Haven’t kept track, but my guess is that a careful analysis would prove that Trump has said something that would convey he is softening his position, if not taking the opposite position on nearly EVERY SINGLE ISSUE he has staked an initial position on. (Neo, you had a great article on how most anything Trump says is “mutable”).

And that is since he announced his run, not including various points in his prior life of holding positions opposite, which brings into question his sincerity on his initial campaign positions to begin with.

With all that being the case, no voter can (honestly) understand what Trump will be doing to “Make America Great Again”.

Most end up projecting their wishes.

Great article, as usual, neo!

I strongly suggest that if you haven’t already done so, you read this thread and its comments, particularly this, this, this, and this.

I think it was and is pretty easy to figure. The Tea Party movement was a clear indicator of the feelings of the Republican base. They were ignored and insulted by the republican leadership. Count me among the “most extreme wing of the party.” I am filled with rage at the actions of the Republican leadership culminating in the last so-called Omnibus budget bill that totally capitulated to the Democrats and as a bonus paid off the Republican cronies with goodies like breaking the sequester and funding the Export-Import bank.

As you know I am absolutely not a Trumper but I place the blame for the destruction of the Republican party squarely on the Republican leadership and the majority of the Republican Senators and Representatives who support them and not on Trump.

The Republican elected officials were so full of themselves that they thought the base had no where else to go. The most unfortunate part of the 2014 election was that the Tea Party was not able to knock off any of the old bulls from the Senate. The totally corrupt victory of Thad Cochran in Mississippi was perhaps the most demoralizing single factor in the whole election cycle.

I hope that like Mark Twain’s famous quip rumors of the Republican Party’s death are grossly exaggerated but I am afraid the odds are not with us.

Answers to “What were President Bush’s alternatives with Iraq?” & “Why did Bush leave the ‘containment’ (status quo)?” & “Why not free a noncompliant Saddam?”;
Answers to “Did Iraq failing its compliance test justify the regime change?” & “Was Operation Iraqi Freedom about WMD or democracy?” & “Was the invasion of Iraq perceived to be a nation-building effort?”.

The kernel of truth is that the post-Saddam peace operations with Iraq were anticipated.

However, the peace operations were “expected” (section 4, 2002 AUMF) based on the anticipation that after a decade-plus of noncompliance, Saddam would not deviate from breach of the Gulf War ceasefire with the mandated “full and immediate compliance by Iraq without conditions or restrictions with its obligations under resolution 687 (1991) and other relevant resolutions” in his “final opportunity to comply” (UNSCR 1441). And generally, from the 20th-21st century American experience as leader of the free world that winning a war requires securing the peace post-war.

The basis of the Iraq intervention was always to “bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations” (P.L. 105-235). From August 1990 onward, Presidents HW Bush, Clinton, and Bush made clear that if Saddam proved the mandated compliance, then enforcement would be switched off, whereas Iraq’s noncompliance triggered enforcement.

The UNSC decision “Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions, including resolution 687” … the UN-mandated “governing standard of Iraqi compliance” (UNSCR 1441) enforced by the US mandate to “enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq” (Public Law 107-243) … the determinative fact findings that confirmed Iraq’s breach of ceasefire, including “about 100 unresolved disarmament issues” (UNMOVIC), which triggered enforcement in Saddam’s “final opportunity to comply” (UNSCR 1441) … the operative enforcement procedure for OIF was simple and straightforward.

Yet the linchpin of Trump’s foreign policy speech is a fundamental misrepresentation of the basis of the Iraq intervention. That places him on the same side of the line as the Saddam regime and Russians who also assiduously obfuscated the “governing standard of Iraqi compliance” enforced by the US.

Iraq Survey Group:

Saddam directed the Regime’s key ministries and governmental agencies to devise and implement strategies, policies, and techniques to discredit the UN sanctions, harass UN personnel in Iraq, and discredit the US. At the same time, according to reporting, he also wanted to obfuscate Iraq’s refusal to reveal the nature of its WMD and WMD-related programs, their capabilities, and his intentions. … Iraq pursued its related goals of ending UN sanctions and the UN OFF program by enlisting the help of three permanent UNSC members: Russia, France and China.

Whether or not Trump is “for” the alt-Right in their practical alliance, the alt-Right has a mission that’s a greater threat to conservatives than the Democrats and a Hillary Clinton presidency. The alt-Right is targeting conservatives in an essential way that Clinton and the Democrats are not.

Whether Trump is a Clinton-planted foil to sabotage the 2016 conservative GOP threat or an alt-Right tool to displace conservatives like the Left displaced liberals and take over the GOP like the Left took over the Democrats, the necessary counter-measure is the same – a competitive social activist movement.

You may not be interested in warthe activist game, but warthe activist game is interested in you. It’s the only social cultural/political game there is. If war is politics by other means, then activism is war by political means.

This comment thread is about the determinative influence of the political ecosystem that surrounds and infuses government, which is the realm of activism across the spectrum.

JJ:
“We need people to take to the streets again as the TEA Party did demanding limited government, demanding less regulation of business, demanding repeal of Obamacare, etc.”

Indeed. See my comment here at Neo’s advising same in the wake of Obama’s 2012 re-election.

This time around, they must fundamentally re-conceive their collective efforts as a social activist movement that’s a primary end in its own right and that they are engaged in a permanent, full spectrum, utterly critical competition with zealously competitive social activist movements, rather than the Tea Party as only a temporary grassroots ad campaign, an ad hoc appeal to elected officials, and/or a quasi-alternative path to enter electoral politics.

At this point, if conservatives still don’t collectively embrace the primacy of activism – and recognize participatory politics subsume electoral politics – even after the loud and clear wake-up call of the Trump-front alt-Right insurgency, it means that conservatives have reached their political evolutionary dead-end.

True dat. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make any difference because the LIVs don’t know it. They get their info from the MSM, not Limbaugh, Fox, or conservative blogs.

The Republican sweep in the 2014 election was the result of the crappy economy and the obvious drift toward weakness in our military and foreign policy. Even LIVs sense that there’s something not working right. They joined conservative and RINO leaning voters because they hoped things would change. The bad news is that the blue states still re-elected enough progressive Senators to thwart the will of those who wanted to see something new tried.

For the first time since 2006 Paul Ryan is doing the budget as it used to be done. He’s trying to do separate appropriations bills for each part of government and send them over to the Senate one piece at a time. He hopes to keep the Democrats from forcing last minute negotiations on an omnibus type bill as was done last year. The omnibus bills, passed at the last minute, are a pork barrel spender’s dream. Whether he will be successful remains to be seen, as the House Freedom Caucus is determined to pass appropriations bills that will be blocked by Harry Reid and the Dems. That is just the reality of the math in the Senate. If you don’t send over appropriations bills that have some shot at getting to the floor of the Senate, you are setting yourself up for another last minute scramble to pass an omnibus bill or close down the government. A lot of conservatives, who haven’t taken the time to understand this, have misplaced their anger.

Suppose the government shuts down again over a budget impasse. How long do you think it would be before the public (stirred up by the MSM and Democrats) would demand it be opened again? If you remember, the Obama administration was ready for the last shutdown. They closed parts of the government that were very obvious and irritating to the public. And they blamed it all on the Republicans. Do you think they would do less, or maybe even more, to stir up public opinion against the nasty Republicans during another shutdown?

Shutting down the government with the odds stacked against you is a fool’s game. The Republicans have to be far more active and smart in promoting the reasons for limiting the size of government and why government regulations stifle business activity. What do we see on TV? We see people marching for BLM, the $15 minimum wage, anti-Trump, anti free enterprise protests and demonstrations. All progressive causes. We need people to take to the streets again as the TEA Party did demanding limited government, demanding less regulation of business, demanding repeal of Obamacare, etc. Why don’t we get it? Because most conservatives have lives and other interests outside of politics. Politics is not a religion to us. (At least not for me.) Why don’t the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson put some money into getting demonstrators into the streets? Because they believe they are above such tactics. But George Soros, Tom Steyer, Mark Zuckerberg, and other progressives fund propaganda and pressure groups all the time. hey have no compunctions about the tactics they use.

I think the shutdown damaged Republicans, although I don’t think there was any love lost for Democrats either in 2014. The damage done by the shutdown was not large, though, and GOP voters were more motivated in 2014 than Democrats, which accounted for their win.

The problem with shutdowns is that they are unwinnable if the other side wants to stonewall, too. The Democrats were willing to do that. If the GOP had followed up with shutdown after shutdown, post-2014-election, the public would have gotten angrier and angrier. The GOP would have turned into a one-trick pony, and fed into the “obstructionist” meme. They decided not to do that after 2014, and I can’t blame them; I think it would have heavily backfired.

Of course, no one foresaw that the resultant anger of the base would somehow spread to more than just the most extreme wing of the party. It is now at least a third to a half of the party who are reacting to their rage by backing a lying con man who is a RINO extraordinaire. Go figure.