Pardon me while I sit back and enjoy the panic of the Republican – and media
– elites as the GOP frontrunner takes up that old left-wing antiwar slogan:
“Bush lied – people died!” That’s the essence of what Donald Trump said at Saturday’s
South Carolina GOP
presidential debate when moderator John Dickerson – who smirked his way
through the entire debate – asked Trump if he still thought George W. Bush should
be impeached as he supposedly said in a long ago interview:
“George
Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should
have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”
DICKERSON: “But so I’m going to – so you still think he should be impeached?”
TRUMP: “You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want
to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there
were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
The storm of booing from that crowd, which seemed mainly to consist of members
of the Lindsey Graham Ladies Home Garden Club, conjured in my memory another
signal moment in the
history of GOP presidential debates: when Ron Paul said that the 9/11 attacks
were “blowback” resulting from half a century of propping up Arab despots in
the Middle East. Remember how everyone declared that Paul was finished: that
by saying the un-sayable he had forever dashed all hopes of making a political
impact on the Republican party and that he was now consigned to the margins?
What happened, however, was nothing of the sort: instead, that moment of speaking
truth to power catapulted
him to national prominence and was instrumental in creating a national movement
that lives and grows to this day.