At odds with reason, civility, and good sense

Max Boot writes in Commentary,

...Trump: “We’re spending billions and billions of dollars supporting people, we have no idea who they are in Syria. Do we wanna stay that route, or do we wanna go and make something with Russia?”

By this statement, Trump reveals that his crush on Vladimir Putin (“at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country“) hasn’t abated and that he still views Russia as a viable partner with the West in Syria. He doesn’t seem to realize or care that 90 percent of Russian air strikes are targeting rebels that the U.S. supports — not ISIS. He also doesn’t realize or care that Russia is aiding and abetting war crimes committed by the Bashar Assad regime and that if the U.S. were to become a supporter of the Russian war effort it would be complicit in war crimes, too. Nor does he know or care that Russia is supporting a power grab by America’s enemy, Iran.

...Trump: “We shoulda never been in Iraq…You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I wanna tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

This is the most high-profile embrace that Trump has so far made of the “Bush lied, people died” canard. Several bipartisan investigations have revealed this is simply not so: that George W. Bush and the rest of his administration, along with the rest of the world (including Saddam’s own general), genuinely if mistakenly believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The claim that “Bush lied” is itself a lie and one that we expect to hear from the likes of Michael Moore, not the Republican front-runner.

...there is no evidence — zero, zilch, nada — that Trump ever spoke out against the Iraq War in advance. He was an ex post facto critic.

Even more amazing, in a 2000 book Trump criticized George H.W. Bush for not having “properly finished the job” in the Gulf War by deposing Saddam Hussein, repeated the claims (which he now calls a lie) that Saddam had WMD, and warned that Saddam’s Iraq was a looming danger that had to be dealt with — “If we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion.”

In short, far from showing any prescience in opposing the Iraq War from the start, Trump was a cheerleader for the war before he turned against it along with so many others. This is not the kind of steely resolve that Trump’s supporters think he embodies — rather it shows that Trump is as prone to shift his views based on changes of popular sentiment as any of the “career politicians” that he criticizes.

...There is no question that George W. Bush bore some culpability for this terrible attack which occurred when he had been in office less than eight months and that he was not focused enough on the al-Qaeda threat when he came into office. But as Marco Rubio pointed out, Bill Clinton also deserved a lot of the blame for not acting more decisively to kill Osama bin Laden. Moreover, even critics of Bush will usually give him credit for his forceful response to 9/11 which routed the Taliban and al Qaeda within a matter of months. Trump won’t give George W. Bush credit for anything and instead embraces the most extreme criticisms of him — criticisms that even mainstream Democrats don’t make.

I have given up expecting that any of Trump’s ignorant, offensive statements will cause his support to decrease. But if there is any justice in this world, South Caroline Republican voters should turn against a candidate who is so at odds with reason, civility, and good sense — and who lies so brazenly and so often that he makes Bill Clinton appear to be a pillar of rectitude by comparison.

Read more here.