Very strangely when both candidates have four years of governing in the highest office in the country on their resumes for comparison, why are the cliched attacks against trump such as “trump is a failed businessman who bankrupted 6 times” “trump is a convicted felon” “trump is a rapist” “trump will ends democracy and declare himself as the supreme emperor and will never leave” are back in full swing when a simple “our four years are better than trump’s” will suffice?

yes the Democrats were unhelpful as were the media, the hydra, which are tied together at the trunk, the Times making too much of Abu Ghraib, was a factor, but the bidonvilles that comprise, Tower Hamlets, Malbeek, St Denis, this where the martyrs came from at least of a third of them, some of them graduates to midlevel management in Islamic State, the first Fallujah offensive, who was involved in that, the subsequent approach to the tribes of the Awakening how successful was that really, and did it do more to empower bad actors, the Obamas haphazard withdrawal, which left the door open to these same players,

I try telling them that they are wrong. The chief worry after 9/11 was copycat imitators bent on Jihad against the West, meaning the US. The earlier Bojinka (sp?) plot to use more trans-Pacific airliners to crash into West Coast city buildings sure supported the fears of this new mode of Islamic terrorism.

What’s missing by Cheney and Trump both is this? What do you do after 9/11. Coming in a time when the Muslim world faces a demographic transition — when the old are few and the young are too many and too idle not to do The Devil’s work.

The strategic thinking back after 9/11 was to staunch the destabilising ingredients — mostly young and idle unmarried males — which history shows us is the needed ingredient for war and revolution. Thus, the need to tame and divert their youthful Warrior drives, just as literacy was becoming the norm in the Middle East and elsewhere among Muslims.

On this base of World historical understanding came Thomas P M Barnett’s lecture on C-span and article and then book, “The Pentagon’s New Map.”
Namely, the huge gap of economically un-interconnected Muslim World and the rest of the globe — remember the freight train of globalization?

The lesson drawn in the 1990s was that nations with McDonalds do not go to war against each other because both sides in a potential conflict have skin in the game, and governments risk more losses than gains by going to war.

Well, that naïveté of then never met post Modernist president Xi, under demographic collapse. Nor Putinist Russia, where countries with McDonald’s do go to war with each other. And not even secular Kamalist Turkey taken over by the Islamist Erdogon.

So, here’s my beef with the Bushites and Chaney as well as Blair, and Trump and Tucker — given the necessity to act defensively after 9/11 in the above historical context, what would have been better for the US to do?

What I never see from them or their mouthpieces is engagement with these facts.

Meanwhile, the US grew tired of wars. Overseas. And my question remains mostly unanswered. Except by the rare and few who take up and herald the gains, despite our losses.

of course in the previous years, the goal was to pin the tail on Roger Ailes, because reason and Shannon Carlson and Megyn Kelly lend themselves to the task, Shannon helped wreck the Miss USA pageant subsequently and Megyn,well her stint at NBC didn’t last, in truth, the corporate suites in all the networks were more like Anchorman, then anyone care to admit,Re Liz Cheney, she did get her share of the contempt of the left when she was in the State Department’s Middle East bureau, what part she played in the installation of Maliki is unclear, he was of like minds with Obama on the Iraq War but Suleimani was allowed be kingmaker in that era, on Iraq policy, selecting the designate Da’wa or SCIRI figurehead, and its charitable to say that did not work out, now State’s preferrence was for ministers that were not popular even among the Sunni community like Pachachi, a one time UN Ambassador in the pre Baath era,
around the time of UN resolution 242, when we play these games without a playbook thats what ends up,

The same media that enabled the demonization of George W. Bush also gave jobs to a surprising number of his relatives–surprising if we believe elites mean what they say. But the Bushes are very connected people and so are the elites in media. The sooner we come to realize that what our governing and elite classes say is not what they mean and is largely performance, the better.

My view is the us and Khadafi had a deal.

He gave up nukes and supporting Terrorism, and the us left him alone.

And the us broke it, and overthrew him with the us supporting France, Italy, and UK’s aerial war (leading from behind). Or Hillary’s comment of “we came, we saw, he died”.

Bottom line is no country can trust the U.S. to keep an agreement.