So the GOP candidates are all apostates now?
by digby
Following up on my post below, I see that Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller awakened from a long winter’s nap:
This whole Jeb Bush/Iraq thing is remarkable. First, you’ve got the fact that this debacle has come from interviews with ostensibly friendly interlocutors — Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity. That’s an interesting aspect, to be sure. But what is even more remarkable to me, at least, is that you now have mainstream Republican candidates like Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz (who worked for Dubya) — not to mention Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Ben Carson — publicly criticizing the invasion.
A few years ago, this would have branded them apostates. Now, it appears to be the consensus opinion (or, at least, not a minority one).
This reversal seems to have happened at roughly the same speed attitudes about gay marriage have shifted. Maybe Ron Paul really did win the r3volution?
Some of this could simply be that elections are about contrast, and if you’re a conservative looking to carve out a niche, disagreeing with Jeb is a pretty good idea. In this regard, Jeb’s inability to effectively answer this question might have actually impacted the stated policy positions of the GOP field — or, at least, sped up the process whereby Republicans were “coming out” as opposing the Iraq war (or, at least, with the caveat of knowing what we know now).
I don’t know what to say. Clearly he’s been out of touch for quite some time.
A September 2014 AP-GfK poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they think history will judge the war as a failure. Among Republicans, that assessment was even more prevalent, with 76 percent saying the war would be seen a failure.
And according to the Gallup poll, a rather substantial majority of Americans have thought the war was a mistake since at least 2005.
Does he think these candidates should associated themselves with an epic failure of this magnitude?
Also too, this vacuous argument that “knowing what we knew then” it was the right decision is extremely lame. Sure, they can say that Clinton made the same mistake but she, at least, has admitted she made the wrong call. These guys would have to continue to defend the invasion that despite the fact that half the world didn’t see the same evidence and we all know it was based on lies, they would still make the same decision. Recall that the only nations that were truly on board were the UK and Spain at the end. (Oh, and don’t forget Poland!)
And let’s not forget that the US withdrew the inspectors before they had finished their jobs when it looked like they wouldn’t find any WMD! How do you defend that? I could go on. It wasn’t just that the evidence was wrong. It’s that a lot of people didn’t believe it at the time because it obviously sounded like a bunch of hooey!
No candidate wants that hideous mistake to weigh them down. Clinton already paid a big price for her vote back in 2008 and has wisely admitted her error. It’s unlikely she would be eager to make that same mistake again. The Republican candidates are also trying to put some daylight between themselves and Bush and Cheney and for good reason. But Jeb can’t do that. To do it would be to repudiate his own family, both of whom have left legacies of hell in Iraq. Indeed, one might even suspect that he’d be the one president to attempt to go in again to try to rescue the family name since it’s been irretrievably degraded by the ongoing toxic mess they created in Iraq. So he’s stuck. And he can’t get unstuck. And every time he sputters about this he looks less and less like the “strong leader” GOP voters always want and more and more like the embarrassing failures they’ve been getting the past 25 years.
He can still win the nomination, of course. I have no crystal ball and anything can happen. But I don’t see the juggernaut that everyone else sees. He’s collecting a lot of money but so what? There will be enough money for everyone. The billionaires have plenty to spare. From where I sit he’s a guy whose brother tied a very big dead Pterodactyl around his neck from which he will never be able to extricate himself. It’s right there in the name.
Update:
Jeb answers the hypothetical: “knowing what we know now, I would have not engaged. I would have not gone into Iraq.”
Did brother make a mistake? Let’s hear it …
.