From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:
They’ve learned nothing because they remember nothing
If the “first tier” Republican presidential debate revealed anything, it is the huge empty space that is at the heart of the conservative mind, circa 2015. No wonder a vacuous nonentity like Donald Trump is leading in all the polls: his gargantuan ego has invaded that vast emptiness and expanded like a giant hot air balloon. As to how soon that gaseous zeppelin will pop – well, it’s anybody’s guess. All we know is that if and when it does another big nothing will take its place.
Speaking of a big nothing, the performance of Sen. Rand Paul, once the great hope of anti-interventionists and libertarians, was even worse than this writer expected. The first mention of foreign policy was the following question posed by Fox News anchor Brett Baier to the junior Senator from Kentucky:
“BAIER: Senator Paul, you recently blamed the rise of ISIS on Republican hawks. You later said that that statement, you could have said it better. But, the statement went on, and you said, quote, ‘Everything they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong for the last 20 years.’
“Why are you so quick to blame your own party?
“PAUL: First of all, only ISIS is responsible for the terrorism. Only ISIS is responsible for the depravity. But, we do have to examine, how are we going to defeat ISIS?
“I’ve got a proposal. I’m the leading voice in America for not arming the allies of ISIS. I’ve been fighting amidst a lot of opposition from both Hillary Clinton, as well as some Republicans who wanted to send arms to the allies of ISIS. ISIS rides around in a billion dollars worth of U.S. Humvees. It’s a disgrace. We’ve got to stop – we shouldn’t fund our enemies, for goodness sakes. So, we didn’t create ISIS – ISIS created themselves, but we will stop them, and one of the ways we stop them is by not funding them, and not arming them.”
Pauls’s answer was not merely inadequate, and shot through with an undertone of abject cowardice – it was confusing as well. To begin with, as Baier phrased his question, Paul’s original critique was directed at “Republican hawks,” i.e. the neoconservatives, a group of Republican ideologues the Senator used to criticize quite freely and regularly. Yet Paul let Baier get away with equating this group with every single Republican on earth: instead of challenging the premise of the question, Paul did what he’s been doing for months now, at great cost to his campaign – he backtracked.
Missing a great opportunity to point out that the neocons – his enemies – have indeed been spectacularly wrong about everything for the last 20 years, Paul instead went into a vague peroration about how we’re supposedly sending arms to allies of ISIS without specifying who those allies are. Are they the Turks? The Saudis? The Qataris? All three of these countries have been implicated in funding or otherwise assisting Syria’s jihadis, including ISIS. What I presume Paul meant is that the United States has been funding the Syrian rebels, who have gone over to ISIS and Al Qaeda in large numbers. Yet he didn’t deign to say that – which left millions of television viewers scratching their heads in puzzlement.
To continue reading: The Foreign Policy of the GOP
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