Jay Cost: Steele must go

-The Dean:

Ah, if it isn’t our local Paleocon German apologist.

Draft Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul already.

For cannon fodder? Yes.

For anything else? Absolutely not.

Ok, they MAY be good at passing misinformation to the enemy if we give them it as fact and let them be captured, but asides from those two situations, there is usually a requirement that one actually know one’s HISTORY and REALITY in order to be of any good.

The children had their eight years; the adults should have a go at turning the sinking ship around.

If those are examples of the “adults” you are proposing, I will stand by the children.

At least when the children screw things up, one can usually guess it was accidentally.

That, and they seem to know quite a bit more than Paul and Buchanan.

I think they would be fine diplomats since both of them actually would prefer peace in the Middle East, as opposed to the pro-war rah-rah set.

Oh puhleaze, do you HONESTLY think our current diplomats would not want peace in the ME if for no other reason than to get a Nobel handed to them?

Unfortunately for you, the reality of the Middle East means that the ENEMY will NOT TOLERATE PEACE, and as such, we must work our way through war.

I mean he didn’t win, but the establishment of the party fought against his run every step of the way because he exposes the party establishment.

Maybe because the divided GOP decided to oppose him for their own reasons, with we NeoKons realizing the man has no clue about Foreign policy or world history and the RINOs realizing his (usually genuine) Conservative social policies as a threat.

If he had the national GOP backing, there would be no President Obama.

And what told you about that? Seer? Time Machine? Magic 8 Ball?

The fact is that a Paul nomination would have seen the GOP fracture into about a dozen different, ineffective parts while drawing the center ever moreso over to the Dems (who would be viewed as arguably the saner-rightly or wrongly- when compared to the Isolationist who holds court with Neo-Nazis and Truthers). If anything, the election would probably have been even more of a massacre, and the GOP brand even further damaged.

And even so, for all the hell Obama is raising, at least our foreign situation is deterorating at a semi-moderate pace. Which means that, by the time we can wrestle Obama out of power, we may be able to save SOMETHING.

And that is the end-all-to-be-all, the true test of a President: what does the world look like when you are done?

Paul would have been akin to Ike: decent ecconomy, and a lot of dead and disillusioned Allies and ground lost to the enemy.

And Ike’s failure to aid France ultimately begot Vietnam, and his mishandling of the Suez Crisis has helped breed the current threat today.

I’m sorry, but domestic issues can be reversed, even if it takes a decades long fight to do so. But the positions (likely) and the lives (certainly) on the line now will likely never be regained.

You can’t judge a broad-base political movement by the minutia. The majority of us are normal folks, most of the weird people supported Obama!

A. You call a single-digit fringe campaign “broad?” Perhaps when compared to low-level townhalls and municipal boards, but hardly on the grand scale of things.

B. We may not be able to judge you based on the fringe, but we can judge you on the candidate, and when your candidate openly courts and seeks alliance with the fringe, we question if it is really the fringe, and why you follow such a man.

That’s not what he says. He is saying that Wilsonian intervention in World War I set the stage for German fascism in World War II.

A. Have you even READ his book Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”?

If not, why are you supporting or defending a man when you have no clear handle on what he says or does (and yes, I READ IT)?

If so, than why are you ignoring it and much of what Buchanan has said?

B. Not this whole “Carthiginian Peace” tripe.

Simply put, Wilson did not cause WWI.

Nor did David Lloyd George.

Nor did Haig.

Nor did Foch.

Nor did Pershing.

Nor did the enraged Allied public who had endured Central War crimes against them for years.

The German people (and to a lesser extent the Japanese) did.

Just as Bismarck started all of his wars.

Just as the German militarists pushed Europe over the edge in WWI after years of trying.

To believe that all would be sunshine and flowers if Wilson did not dispatch to AEF to end any hope of a German victory, thus allowing the “justified” German victory or to simply allow Europe to continue killing itself is foolish to the extreme, and ignores forty years of history leading up to WWI.

Germany, more than any other power save perhaps the Serbs and the Austro-Hungarians, wanted this war, as is clearly revealed by Allied decripts and the released German war documents.

If WWI had ended in a stalemate, we would still have had the militarists who bear the greatest charge for starting WWI still in power and still unpunished for their crimes, while a German public fed with delusions about neverending victory being fed some tripe about how the heroic Reichwehr managed to grind the Western Allies down from their attempts to destroy Germany entirely, and afterwards they could go back to planning on how to get it RIGHT the next time.

Don’t believe me? Than believe the records, as THAT is quite LITERALLY what they planned do to (THEY EVEN MADE PROPAGANDA POSTERS FOR THE OCCASION).

And if Germany had won?

Guess who becomes the next target?

If we were lucky, than the British if they had not been fatally mauled and brought under the jackboot.

If not, than their next target would have been US.

The Cuba Memorandum of 1898 (over a DECADE before Wilson) made their stance ABUNDANTLY clear, and the idea that they would not follow it begs the question of what one is smoking.

No, Wilson nor his (admittedly foolish and naive) diplomacy begot WWII. German, Soviet, and Japanese ambitions did.

While one can argue if Germany, the Bolsheviks, and Japan were ABETTED by Wilson’s poor attempts at peacemaking, there is a fine line between inadvertently helping and causing. And that blame lies with Tokyo, Moscow, and (particularly) Berlin.

Oh yes, and the irony of you waxing poetic about a “gritty, realistic Conservatism” is bitterly ironic when your candidate would propose effectively sealing us up ALA Harding and letting China, Russia, the Jihad, and anybody else who wants to get in on the fun run loose.

Gee, didn’t that work out swell during the 1900′s, when we had as little contact with Europe as possible and STILL found ourselves the target of planning by a foreign despot and his militarist clique?

Turtler on May 11, 2009 at 7:14 PM

joe_doufu:

No, absolutely not.

Organizer? Sure.

But leader? No.

A. Too many skeletons in the closet.

B. He has certainly dropped off from his past self.

C. His support from a Carbon Cap and other things are just what we don’t need when we are trying to remove the RINOs from our midst.

Turtler on May 11, 2009 at 7:39 PM

The Dean:

The 100,000+ killed wars were “accidents”? That’s quite the slip-up.

No, that’s the price of doing business.

MISHANDLING the wars and our policies, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

The GOP leaders wouldn’t let the diplomats attain peace, because then there wouldn’t be any no-bid government war contracts to hand out.

Oh, right, so I am supposed to believe the reason the Middle East is in a tizzy is because we are so fed up with our contracts?

Um, hate to tell you this, but that excuse went out the window when Carter literally tossed aside the “War Profiteers” as much as any President ever had and tried to literally hammer peace out of the Middle East.

How did that work out again?

You claim that they do not want peace, but neither do we.

Right, which would be why we dragged our feet on attacking Iraq, fought an extremely limited war while allowing Syrian, Iranian, and Russian duplicity to go unpunished, and even have been funding the PLO? We may have motives for not wanting peace, but they are far less in number and influence than those of the “they”s you mentioned.

The neoconservatives would not survive without a cause to bomb someone.

Proof?

Here the Bush record speaks for itself: more of us and our allies killed by terrorists worldwide than in any other 8 years.

And more of our men perished in a month in Normandy than did in the six years (more or less) of “peace” with the Germans (and latter the Japanese) in both World Wars.

When you clean out an anthill, losses are immenent.

However, it is far preferable to clean it up and than scorch it shut than to put it off for some other year, some other hour, some other decade.

Al-Qadea loved Bush.

Then why are the Jihadi forums celebrating his departure just as they cursed him during his tenure? In Afghanistan, we attacked a previously safe base and ally and forced them to brink of extinction for a while while releiving stress on Islamabad, and in Iraq we took out one of their major financiers and forced them into an attritional battle for the heart of the Caliphate, one that they have not made any ground in for quite a while.

He was great for recruiting with the rape and torture of detainees by our military.

A. You obviously fail to mention how those who misbehaved are investigated and PUNISHED, like the Abu Grahib probe was STARTED by the military under Bush.

B. Rape? Where? And was it sanctioned or punished?

C. Torture, sickening as it may be, is very useful, and has helped preserve the Republic through the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. While we must control its use, the idea that we should not use it is ridiculous.

D. If Torture and Rape are great RECRUITERS for the Jihad, than why is Chechnya so quiet?

Not a stalemate, Germany would have lost without us,

Probably, but you do not know that, and neither do I. They had just taken out Russia and Romania while carving up massive chunks of Eastern Europe. If they would have held a defensive frontier somewhere for a year or two, the ballgame would have been quite ugly.

but the Treaty of Versailles crippled the German economy, thus giving Der Fuhrer an opportunity to rise to power.

And here you ignore that while Der Fuhrer might not have risen to power in any other event, a whole bunch of like-minded individuals (at least in terms of aggression and Racial prejudice, if not in regards to Leftist views) were still in the running to carve out their own bloody place. Germany was a breeding ground for these people, and the fact is that a healthier Germany would probably have only gotten rearmed faster barring a few million Brits, Frenchmen, Americans, Italians, Belgians, and Greeks sitting from the Rhineland to Silesia forcing reform at the bayonet point, like what happened with Western Germany post- WWII.

German officials in WWI could still be convicted.

True, but they weren’t (which is a genuine strike against Wilson), and without the American deployment it is questionable if the Western Allies would have been in a place to do so anyway. So, rather than it being a case of justice thwarted by lack of victory, it was justice thwarted by lack of will. Still, that does prove one point: that those “foreign entanglements” aren’t entirely bad, for a stronger will than Wilson (think TR) probably would have.

Also remember that Japan only attacked us because we goaded them buy cutting out their food and oil supply. Otherwise we didn’t have to get involved.

While I do think that Japan was a case where we needlessly cultivated an enemy by our hostility from 1853-1920, by 1931, it was far too late to do much.

And keep in mind that we only cut off oil to Japan (we did not, at any time during the period until war broke out, cut off food supplies) because they:

A. Violated the Open Door Policy
B. Tossed aside the Eight Power Treaty
C. Were committing war crimes at a rate that vastly exceeded anything in modern history up to that point (Germany’s misbehavior in WWI, the Spanish Civil War, and Ethiopia were vastly smaller, the slaughter of the Russian Civil War was more evenly dispersed between the combatants, King Leopold II’s Congo was also dwarfed, and Hitler and Stalin did not begin their mass killings in earnest yet).
D. Had committed atrocities against neutrals, including Americans (and no, I am not referring to the Panay, as that was a solo event that was immediately condemned; there were other, far more widespread and condoned examples, ie Shanghai).
E. They were rapidly building up their navy in spite of the fact that the conflicts with China and the USSR were terrestrial in nature.
F. They violated the Kellogg-Briand Pact
G. They had invaded and occupied French Indochina in strict defiance of our warnings

It was only after G that we cut them off, and that was not only to starve their war machine of the oil it needed to function, but also to prevent it from attacking Western Allied targets like the Dutch East Indies. Yes, in hindsight, that looks like a goof, as does our hostility towards Japan when it was relatively Democratic, but by 1931, Japan had chosen this fight, and we only acted after more than ample importunity.

And now, obviously, Europe spends much more on military than anything else in the region, and nothing is a serious threat to them even if we are not their nanny.

I do hope you are being sarcastic.

Eastern Europe is certainly active (after all, little causes leaders in Kiev or Warsaw more nightmares than the thought of what might be going on in a Russian warroom), but even they have atrophied, and Western Europe hardly has a military at all that exists outside of papers.

Though on this much I do agree: Europe must be forced to provide for its own defense. The only thing we should have- until evidence demands otherwise- is a tripwire unit, like those on the DMZ.

However, this still does not answer my points about Paul and Buchanan’s positions, history, the fact that “Fortress America” has often been targeted even when we were truly neutral, and the ability of the US to be isolated without provoking our enemies into running riot.

Turtler on May 11, 2009 at 8:31 PM