constitute a leftist foreign policy will diverge pretty considerably, indeed at a more fundamental level one could include things like preventing corporate evasion of tax across borders and the likes as a key component of that. A leftist foreign policy beyond that I’m not sure it looks necessarily but leftism isn’t synonymous with pacifism in this regard.
Going to cut out a lot of this since the entire "Trump general foreign policy" is an aside, though one I can sympathize with on some level.
The problem with a "we shouldn't have gotten into it, but since we did, we should stay in" argument is at least two-fold. One, it seems an awful lot like a backdoor justification for exactly what Bush advocated for (stay in Iraq for 40 years) and that Obama notionally opposed before and during his presidency, so if it's a principle it's only one that became convenient to acknowledge in the context of sticking it to Trump. And two, the benefits of US being involved in the region to promoting peace is questionable at best. None of this is to say that the Republican / conservative / Trump approach is better (it's most certainly worse), but that doesn't justify the Democrats' flip-flopping.
At some point you just have to acknowledge the hypocrisy of a position that has surface-level appeal but doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
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Seeing the Obama's cozy up with George Bush should make Democrats seriously question how sincere the Democrat party was about its opposition (or how bothered they were by the death and torture at Bush's order).
Hillary and Biden both supported the invasion, Biden rather enthusiastically in the lead up to the war as well.
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It's almost like the Obama's can't like a person and not like his political leanings at the same time.
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United States43677 Posts
On April 14 2021 00:50 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
It's almost like the Obama's can't like a person and not like his political leanings at the same time.
I’m not convinced by this because Bush can’t be separated by his policies. Bush isn’t someone who supported shitty policies, he’s someone who enacted them. That’s a whole different thing. It’s like the difference between some internet edgelord saying that marital rape should be allowed and a rapist.
Personally I don’t think you should be friends with either but let’s not conflate someone who thinks that torturing suspected terrorists for information is justifiable and the guy signing the orders to tear out people’s fingernails. They’re not the same.
If there is a hell there’s a special room waiting for Dubya. If no hell exists then a just God would be working on building one for him.
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On April 14 2021 00:58 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2021 00:50 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
It's almost like the Obama's can't like a person and not like his political leanings at the same time. I’m not convinced by this because Bush can’t be separated by his policies. Bush isn’t someone who supported shitty policies, he’s someone who enacted them. That’s a whole different thing. It’s like the difference between some internet edgelord saying that marital rape should be allowed and a rapist. Personally I don’t think you should be friends with either but let’s not conflate someone who thinks that torturing suspected terrorists for information is justifiable and the guy signing the orders to tear out people’s fingernails. They’re not the same. If there is a hell there’s a special room waiting for Dubya. If no hell exists then a just God would be working on building one for him.
I don't harbor any goodwill towards the man in any capacity whatsoever. But at the same time, I can think "R Kelly makes great fucking music" and "R Kelly has some serious sexual assault issues that need intervention and jail time."
While I think there should be war crimes issued for a false pretense to a war, I don't think Bush himself, devoid of his political nature and actions, is a bad person. Just a gullible fool who let Cheney and his warmongering Rs dictate all of his policy.
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This discussion reminds me of what I take to be a pretty flagrant problem with commonplace logic as it pertains to beliefs and statements. There's a neat and tidy attractive quality to the notion that people can be understood separately from what they say or believe, and the same goes for concepts themselves; people frequently claim to support particular ideas without any accounting for either the genealogy of those ideas or their epistemic proximity to other ideas. It's that tendency to partition beliefs, ideas, and the people who hold them that can lead to all sorts of awful shit, a contemporary example being the idea among Trump voters that they need not account for the fact that people with swastikas tattoo'd on their body also voted for the same guy. Long termers will recall we had similar discussions with xDaunt regarding his support for white cultural supremacist ideas combined with his refusal to account for either the awful people that shared them or the awful historical events that turned on their acceptance among groups.
I know what someone like GH would say to all that with reference to what liberals will excuse as far as Obama drone bombing tons of innocent people and the like, and to be fair, that's a compelling point that shows there's no easy alternative to the casuistry we all must partake in as we try to make sense of what we support and why. Nevertheless, it's high time we start acknowledging that ideological proximity and association are not things we can simply wave away on principle, they need to be wrestled with in public ways that show others it is important to understand how interconnected everything is.
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United States43677 Posts
On April 14 2021 01:12 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2021 00:58 KwarK wrote:On April 14 2021 00:50 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
It's almost like the Obama's can't like a person and not like his political leanings at the same time. I’m not convinced by this because Bush can’t be separated by his policies. Bush isn’t someone who supported shitty policies, he’s someone who enacted them. That’s a whole different thing. It’s like the difference between some internet edgelord saying that marital rape should be allowed and a rapist. Personally I don’t think you should be friends with either but let’s not conflate someone who thinks that torturing suspected terrorists for information is justifiable and the guy signing the orders to tear out people’s fingernails. They’re not the same. If there is a hell there’s a special room waiting for Dubya. If no hell exists then a just God would be working on building one for him. I don't harbor any goodwill towards the man in any capacity whatsoever. But at the same time, I can think "R Kelly makes great fucking music" and "R Kelly has some serious sexual assault issues that need intervention and jail time." While I think there should be war crimes issued for a false pretense to a war, I don't think Bush himself, devoid of his political nature and actions, is a bad person. Just a gullible fool who let Cheney and his warmongering Rs dictate all of his policy.
I don’t think there’s anyone who can simultaneously become President and not be competent enough to be held accountable for their decisions as President. You don’t accidentally become the President. But either way we’re not talking about naivety or intelligence, the issue of torture is a strictly moral one. I know people with mental disabilities who could correctly answer the question of whether you should hurt people. It’s not about being a fool, it’s about being evil. A fool says no, an evil man says yes. He could, of course, be both but he can’t not be evil.
The comparison with liking an artist vs liking the art doesn’t apply either because the complaint was that Obama likes the artist. It’s not like Obama thinks R Kelly’s music still has value despite R Kelly being a child abuser. It’s like Obama wants to hang out with R Kelly and talk about the good times they had with children.
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Norway28761 Posts
On April 14 2021 00:58 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2021 00:50 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
It's almost like the Obama's can't like a person and not like his political leanings at the same time. I’m not convinced by this because Bush can’t be separated by his policies. Bush isn’t someone who supported shitty policies, he’s someone who enacted them. That’s a whole different thing. It’s like the difference between some internet edgelord saying that marital rape should be allowed and a rapist. Personally I don’t think you should be friends with either but let’s not conflate someone who thinks that torturing suspected terrorists for information is justifiable and the guy signing the orders to tear out people’s fingernails. They’re not the same. If there is a hell there’s a special room waiting for Dubya. If no hell exists then a just God would be working on building one for him.
Rehabilitating Dubya is Trump's most impressive achievement.
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On April 14 2021 01:59 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2021 00:58 KwarK wrote:On April 14 2021 00:50 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
It's almost like the Obama's can't like a person and not like his political leanings at the same time. I’m not convinced by this because Bush can’t be separated by his policies. Bush isn’t someone who supported shitty policies, he’s someone who enacted them. That’s a whole different thing. It’s like the difference between some internet edgelord saying that marital rape should be allowed and a rapist. Personally I don’t think you should be friends with either but let’s not conflate someone who thinks that torturing suspected terrorists for information is justifiable and the guy signing the orders to tear out people’s fingernails. They’re not the same. If there is a hell there’s a special room waiting for Dubya. If no hell exists then a just God would be working on building one for him. Rehabilitating Dubya is Trump's most impressive achievement.
It's not really Trump's doing since we got garbage like "Bush is smarter than you" being pushed by the mainstream since well before Trump. The first Republican to push a strategy that diverged significantly from Bush orthodoxy made the establishment feel comfortable putting Bush back into their circle of friends as they had long wanted to.
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EPT
