When will important people in New York and Washington notice that 65% of Republican voters in the Iowa caucus chose candidates who opposed both the Wall Street bailout and Bush/Obama adventurism abroad (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul), and about 50% of Democrats (Bernie’s army) did the same?
It’s easy to dismiss all four because all advocate some very bad ideas (although, when it comes to civil liberties, both Paul and Sanders have some very good ones). Expelling 11 million illegal immigrants? Carpet-bombing ISIS? Smashing the Federal Reserve? Taxing billionaires to pay off a trillion dollars in student loans? Do any of these guys belong in the White House?
Well, no. In fact, I even supported the Wall Street bailout, though not the Tim Geithner gold-plated version, and I didn’t support any of the Bush/Obama invasions. I don’t think that the Chinese or the Mexicans are stealing our jobs. I don’t feel threatened by terrorists. I don’t think that America is in danger, and I don’t think that our nation’s leadership is particularly corrupt. But I do think it is deaf.
I think Wall Street dismisses all the criticism it hears from Trump and Cruz and Sanders. Believe me, sweetheart, when you’re as rich as I am, you don’t need to be loved. You just need to abolish the inheritance tax, the capital gains tax, and the corporate income tax. I was and am disgusted by pseudo-philosopher king Michael Bloomberg’s petty and dishonest attempt to blame the Great Recession on the government, and I’m afraid that, on Wall Street, Michael still passes for an enlightened capitalist.
Similarly, I think the foreign policy/military/industrial complex has yet to process its own repeated failures to inflict a Pax Americana on the world and has also failed to process America’s lack of patience with those failures. Even under President Obama, Mr. Feckless, the American foreign policy establishment is constantly seeking ways to involve the U.S. in conflicts around the world, conflicts that, in Syria or Yemen or Libya or Ukraine, for example, have no significant relationship to our national security. When these second-hand attempts to shape the fate of other nations fail to turn out as we would like, well, then, of course, we have to intervene more aggressively, because our credibility is on the line. What would other nations think of us if we were actually capable of learning from our mistakes, or—even worse—actually capable of admitting them?
Fighting wars we don’t need to fight is almost always a disaster because, very quickly, the minimization of U.S. casualties becomes the first priority—which means, essentially, that losing battles becomes preferable to losing men—a process vastly accelerated by the elimination of the draft, which also eliminated all the cannon fodder. Yet it’s remarkable how attractive war is to American politicians, even though in the twentieth century, even victory is the prelude to defeat (the Democrats in 1920 and 1946 and the Republicans in 1992), while stalemate leads to disaster (the Democrats in 1952 and 1968 and the Republicans in 2006 and 2008). Yet Hillary clearly wants to mix it up with Russia, China, and Iran, and Rubio, well, you aren’t going to let a woman make you look like a pussy, are you, Marco?
