Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Republican incoherence

I'm using "incoherence" because it's the politest word I can think of under the circumstances.  Those circumstances being that Jeb Bush has called, albeit vaguely, for ground forces to fight ISIS, and that call has also come from John Kasich (not to mention, needless to say, Lindsey Graham and other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, although the latter has probably been so vague as to have deniability for anything).

According to an NBC News report of a Kasich speech at the National Press Club:
[he] proposed leading a coalition that includes soldiers fighting on the ground in both Syria and Iraq. He would not indicate a number and said the coalition should not be involved in Syria's civil war.
How soldiers can be on the ground in Syria without being involved in its civil war defies the imagination.  This person is a serious presidential candidate?  Not to mention Trump, Cruz, et al.?  This is a disgrace.

Oh yes, I almost forgot: Kasich also wants a new government agency devoted to spreading "Judeo-Christian values" around the world. (The phrase is in quotes to indicate that these are, from what I gather, Kasich's words.)

5 comments:

Peter T said...

Why should one expect their foreign policies to be any more coherent or sensible than their economic, health, employment or environmental policies?

LFC said...

Good point. Republicans often out-poll Democrats on the "whom do you trust with foreign policy?" question, but that doesn't mean one should expect them to be more coherent in this area than any other.

Peter T said...


Yeah. Well the right consistently out-polls the left on "who do you trust with the economy", yet has a consistently worse record. It's yet another of those areas where deep-seated cultural axioms trump experience.

Anonymous said...

I'm impressed that the candidates have successfully made an international crisis worse without any of them actually occupying the presidential office.

LFC said...

Yup. At any rate they have not made it any better, that's for sure.