Month: July 2016

Disco Donald the 70s throwback


by digby

Donald Trump gave a speech yesterday to announce in the wake of the Dallas mass shooting that he is a big supporter of the men and women in blue.  This is not news to some of us. I’ve been writing about his affinity for the police and long term desire for them to be allowed to do whatever it takes to keep order since the beginning of his campaign. It’s not just his infamous full-page ad in 1989 calling for the death penalty to be reinstated to execute young men who later turned out to be innocent that leads one to that conclusion. Throughout the past year he’s made it clear that he believes the police do not have enough power. This is from August of 2015:

Trump: We have to give the power back to the police because crime is rampant and I’m a big person that believes in very… we need police and we need protection.

Chuck Todd: Can you understand why African Americans don’t trust the police?

Trump: Well I can see it when I see what’s going on but at the same time we have to give power back to the police because we have to have law and order.

He meets regularly with police groups to tell them he plans to set them free:

You’re not recognized properly, you will be recognized properly if I win. Remember that. We know what you’re going through. You speak a little bit rough to somebody and all of sudden you end up fighting for your job.

The tragic events in Dallas are tailor made for Trump’s pitch. Yesterday, he made it explicitly:

The attack on our Dallas police is an attack on our country. Our whole nation is in mourning and will be for a very long time. Yet we’ve also seen increasing threats against our police and a substantial rise in the number of officers killed in the line of duty. Very big rise. America’s police and law enforcement personnel are what separates civilization from total chaos and the destruction of our country as we know it.

We must remember that police are needed the most where crime is the highest. Politicians and activists who seek to remove police or policing from a community are hurting the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. It’s time for hostilies against police and against all members to end and end immediately. Right now.

He then digressed into a weird discussion of how the soldiers in the Vietnam era were “victims of harassment and political agendas” (an urban myth, but whatever) and said that is a daily reality for police even though we must make sure that we do “a lotta work” to make sure that events such as those that took place in Minnesota and Louisiana don’t happen. He quoted some crime statistics from Chicago and concluded with this:

Our inner cities have been left totally behind and I’m going to fight to make sure that every citizen in our country has a safe home, a safe school and a safe community. We must maintain law and order at the highest order.

I am the law and order candidate.

I have often thought that Trump’s worldview was completely formed by the mid-70s and hasn’t evolved since. (He hasn’t even changed his hairstyle, which was a standard cut for squares trying to be “with it” during that era.) So it’s not surprising that he would harken back to the days of Richard Nixon for his campaign. It’s certainly not the first time he’s done it. When he began his campaign he leaned heavily on the old Nixon slogan “the silent majority.”

The “law and order” trope also comes from Nixon (and George Wallace, another 60’s icon who apparently made an impression on the youthful Trump.) This was noted by a number of commentators after yesterday’s speech but they seemed to believe that his concern for the inner city set him apart from Nixonian dogwhistling. Indeed many people seem to be under the impression that conservative talk about keeping communities of color safe is a modern approach signifying some kind of raised consciousness. That is anything but the truth.

In 1968 the country was in turmoil, with massive protests, urban riots and political assassinations. Nixon was proposing to enhance the death penalty and use government wiretapping (seriously) to crack down on dissent and violence and the Democrats denounced his crime agenda as racist, which it was. But none other than Nixon staffer Pat Buchanan advised Nixon to go on the offensive. He wrote, “It is a kind of reverse racism to suggest that talk about law and order is anti-Negro because it implies that Negroes are opposed to law and order — this is an outrageous calumny and indeed two recent polls indicate clearly that crime is the major concern of Negroes in our largest cities.”

That alleged concern for the poor inner city residents who were surrounded by thugs and criminals — also known as their community — didn’t come out of a sense of compassion then and it doesn’t stem from compassion now, even though Trump commanded us to “believe it” in his speech. It’s a cynical “I know you are but what am I” strategy to turn the Democratic Party’s argument back on itself.

Keeping in mind that Trump never, ever changes, if you have any doubts about what Trump really believes, just take a look at his 1989 Central Park Five full page ad:

I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence. Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them, I am looking to punish them. If the punishment is strong, the attacks on innocent people will stop. I recently watched a newscast trying to explain “the anger in these young men.” I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid. 

How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!

For Donald Trump more things change, the more he stays the same.

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“A little bit of hypocrisy”

by digby

A nice line of questioning from my congressman:

In fact, when it comes to blabbing national security secrets, many of Clinton’s fiercest critics prefer to do theirs on national television.

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Damned if you whatever
by Tom Sullivan

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about it: the systemic discrimination faced by black people in this country. Even white people like me know about “the talk” black parents have with their sons:

Every black male I’ve ever met has had this talk, and it’s likely that I’ll have to give it one day too. There are so many things I need to tell my future son, already, before I’ve birthed him; so many innocuous, trite thoughts that may not make a single difference. Don’t wear a hoodie. Don’t try to break up a fight. Don’t talk back to cops. Don’t ask for help. But they’re all variations of a single theme: Don’t give them an excuse to kill you.

For all the good it will do.

In the wake of the recent shootings of black males Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (as well as the shootings of policemen in Dallas) on top of all the others — Brown, Garner, Scott, Gray, Rice, McDonald, etc. — it seems there is no instruction one could give or follow to ensure a black male will survive an encounter with police.

Dr. Brian H. Williams, a Parkland Memorial Hospital trauma surgeon who treated wounded Dallas police officers, told the press:

“And I want the police officers to see me — a black man — and understand that I support you, I will defend you and I will care for you. That doesn’t mean that I do not fear you. That doesn’t mean that if you approach me, I will not immediately have a visceral reaction and start worrying for my personal safety.”

Michael A Wood, Jr., a former black policeman writing for the Guardian, admits he has no answers:

Following Castile’s death, my friend, Frank MacArthur tweeted: “Brother got gunned down for no reason. He had a burned out tail light. Complied. Did EVERYTHING cop asked. STILL not good enough. For America.” He is right. Based on what we know from available reports, Mr Castile did nothing that could have jeopardized his life. There is nothing he could have done differently.

It is frustrating that I cannot offer foolproof advice on how to stay safe from taxpayer-funded state-sanctioned violence. You can run, or not run. Make eye contact, or avoid eye contact. Assert civil rights, or be submissive. There simply is no rule on how to stay alive when you interact with the police. And that is a problem.

Police legitimacy is built upon trust from the community and is what enables the rule of law. The very fabric of our society depends on all of us caring about the victimization of others. That is why I cannot answer the question of what the oppressed should do when engaged by the police to ensure they do not get killed. The question is irrational. It is up to the privileged and the oppressors to ensure the question is never asked.

Chris Hayes last night on All In observed that putting policing in a unique category misses the point. The problem of police shootings is simply a more visible (and deadly) manifestation of broader, systemic discrimination that has never been excised.

Based on the reactions of the Rudy Giulianis and the Sarah Palins, the country still refuses to come to terms with it. Giuliani calls the phrase “black lives matter” inherently racist as he sticks his fingers in his ears. Palin demands the press stop calling Black Lives Matter protesters “people.” She seems nice.

Permission to hate

by digby

Jared Yates Sexton went to another Trump rally:

The first time I heard someone yell “Hang that bitch!” was during a speech by Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller. I heard “hang that bitch” at least twice more during Trump’s speech, remarks that led to the crowd’s calls for Comey to be fired. Trump alleged that former President Bill Clinton had tampered with the FBI’s investigation, and that Hillary had used her position as secretary of state to line her pockets and singlehandedly destabilize the Middle East.

While Trump made the latter case, a man stood up and yelled, “Hang Hillary!”

“Yeah!” another shouted.

A smattering of applause.

Nearly six years have passed since I last heard, in person, somebody call for the death of a politician. I was at a Tea Party informational meeting at the Greene County Fairgrounds outside Bloomfield, Indiana, back when Obamacare was still a dirty word. Speakers equated President Barack Obama with Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. They alluded to the Great Famine and the Great Purge. If Obama had his way, they argued, we should all be ready to report to work camps. After the presentation, I listened to farmers and factory workers alike wonder whether to take up arms and march on Washington. If the time had come, as one speaker put it, to “refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.”

There was a similar mood at Trump’s rally in Raleigh—the notion that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary means. For bloodshed. Trump himself implied as much when he invoked Saddam Hussein approvingly. “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, right?” Trump said. “He was a bad guy, a really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists.”

He whipped his fans into a frenzy, and now they spilled into the streets, where media and protestors awaited.

“So let me get this straight,” one man fumed. “They get a fucking safe zone, but we don’t? Where do we get our free speech, bitches?”

When the protestors chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go,” his supporters amended it: “Hey hey, ho ho, (she’s a ho), Hillary Clinton has got to go (to prison).”

Meanwhile, a man with a copy of The Art of the Deal in his back pocket was ranting to a local TV reporter about Clinton’s private email server. He said Clinton should be “shot, executed” for “high treason.”

I walked the streets of Raleigh and heard laugher echoing through the blocks. There were Trump supporters eating food in the plazas. Trump supporters loitering in front of hotels and smoking while waiting for cabs. Some were debating their best insults to the protestors, and how they would’ve liked to have gotten their hands on them.

Later that night, in a frenzy himself, the architect of this bloodlust would tweet that “Crooked Hillary” got away with “murder.”

Sexton also wrote a very insightful NY Times op-ed a few days ago that I think explains an important aspect of the Trump phenomenon:

DEPENDING on whom you ask, political correctness is either an effort to expunge offensive expression from our culture, or it’s a weapon fashioned by the left to brainwash the next generation. If you believe the right-wing media, the next generation’s brains have already been sufficiently washed: The internet is flooded with disparaging articles about “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” where, the right charges, frail young liberals seek shelter from unpleasant realities.

I could not help but think of that idea, the “safe space,” during a recent assignment to cover a Trump rally at the Coliseum Complex in Greensboro, N.C. Inside the auditorium, men gleefully referred to Hillary Clinton with misogynistic slurs; those same smears were printed on T-shirts sold by vendors outside. The men and women sporting them were constantly being pulled into photographs with their fellow Trump supporters, all of them slinging their arms around one another and flashing smiles and thumbs up.

Seemingly emboldened by the atmosphere of serial transgression, a man a few feet away from me answered a warm-up speaker’s call for solidarity with the victims of the massacre in Orlando, Fla., by shouting, “The gays had it coming!”

As expected, Donald J. Trump’s speech that night paid necessary lip service to those victims, but he wasted no time in blaming the tragedy on political correctness, which, he explained, was “deadly” and kept people from talking about the problem of violent extremism. Like most of his directionless ramblings, the rhetoric was short on specifics and heavy on blame, of which there was plenty to go around — Mrs. Clinton, President Obama, Muslims, liberals and pretty much everyone else save for the sort of people represented by that night’s crowd.

When Mr. Trump left the stage and the doors opened, I found myself in a glut of supporters streaming into the parking lot. As vendors hawked T-shirts by yelling, “Hillary sucks!” the people — more than a few of whom appeared inebriated — were discussing such worthy topics as the untrustworthiness of most Latinos, the inhumanity of immigrants and the racial epithets they’d used when Mr. Trump had referred to Mr. Obama as “one hell of a lousy president.”

They were pumped up by the speech, but it was more than that. Their voices were clear and unabashed. There was a noticeable comfort, as if they had been encouraged by not just Mr. Trump’s rhetoric but also their shared proximity to so many people of a similar mind.

And then it dawned on me: For them the arena, and then the parking lot, had become their own safe spaces, where these people, who had long been reined in by changing societal expectations and especially the heavy burden of political correctness, felt they were finally free of the ridiculous expectations of overly sensitive liberals.

At the same time there was an overt hostility to dissent and difference. At one point a man standing nearby looked me over and said, “You don’t look right.” I had no doubt that, had I suggested that Mrs. Clinton was not in fact a lesbian communist, I’d have been forcibly removed, or worse. And I saw cars of supporters hurling slurs at a passing motorist waving a Mexican flag out his driver’s-side window.

For a good stretch of my five-hour drive home, I chewed over the great mystery that is the Trump phenomenon. The media has questioned incessantly why people flock to his campaign. Mr. Trump isn’t particularly magnetic or even that compelling — his speeches are loud, but so dull and tiring that great swaths of his crowds head for the doors early.

Perhaps the appeal lies elsewhere. Maybe all this electoral chaos has been sown as an excuse to gather in public, under the guise of civil engagement, to say the vile, hateful things that the majority of the country has long shunned. It’s not about Mr. Trump; he’s just the cover, the cheerleader, not the quarterback.

In a perverse way, many Trump supporters want what they criticize: the sense of winning that seems to be the sole preserve of the cultural elite, the ability to set the terms of discussion, the freedom to speak their minds and not face criticism. Whether it’s same-sex marriage, the last two presidential elections or the Confederate battle flag (several of which I saw at the rally), they have not won in such a long time.

Commentators have tried to cast Mr. Trump as a master manipulator, using his supporters to carry him to the White House but having no real interest in improving their lives. That may be his intention. But the reality is the other way around: His supporters are using him. Indeed, as I got in my car to drive home, I realized that since leaving the coliseum, of all the things I had heard people say, there was one phrase I hadn’t heard his supporters utter even once: Donald Trump’s name.

To be honest that kind of scares me more than Trump. But it rings true. (I have Trump voting relatives and this is exactly how they talk.)

Trump has a way of channeling the wingnut zeitgeist (and does it explicitly.) And he does share their beliefs about race and police and the need for global American dominance. But what they really like is being in a crowd of other people who hate the same people they hate. It’s a relief to them to be able to let their hair down and just be themselves: haters.

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Pensive Pence the sanctimonious wingnut


by digby

There’s a lot of talk about Trump choosing Indiana Governor Mike Pence for VP.  Feel the magic. This guy is an unctuous creep dripping with insincerity from his every pore. (Trump seems to have an unnatural attachment to Indiana — I guess that win really meant everything to him.) But picking Pence is kind of inexplicable. He makes people’s skin crawl.

Over the years he was in Washington and since he went home and became a totally ineffectual Governor, I’ve written a lot about him. Here’s one example of the kind of sanctimonious drivel he specializes in delivered with a furrowed brow and a smug “more that sadness than in anger” attitude. This was from an interview right after the election when Pence was busy pretending that he really wanted to work with President Obama but those terrible Democrats were refusing to enact the Republican agenda in whole cloth:

Mitchell: Well there have certainly been a couple of signals from Senator Reid on the Senate side that they’re willing to do more talking and permit amendments on the floor. But you’re correct that the House Democrats have not been, and we were with Barney Frank earlier, and he was making the point that elections really do have consequences and that philosophically, they disagree with your positions. That the free market approach, lack of regulation, all of the allegation of abuse is why we have reached this point.

Pence: Sure, you know, I have great respect for Chairman Frank and I have great respect for that kind of a partisan attitude, but I don’t think that’s where the American people are at right now, Andrea. I think the American people are hurting, many people have lost their jobs,many millions more are worried they’re going to be next and they want all the best ideas regardless of party politics to be brought to the table, debated in the light of day and to bring forward a truly bipartisan compromise. But we have to see a different attitude than we’re seeing from Democrats.

I wanted the president to know we were grateful for him coming by and his graciousness. We take his desire to reach out to house Republicans as genuine but we’re just not seeing any of that attitude, as you can see from Chairman Frank’s comments, and the American people deserve to know that.

Then he tugged his forelock, glanced out of the corner of both eyes and slithered off down the hall …

This guy is a real piece of work, a hard core right wing hater who adopts a holier than thou attitude while sticking in the shiv. Creepy.

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Relating to the little people

by digby

Trump today:

Perhaps it’s easy for politicians to lose touch with reality when they’re being paid millions of dollars to read on a teleprompter speeches to Wall Street executives instead of spending time with real people in real pain.

Trump last week:

Don’t forget when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did these big rallies, 3,4, 5 thousand people would come. And they said, wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go into people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.

I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living rooms they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, “I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird!”

By the way, he read that speech today (badly) from a teleprompter.

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Even Trump thinks the email scandal is boring

by digby

And I think he’s got a pretty good bead on what turns on right wingers. This email scandal ain’t it:

Donald Trump explained in a Monday interview with me that he does not spend entire campaign rallies talking about Hillary Clinton’s email controversy because “when you are in front of an audience of 10 to 20 thousand people, you can’t just talk about Clinton email. … They don’t want to hear that.”

Trump insisted that he faces unique challenges as a candidate because of the size of his crowds and the fact that virtually every one of his speeches is run in full on cable television. “They broadcast every speech I make, which means I have to change it up,” Trump said.

In a 25-minute phone interview, Trump ranged across a wide variety of topics, including his timing on making a vice presidential pick. But he was most passionate in defense of a speech he gave last week in which he threw away his prepared remarks attacking Clinton’s emails after 20 minutes to give a more free-form speech touching on his belief that Saddam Hussein was very good at killing terrorists and continuing his defense of tweeting an image that looked like a Star of David.

I wrote a piece quite critical of that decision. But Trump insisted it was the right one in our conversation.

“I said everything you could say in 15 minutes. … I covered the various lies,” he said. “There’s only so much you can say. At some point they want to hear about ISIS, they want to hear about security, they want to hear about Black Lives Matter.” (Trump also noted that “the speeches that are most well received are without teleprompters.”)

He acknowledged that although he makes “a few mistakes,” his defense of Hussein’s terrorist-killing prowess was not one. “He was good at one thing: Killing terrorists,” Trump said. “It was only a one-sentence thing. They made a big deal out of it.”

The “they” above is, of course, the media, which Trump blames not only for taking his comments about Hussein out of context but for insisting that he did not talk enough about Clinton’s emails. “I am talking to a crowd of people who have been standing in line for seven or eight hours,” Trump said. “They don’t want to hear about it. I covered every point. The way it’s reported is unfair in that if you read those stories, it’s like I didn’t even mention her.”

He’s right, sort of. The people who care about this are the media.

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Yes, Bush lied and people died. Bigly.


by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

One of the more alarming characteristics of this election season is the fact that both major candidates for president are considered to be dishonest and untrustworthy by a majority of Americans. Of course when you compare it to the 16% approval rate American people give congress, both Trump and Clinton have the reputations of angels. The public generally holds all politicians in contempt, a trend that has been coming for quite some time and for a variety of reasons.

You can go back to the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Watergate to see why people have come to distrust politicians. Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra. George H. W. Bush had the Christmas pardons of half the Reagan cabinet. Bill Clinton was dogged by scandals throughout his term but was caught lying red-handed about a personal indiscretion and got impeached for it. But nothing can compare to the lethal dishonesty of President George W. Bush.

It was so obvious that it’s rather shocking anyone would deny it. And yet the long awaited Chilcot Report from the UK which reveals that intelligence officials knew that the invasion would cause Iraq to collapse and inevitably grow the environment for terrorism to flourish, for some reason is seen as a vindication of sorts for George W. Bush and Tony Blair by people who insist that the two did not lie to the people to justify the war.

But they did, repeatedly.

Dylan Matthews at Vox helpfully laid out some of the lies, based upon David Corn’s reporting for Mother Jones.  He begins with President Bush’s insistence before the war began that Saddam Hussein had a massive stockpile of biological weapons. However, we know that the CIA told the White House that they “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” This was evidently something out of Bush’s fever dreams.  But it was important.

As much as people were frightened of the prospect of Saddam having nuclear weapons (which Bush also lied about when he said we didn’t know if he had one — we knew that he didn’t) they were also terrified about the prospect of biological or chemical weapons being used in another terrorist attack. After all, we had just been through the anthrax scare and President Bush was stoking these fears in press conferences where he warned people to be particularly aware of crop dusters and said that Saddam had a fleet of drone planes that could be used to drop bioweapons on Americans. (The Air Force said at the time that this was nonsense.)

All of this was done with the implicit suggestion that Saddam was working with Osama bin Laden, the mastermind who had proven he was willing to stage a catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil. That was the big lie that undergirded all the rest. And it was very effective. In September of 2003, six months after the invasion, a large majority of Americans believed it:

Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists’ strike against this country.

Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it’s likely Saddam was involved.

The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.

Matthews at Vox points out:

On numerous occasions, Dick Cheney cited a report that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. He said this after the CIA and FBI concluded that this meeting never took place. 

More generally on the question of Iraq and al-Qaeda, on September 18, 2001, Rice received a memo summarizing intelligence on the relationship, which concluded there was little evidence of links. Nonetheless Bush continued to claim that Hussein was “a threat because he’s dealing with al-Qaeda” more than a year later. 

There were many large and small lies for months on end. My personal favorite is a small one but it’s the one that best illustrates the “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes” tactic. In July of 2003, President Bush said this:

“[W]e gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power….”

This is completely wrong. Hussein did let U.N. weapons inspectors in, and they  failed to find any weapons. The administration withdrew them so they could begin the invasion.

Here he is saying it:

It was shocking to hear him say it. By this time it was becoming clear that the administration’s stated reason for the invasion — to “disarm Saddam Hussein” — was turning up no WMD. And yet this blatant lie was barely noticed in the press. Here’s how the Washington Post’s  Dana Milbank explained why this wasn’t a bigger deal:

“It was on the front page of The Washington Post, but I think what people basically decided was this is just the president being the president. Occasionally he plays the wrong track and something comes out quite wrong. He is under a great deal of pressure.”

How to explain that it “came out wrong” again three years later when the world was finally realizing just how thoroughly they’d been taken for fools when he said it again: 

And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. 

If you want to know why so many people believe that their leaders are liars, look no further than the fact that the George W. Bush administration convinced the nation that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and had weapons of mass destruction which the two evil-doers were planning to use against Americans. A quarter of million people (and counting) died as a result of those those lies. It’s amazing there’s any trust in government at all after that.

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In an October exclusive with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Trump asserted that the Middle East would be better off today if Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein were still in power. “It’s not even a contest,” Trump told Meet the Press. Trump continued to push this idea at a rally in Franklin, Tennessee, telling the crowd that despite Hussein’s “vicious” rule in Iraq “there were no terrorists in Iraq” while he ruled. 

“You know what he used to do to terrorists?” Trump polled the Tennessee crowd. “A one day trial and shoot him…and the one day trial usually lasted five minutes, right? There was no terrorism then.” 

Trump didn’t just praise Hussein for keeping terrorists at bay, but seemed to tacitly accept the dictator’s use of chemical weapons. During a December rally in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Trump took a cavalier attitude toward Iraq’s use of chemical weapons under Saddam. 

“Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, ‘oh he’s using gas!'” Trump said. Describing the way stability was maintained in the region during that time, Trump said “they go back, forth, it’s the same. And they were stabilized.”

“We shouldn’t have destabilized Saddam Hussein, right? He was a bad guy, really bad guy, but you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good.”

I would hope that anyone who still deludes himself into thinking that Trump is some kind of isolationist that they would think again. The only reason he turned against the war was that he really thought that Saddam was a force for good, not that the US shouldn’t be invading countries that didn’t attack it. Big distinction.

Oh, and he’s also a psychopath who thinks war crimes are a-ok.

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America 2016

by digby