What is it about conservatives and lists? We are repeatedly confronted with lists of talking points and other conservative arguments which wind up getting posted all over the internet. Typically the lists are a bunch of misquotations and erroneous “facts” but they don’t seem to care as long as they have lists of things to post. The latest nonsense of this nature is in Investors Business Daily on 97 Reasons Democrats Are Weak On Defense And Can’t Be Trusted To Govern In Wartime. They ignore the victories of Democrats in two World Wars and in containing the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War and proceed to list specious arguments primarily against Carter and Clinton. Even if there was any validity to their arguments, they are irrelevant to the question of who we need to lead the nation at this point in time.
The whole list of arguments is just an attempt to distract attention from the manner in which George Bush and the Republicans have undermined our national security by mishandling both al Qaeda and Iraq. They quickly dismiss the many errors made by saying, “We’re in a war. Something always goes wrong in a war, and our military leaders have made mistakes in Iraq.”
These were not just the normal mistakes made in any war. We have two separate issues here. With regards to al Qaeda, Republicans have blocked Democratic proposals to fight them and improve homeland security both during the Clinton and Bush Administrations. They ignored warnings prior to 9/11 which might have led to preventing the attack. The Iraq War was a mistake from the start. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Besides being the wrong war to wage following the 9/11 attacks, the war was started without a meaningful plan for victory and run totally incompetently, asĀ recent books including Cobra II and Fiasco demonstrate.
The war has strengthened al Qaeda and Iran while weakening the United States in the middle east. The distraction in Iraq also contributed to the Bush’s Administration’s mishandling of North Korea, also increasing the threat from them. No list of complaints about previous Democrats, even if the list was true, would be relevant to defending the Bush Administration at the present considering how much harm they have done to this country.