AND: Back in February, I said it's crucial for Rand Paul to make us feel that he's not abnormal or weird:
I like Rand Paul. He's got youthful vigor and a libertarian spirit. He can speak, and by speak, I mean he doesn't merely stay on message with excellent talking points. He seems to be speaking from a real and lively mind. He needs to convince us that it's a normal, nonweird mind.He's losing ground today.
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So much for Rand Paul.
Circular firing squad now has two members, and lots of room for more.
I'm on Dick's side, here.
Bushitler McChimpyHalliburton!
So Rand is just like his dad just with better suits and sharper talking points on Sunday morning.
Lovely.
This could be literally true. Cheney was a lousy CEO and getting him into government definitely help Halliburton's profits. Of course, it's possibly true that the Paul's have a genetic streak of moonbattery.
His position has "evolved" since then.
But, but, Dick was on the side of the fairies, (I mean angels) on SSM...
Cheney is such a Dick.
Blood for oil! Halliburton! Mickey Rooney! Very nostalgic.
Halliburton provides "services" essential for the military in war zones. They are among the very best.
Like Blackwater, they have been unfairly vilified in the mainstream media and on the floor of congress.
I like Rand Paul, but he's gone over the top accusing Dick Cheney with a profit motive on Iraq.
Now I'm not a real bubbly fan of Cheney but...
To say an old man who had plenty of money would start a WAR so his buddies could earn more money is just BULL SHIT.
FDR didn't do that, Truman didn't do that, Kennedy, Johnson, etc....
And no, Bush didn't 'let 9/11 happen' either.
I am saddened Rand even uttered such a ridiculous statement.
That's a mainstream view in the Democratic Party. Paul's a centrist!
A lively mind? Yes, like the mind of the Mad Hatter.
He needs to convince us that it's a normal, nonweird mind. He's losing ground today.
Why is it weird to think that Cheney wanted the Iraq War when the company Cheney just left was awarded 40 billion dollars in contracts for the war? It's weird to think there wasn't any connection.
He just lost me. There plenty of room for disagreement on the wisdom of the Iraq war, but this is loonie toons stuff.
It's libel...and that "truth is a defense" idea does not apply to Connecticut Bush Royal House.
Was that before or after Clinton?
All that Hussein had to do was comply with the terms of the ceasefire. Clinton could have formally addressed the situation. Instead he punted to Bush.
Why is that? The entire left wing accused Cheney of waging war for oil. So it's only nuts when a non-leftist does it? Please.
Rand Paul said it like it was. Why would he lose ground when he speaks the truth? Young libertarians agree with this. They reject the establishment right. Why do conservatives always mess up their chances to win an election?
Dammit, somebody beat me to it. Maybe Rand Paul's running for the Democratic nomination.
Althouse theme of the day: Republicans are weird or insane when they act like Democrats..
Rand Paul ended any interest I had in his candidacy. That is ridiculous. Cheney was VP and that attack only validates the Democratic talking point that he was the ventriloquist and Bush was the dummy.
Cheney put his Halliburton stock in a blind trust. He took a huge financial loss to take the VP job which he didn't want.
Paul has entered lunatic territory.
"It's weird to think there wasn't any connection."
So Clinton was a Republican ? You fool.
Thanks, garage! I appreciate the way you're always willing to oblige.
Actually, it's not that crazy to think that Rand is trolling for voters on the squishy Left. And there's a boatload of populist social conservatives who would also be very comfortable with what RaP said.
Two points:
-Mother Jones
-2009
Jeb is smiling.
Why is this a surprise? Doesn't anyone have a memory anymore?
Some people do benefit financially from wars. Human nature dictates that we can be somewhat blinded by self-interest. Nothing wrong with pointing this out.
I've been waiting for this shoe to be dropped by Senator Paul for quite sometime.
oh well. he's toast
Michael K said...
He took a huge financial loss to take the VP job which he didn't want.
Literally no one else believes that Cheney didn't covet and successfully maneuver to get the job. No one.
He could have said no.
Stop voting for Senators in the primaries, people. It's always a disaster.
Senators talk. Executives act.
The details don't support the summary of what Paul said. He was much more nuanced.
As for Cheney, was doesn't he just shut up and go have another heart attack.
The master of the "Invade the World, invite the world" strategy that led directly to President Obama. A Fordite and member of the Bush I administration. A political genius IOW.
"Nothing wrong with pointing this out."
If it's true.
William Randolph Hearst profited for the Spanish American War. The foolishness about "Daddy Warbucks" kept lefties amused for a while in the 1920s.
The present day furor by Democrats is ink squirting to conceal their votes for war in the Clinton and early Bush administrations.
I don't agree with what Paul said, but it's not as offensive as what Mother Jones says he said. @rcocean is right about that.
If I thought Paul had the best chance of any Republican of winning in 2016, I'd support him and hope that he either isn't as squishy on foreign/military policy as some of his statements suggest, or that he would change when mugged by reality. So far, I'm not convinced that he would be the strongest Republican candidate, but he's at least useful in combating the threat from the moderates.
"Literally no one else believes that Cheney didn't covet and successfully maneuver to get the job. No one."
You mean no one you know. He did say no according to the NY Times writer who wrote "Days of Fire."
Maybe you should read something beside Daily Kos.
Some Repugs grow balls today, not all chickenhawks approve. Film at eleven.
Barack Obama, 2002:
"What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. "
He didn't lose you when he made that speech.
Two words - Mother Jones.
When the enthusiastic, young zealots are the electricity behind your campaign, you know you're wrong, whether it's "change you can believe in" or "libertarianism". Young people, by nature, are the most naive and inexperienced in society. They shouldn't be leading anything.
A classic weaseling, gutless post from rcocean. Doesn't have the balls to come right out and say he thinks Paul is right about this.
Sorry guys. He's your front runner.
Like father like son. Dad can barely contain his John Birch, shit for brains nuttiness. Scratch the surface and he's a froth at the mouth whack job and surrounds himself with people who are even whackier. Remember Paulbots?
I don't trust Rand either. He's better at concealing his derangement though.
Here's hoping he runs a third party candidacy to bleed off the nutter vote.
I'm no fan of Cheney or the war he helped start (and still defends) but that statement is nutty whether it comes from Rand or some lefty. Though I don't see Rand getting the nomination anyway--his views on a whole host of issues would alienate him from too many primary voters.
It would have been nice, though, for at least one of the parties to nominate someone with genuine civil libertarian and nonwarmonger cred. These days our choices seem to be between different degrees of statist interventionists.
OK, so the war wasn't started to benefit Halliburton. But why was it started?
The WMD stuff never made any sense, as it conflates very different weapons systems. We had pretty good reasons to believe that Saddam had chemical weapons but little reason to think he had the far more dangerous atom bomb. Bush and Cheney knew this, and so did their military and intelligence advisers. The WMD stuff was just for public consumption.
So what was the real reason for going to war? Will we ever know?
War is almost always about profit...for someone. It's obvious Halliburton and like firms profited greatly (and continue to profit) from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond.
Cheney, the "Reluctant Vice-President,"(hahahahahaha!)--as MichaelK characterized him, (revealing his own naivete or ignorance...hey, Michael...Cheney selected himself for the job!)--a former Halliburton exec and staunch supporter of the oil industry, surely had his own interests and the interests of his cronies in mind as he helped foment war, but he seems a psychopath to me, so he may have had other motives as well. His championing of war against Iraq certainly couldn't have been because he feared Hussein was a threat to us, a threat sufficiently dire to require that we start a war to thwart him...no one ever really believed that.
Count me amused by all the people who suddenly "can't countenance his candidacy" now. Suuuuure.
Do I agree with it? No, it's ridiculous, but at the time it was said, it was very, very mainstream to say things like that. And if one statement were enough to disqualify people from the presidency, we'd have never had any presidents. I'm not completely sold on Paul, but I'm not discounting him because of one years-old statement either. Those who do weren't going to support him anyway.
Rand Paul is merely reminding us of Eisenhowers statement that we needed to beware the "military-industrial" complex. We've forgotten that, now that we have to more to fear from Obama's insurance-medical-drug complex.
The Iraq war wasn't started for profit, nor for "oil" in the sense that many critics implied (i.e., that our oil companies wanted access to Iraqi crude for cheap. Oil of course does make the Middle East important globally, but if all we wanted was oil all we had to do was lift the sanctions and let Saddam sell his oil on the market, which he wanted to do far more than we needed his oil).
The WMDs I believe the pro-war side (including Cheney and Bush) truly thought were present and a potential threat, but I think the main reason to go into Iraq was that these guys believed that if we toppled Hussein, the result would quickly be a stable, somewhat democratic, pro-western friendly country that with its relative weight in the region would inspire other countries to move in that direction. It would isolate Iran, reduce threats to Israel, and reduce longer term threats to a long-unstable region. The cause of the war I think was more Wilsonian than anything.
That doesn't mean it was a good idea, or well-executed.
While it's true that both the Pauls rejected the core truther ideology, neither have pushed it off far enough to keep it from at least partially influencing their thinking.
There's a strain of trutherism that doesn't claim the government planned and caused 9/11 to happen, that rather they knew of it and let it go so as to "profit" from it (it's called "LIHOP", for "Let It Happened On Purpose"). Neither Paul has outright said they've accepted that strain of thought, but the issue is that both appear to have let it shade their opinions. Cheney profiting from Halliburton's participation is one of that strand's common talking points, and here we have Rand Paul citing it unabashedly.
Score one partial victory for the truthers here.
The problem with the Pauls is that around 80-some percent of what they say is something that would appeal to many conservatives, non-psycho libertarians, and many centrist moderates who sometimes vote Democrat and sometimes vote Republican. If they only stuck to that 80-some percent, they'd go far. But that leftover 20% they home in on always gets them shunted to the "Looney" category. It's hard to get run a good race when your first step is to shoot yourself in the foot.
The acorn nut doesn't fall far from the tree. But we already knew that.
"He's losing ground today."
You got THAT right!
While I am not in agreement with much of what either Ron or Rand Paul believes, they are on point on some matters, and there is nothing in the least looney about Rand Paul's remarks about Dick Cheney, who is, by any measure, a war criminal.
We had pretty good reasons to believe that Saddam had chemical weapons but little reason to think he had the far more dangerous atom bomb. Bush and Cheney knew this, and so did their military and intelligence advisers. The WMD stuff was just for public consumption.
Chemical weapons are WMD. The official U.S. policy for the last fifty years is that:
Chemical weapon = biological weapon = nuclear weapon = weapon of mass destruction.
Anne Althouse said:
"Back in February, I said it's crucial for Rand Paul to make us feel that he's not abnormal or weird:"
Back in February, I told you Hillary didn't have to respond to Rand Paul because the Republicans would take care of him for her. It didn't take long.
Gahrie said:
"Chemical weapons are WMD."
When they lied to America about Saddam's WMD and the dire necessity to attack Iraq--to forestall the "smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud" (a very carefully crafted bit of copywriting, you can be sure)--they were talking about "NUKES! CRAZY PERSIAN DICTATOR GOT NUKES!!"
No one would have been scared enough at the prospect of chemical weapons(which can be ineffective in the field for various reasons) to give up all sense of reason and accept every irrational lie promulgated by the White House and accept their fabricated case for war against Iraq. (Then there's the fact that virtually all of Iraq's chemical weapons had been destroyed.)
He's losing ground today.
Rand Paul is losing ground for holding a mainstream Democratic opinion?
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