Re: In all fairness...
Good example with Bush, but I rather think it proves my point that suddenly enforcing the law when Trump's are on the line would be a strange result given the lack of introspection for politicos on both sides of the isle.
You reference 9/11. Having lived through it and serving abroad on the pointy end of the stick, I think I will go ahead and comment... I've lost friends, blood, and years of my life. Bin Laden's planning for the attack was already well underway under Clinton. Does anyone seriously think Al Gore being elected would have made the slightest difference in outcome that day? The die had already been cast. Lesson going forward: if you kill thousands of Americans, we will (over)react and kill you. Full stop. Suspect UK would react similarly. Whether over the top reaction ultimately plays into the terrorists' hands then becomes an interesting question that we are not thinking about. But when the Taliban refused to turn over Bin Laden - and from their viewpoints for good reasons - AFG was going to get it, without lube. And so they did. I'm okay with that.
Now Iraq... Yes, that's a total cluster f...k. Been there, seen that. Checks and balances? Well, ISTR Congress authorized force with an strong majority. Specifically including Biden, Feinstein, Lieberman, Reid, Schumer, Clinton... Whether this was due to bad Intel or cherry picking Intel to meet a neocon political objective? History will tell. But this is not a case of lack of checks and balances, it is a good old IT garbage in/garbage out problem.
You break it, you buy it: I thought then and now that Iraq was a colossal mistake. But once everything went to crap and then some sort of order became established... We pulled all our troops out and pretty much ceded everything to ISIS/ISIL. This pullback seems to have been done largely to satisfy domestic political pressures. What's thousands of dead compared to a good "I brought 'em home!" Election cycle news conference, anyways?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
