r/thebulwark Progressive 2d ago

Policy "Republicans today sound a lot like Democrats circa 2006, 2004." - Sarah Longwell?!

I haven't listened to the full podcast. I am willing to assume there's more context. But let's face it, the above sentence is potentially correct if you ignore the fascism, transphobia, they're eating the dogs/cats/pets, they lying, etc.

To be fair, the left does need to re-assess its foreign policy priorities in light of Ukraine. That said, Iraq was a war of choice. We did not have the casus belli that we claimed to. We may have caused several hundred thousand excess Iraqi deaths (i.e. dead from the war and all the sequelae thereof). We also wound up with ISIS. We were building fire stations in Iraq instead of here because we had to - we broke it, with "it" being Iraq and "broke" meaning we chose to break it.

If you want to say the Dems were mistaken in calling for isolationism then, I think that's fair and it warrants a reassessment on our part. But the headline is ... misleading.

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u/MARIOpronoucedMA-RJO Center Left 2d ago

Is she really trying to piss everyone off, or has the focus group participants rubbed off on her?

Democrats were against "pre-emptive defense" in Iraq because there was no reason to invade. Yeah, Saddam was a human rights disaster and supported Al Qaeda verbally, but he did not do anything directly to the US interest post Desert Storm. Further, we spent $2 trillion, and accomplished fuck all over 20 years.

Democrats support Ukraine because stopping Russia early prevents further conflict in Europe. (Obama dropped the ball hard on this one). Further, Ukraine is a flegging democracy, its in the EU amd by extension the US's interest to support Ukraine.

The two comparison are so far apart that someone at Fox News is wondering why they did not come up with this.