Another night, another debate, and just like the last four or five, the performance of the major players has not changed.
Ted Cruz had a fantastic debate. He stayed on message, he continued to give the most substantive answers of any candidate, and he made Donald Trump look foolish without stooping to his level.
Marco Rubio looked tired. He engaged Trump on his many scandals, including Trump University, but it was clear that this campaign has taken a toll on him. Rubio knows his chance at winning the nomination is effectively done, and it showed last night.
Even though he finished behind Ben Carson in at least 6 states on Super Tuesday, John Kasich keeps soldiering on, hoping to pull enough votes away from other candidates to give the nomination to Trump. Ironically, the one candidate he is hurting the most is the establishment favorite, Rubio. Kasich has not won a single state, and will not win a single state.
And then we come to Trump.
Donald Trump is doing his best to prove his claim that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes. Trump declared on the debate stage that he has now officially changed his position on immigration when it comes to H1-B visas. This is the same program that allowed Disney to fire 500 American IT workers and then force them to train their foreign replacements. While his website called for cutting back on this program, Trump now supports the program and says we should increase it. I wonder what Sen. Jeff Sessions thinks of that? Didn’t he write Trump’s immigration policy?
It’s not like Sessions shouldn’t have seen this betrayal coming. After all, Trump was bragging about hiring immigrants instead of Americans at his hotels at the last debate, because Americans are just too lazy and wimpy to work in the heat. A claim he repeated in this latest debate. He also all but admitted he told the New York Times that he has no intention of following through on his campaign promises, and they have it on tape, but he won’t let them release the tape. In all honesty he doesn’t have to. He stood on the stage and told every one of his supporters that he’s going to double cross them. Remember, “you have to be flexible.”
So now Sen. Sessions gets to join Chris Christie standing behind Trump at his press conferences, with his own thousand yard stare. Another broken man, regretting his choice.
I have to admit that his complete reversal of yet another of his immigration policies last night was not the most shocking thing he said. What shocked me the most was when he declared that he would order the United States Military to commit war crimes by ordering the targeting of the families of enemy fighters. That’s right, Trump wants to order our Armed Forces to deliberately target innocent, non-combatant women and children. When pressed on the issue by the moderators about whether our soldiers would refuse to obey such an order, Trump brazenly declared, “they won’t refuse an order from me.”
Think about that for a second. I know a lot of you think Trump is the answer to all of your problems with the establishment and the corruption in Washington, but just….think about that for a second. The man you support for President wants to force our sons and daughters to kill women and children. Leaders don’t say that kind of thing. Tyrants do.
I wonder what the brave heroes of Benghazi think about that pronouncement from the candidate they have endorsed? I wonder what all our Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen think of that? I wonder what all of our veterans running around wearing “Make America Great Again” hats think of that? They need to change that slogan to now say, “War Crimes For Everyone!”
The Trump supporters in the remaining states need to think long and hard about the kind of man they want to lead the country. I don’t know how many times Trump has to directly tell his supporters, “I’m lying to you,” like he did last night before it sticks. Maybe last night was it.
We’ll see.
16 comments
As a retired Army officer I’d like to remind Mr. Trump that any soldier can refuse to carry out an illegal order, and they are duty bound to do so.
I know many of you will ape Obama and say, “This is not who we are.” But this apparently true story (see link) circulated around intelligence organizations 30 years ago. It may not be who we are, but killers of family members of Arab terrorists was what the Soviets were. And it evidently worked, because that is the only language that Arab terrorists understand. http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-07/news/mn-13892_1_soviets
Just so we’re clear, you are saying you agree with Trump that we should target the families of enemy combatants because the KGB did it?
You know, Trump also praised the Chinese for showing strength in dealing with the protesting college students at Tiananmen Square. Do you think we should employ those same tactics with the Occupy movement as well?
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432036/donald-trump-tiananmen-square
I didn’t watch the debate, so I don’t know exactly what Trump said.
But I’d like to point out that killing women and children is not inherently a war crime. If they are combatants or aiding combatants, they are fair game. Additionally, since ISIL and fundamentalist islamists are not adhering to the laws of warfare, we are under no obligation to adhere to them either. Killing them may be repulsive, but it isn’t necessarily illegal.
Trump declared that he would order our Armed Forces to find and kill the family members of enemy fighters. That is the equivalent of terrorists targeting the families of the Navy Seals who killed Osama Bin Laden, or defended Americans at Benghazi.
These are not enemy combatants. They are innocent civilians that Trump wants to target and kill for the purpose of instilling terror in our enemies. Do you know what that makes Trump? A terrorist.
Agreed. Certainly during WW II hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. Total war recognizes that any army requires an infrastructure to support it and that infrastructure relies upon civilians. It is only fairly recently that many people, notably the media reps who have never felt war or its effects, feel that killing of civilians is to be avoided at all costs, even going so far as to say, as did President Obama, that trucks carrying fuel to ISIS should not be attacked because they probably have civilian drivers. Those kinds of rules of engagement greatly increase the danger for our military forces. Fighting with one hand tied is not the way to defeat a deadly foe. The liberal press has even harangued about “non-proportional response” in the cases of PLO attacks upon Israel and its citizens although President said “if they bring a knife, bring a gun” during his election campaign. .
We no longer live in the days of B-52s raining uncontrolled ordinance from the sky. Now we have laser guided smart bombs and pinpoint precision. In the course of war there is always the chance that innocent civilians will be killed in the crossfire, and we try to avoid that as best we can.
What Trump is arguing for is the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. There is no, and never has been, an excuse for that kind of behavior. It is a war crime, plain and simple, and to say that he would force our Armed Forces to do something like this disqualifies him from ever having the honor of being Commander in Chief.
About 30% of the 1B+ Muslims worldwide think that, in certain situations, suicide bombing is legitimate. So, we have 300M+ Muslims that think, sometimes, it is OK for someone to go blow themselves up and others around them. There is no way to “precision bomb” the millions of Islamists. We, as a country, are nowhere near the point of realizing just how much death and destruction it will take to rid the world of Islamists. We aren’t willing to go there (yet). To make a Civil War analogy, it will take a Ulysses S. Grant mindset of total destruction to eliminate the problem.
And because of that we’re supposed to be as bad as the are? That’s not a justification for war crimes.
Wiping out ISIS is fine with me, I’m all for it. However, wiping out every single Muslim everywhere who agrees with it, if they have taken up arms or not? We can’t do that.
Back in the 90’s I was in the military working out of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Against the recommendation of other embassy personnel, I often walked to and from work. One day there were huge crowds of people flooding down the streets. Everyone was on the move. Grandmothers, small children, mothers with babies, whole families. I would have thought that the circus was in town and people were keen to see it. But it wasn’t the circus. In fact, it was public hanging day and people wanted to take themselves and their children to watch men get executed. It is ingrained in my memory. What kind of people take their children to watch public executions? These are the people we are dealing with.
And? Again, are we supposed to be as bad as our enemies? No.
Islam is a unique religion in that it has a command to physically subjugate the entire world and kill everyone that doesn’t go along with the plan. They started 1,400 years ago, swept westward across formerly Christian North Africa murdering everyone along the way and moved northward into Europe until Charles Martel stopped them at the Battle of Tours. They lost economic and political power from there. Now they are regaining it and marching forwards. Islamists murdering people are nothing new and it will NEVER stop. When they get bombs big enough, they will kill people by the thousands or millions if they can. People don’t want to face the reality and naively think these jihadists can be contained. They can’t. Kill or be killed.
You’re dodging the issue. Trump said we should use our enemy’s tactics. I, and practically everybody else, said no way.
We won’t slaughter innocent people in the way Islam does.
Will we stop ISIS? Yes. Will we use Trump’s strategy to kill women and children? No.
If we lose our morality, as Christians(I am one and I presume you are as well) and as a nation that applies Judeo-Christian ethics and the rule of law to our conduct of war, if we sink to the level of terrorists in order to stop terrorism, we’ve lost.
Don’t try and justify doing evil by saying the other side is evil, it won’t work.
Nobody will tolerate or allow that kind of tactic in the war to stop Islam.
I agree with Trump’s tactics of massive military force because death is the only thing that will stop the barbarians who want to 1) kill us or 2) die trying. Let us help them achieve that latter rather than the former.
What is the alternative Joseph? I can think of one viable alternative. We go on the offensive 12th century style with military force backed by an army of priests that forcibly “convert” Muslims and slowly eradicate Islamic culture. But I think the chances of Western secular humanists taking that approach are near absolute zero.
So what is your plan to peaceably end Islamism? How do you stop millions of radicalizes Muslims hell-bent on death, the hundreds of millions of muslims that support them, and the billion muslims that sympathize with them? How does the world come to terms with a religion that commands its adherents to murder people?
It is the sheer scale of the problem that defies an answer. I’d like to hear one if you have one.
Military force, yes, killing everyone even peripherally involved that is Muslim? No. That’s illegal and it’s immoral. It’s a crime under the rules of war.
We can defeat ISIS by killing the terrorists when and where we find them, not by targeting everyone who could be involved with it.
What is my plan? First, find and kill everyone who is ACTIVELY involved, taking up arms or training to take up arms. That would require an overhaul of our intelligence services, so that they work considerable better than they do now, and precision targeting of the enemy.
And I don’t mean Obama’s strategy of PR shows of force, I mean eliminating the terrorists when and where they are found.
Destroy the camps, cut off supply lines, bleed them dry, burn the rats out of their holes but don’t target the civilians if possible. It’s a long war, as it always will be.
Do what will happen if you start freely targeting civilians and nonviolent Muslims?
You create martyrs, not the martyrs blowing themselves up but you give EVERY Muslim EVERYWHERE a justified cause to fight. On top of the existing terrorists, you’d create hundreds of thousands of righteous avengers screaming for blood. It’d be a global bloodbath.
That strategy would double the problem, not fix it.
“What kind of people take their children to watch public executions?” The answer is simple – America prior to 1960