TODAY’S POLITICS: LOTS OF CRITICS, BUT FEW REAL IDEAS

…Rand Paul: this Republican’s views are continually being attacked by his fellow Republican party members.

 

As with past Republican campaigns, “As with manure, the rhetoric continues to pile high and deep!”

Things must be getting pretty bad when Republican 2016 candidates have to steal their hawkish statements from the latest big screen action movie.  Yep, in Marco Rubio’s latest declaration against the ISIL terrorists, Rubio decided to hijack and modify the trailer-line from Liam Neeson’s movie “Taken”.  Rubio said about the Muslim terrorists,  “We will look for you…we will find you…and we will kill you.”

Boy, wouldn’t that convince you to vote for Marco…….RIGHT!!!!

As one Post writer, Eugene Robinson, he did say something about Marco’s statement that I have to agree with, “That’s actually a pretty good way to describe Obama’s campaign of assassination by drone strikes. Rubio describes the president’s policies as a failure, yet he [his idea] seems to promise more of the same.”

As with most of the comments by the plethora of Republican presidential candidates, they never seem to give us any specific new ideas for dealing with the terrorists.  It’s all just the basic “hawk-talk” about how they are “going to get them”, and then they move into the standard Republican talking points about cutting taxes on the wealthy, trickle-down economics makes jobs and for repealing Obamacare. 

 

Of course, not one word about today’s income inequality, stagnant wages and how to secure the futures of Medicare and Social Security.

It’s all so easy for the Republicans to criticize the president’s foreign policy, and in many cases, I also question some of the presidents moves when it comes to dealing with the on-going wars in Iraq and Syria.

But, for those that want to be the ones to replace him, to criticize and then have no suggestions for what they would do instead, it does make all political observers turn to Shakespeare and ask, “Does one protest a bit too much?” 

The reality is that all the negative comments from the current and potential 2016 GOP candidates are offered in rivers of criticism, but their approach for dealing with these same real issues are only offered in small little trickles.

Yep, they are all unanimous in calling President Obama’s foreign policy moves all wrong, but when asked about their plans, all they do is look up at the clouds while they mumble to themselves.

Here are just some of the opposition’s approaches to dealing with the current foreign policy and military issues in the middle east:

Lindsay Graham: (R-SC) has the most complete plan of them all, however it’s exactly what most Americans don’t want but it's what you would expect from a major GOP hawk.  Graham wants to increase the number of US troops in Iraq from less than 3,000, to 10,000.  Per Graham, “This would allow us to train the Iraqi army at a faster pace, give them capability that they don’t have.”  Unfortunately, the Iraqi’s that have been trained so far by the American troops have shown that they don’t have the stomach for fighting ISIL.  I guess Graham’s going with the “We broke it, so we have to fix it” approach, so let’s throw more American troops at the problem.  And I guess in doing that, he just wants to start another American mid-east war.

But, the Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, has pointed out that the recent fall of the city of Ramadi occurred only because the Iraqi Shia troops lacked the will to fight.

 

Not one of the Republicans is suggesting how to deal with that very large problem of getting the Iraqi Army to fight the terrorists in their own country.

Rick Santorum, (R-Former Penn. Senator) Rick wants to “load our bombers up and bomb them back to the 7th century.”  So I guess he wants to kill all the innocents as well as the bad guys as he “bombs them back to the 7^th century”.  As the Post’s Robinson also wrote, “Someone should inform Santorum that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been trying this approach since the civil war began and that it hasn’t worked very well.”  This candidate wants all this killing to be done by American bombings…… and all this time I thought Rick Santorum was a devout, pro-life Christian….?

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), takes the totally opposite position from the other GOP hawks. Paul has stated: “Because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately. Those weapons eventually fell into the terrorist group’s hands.”  Paul had added that ISIL, “Is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved, they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it. . . . Everything that they have talked about in foreign policy, they have been wrong about for 20 years, and yet they have somehow the gall to keep saying and pointing fingers otherwise.”  (And boy did his fellow GOP candidates go after him for those comments!)

Even though I may agree with some parts of Paul’s statement, it still doesn’t tell me “what the hell Paul would do if he were running the show!”

The former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, says he wants to “take out the Islamic State [ISIL] ”, in cooperation with other countries.  In other words, sounds like Obama’s current policy of using US air power and drones while having the local allies fight the ground war.  When asked if more US troops would be needed, Bush said he would "ask his military advisors make that determination". 

(That would of course be the same advisors that George W. and his father used, and we already know how well that worked.)

But in any case, it’s similar to what the president is already doing, and yet Jeb keeps saying that the president’s “making grave errors of an unspecified nature”. 

So what the hell does “making grave errors” mean, while at the same time, Jeb has no clear plan or suggestion for what to do….?

Scott Walker (R-Governor of WI)  As usual is all tough talk, but with zero workable ideas of what to do.

Mike Huckabee (R-Former Governor of AK)  Wants to give more weapons to the Kurds and step up air strikes………and then????.  Just what positive effect does he expect from this suggestion?  And what would be Plan B, if Plan A didn't pan out?

Chris Christy (R-Governor of NJ), and Rick Perry (Former Governor of Texas), both are big, tough talkers but neither have offered any specific suggestions for what they would do if they held the reins.

I am not a true believer in the president’s current approach to the middles east except for his current efforts in continuing with the Iran nuclear talks, and that’s still not a done-deal.  But I also admit that as a political observer, I also don’t have a strategy for dealing with Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the rest of our foreign mid-east policy.  We should never have invaded Iraq, but we did, so what should we do now?  I don’t have the answers, but what we are doing now obviously isn’t working.  In addition, social media is now currently being very well used by the terrorists for getting those terror “lone-wolves” to comes after innocent Americans here on the mainland.

However, I damn well hope and expect that those that want to take over from our current Commander-in-Chief, they should at least have some firm new ideas for what we should do.  That also includes what Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley would do, not just the Republican candidates.

At least the latest Democratic candidates are currently letting the Republicans go after each other while they sit on the sidelines.  I guess, and hope, that after the political blood-bath of the 20+ GOP candidates is over, the Dems will then get involved with those beat-up Republicans that are left, after the dust settles.

We will then hopefully get to hear some real ideas for where the final candidates want to take this debacle that the Bush administration left for us American voters to eventually sort out.

Yes, it’s going to be a very long campaign.

Copyright G.Ater  2015