This is a weird thread. At the end of GWB's tenure, he'd gotten the US into a disastrous war which killed and injured tens of thousands of Americans and turned the region into a basket case. The deficit was through the roof. A major financial crisis was underway. His approval rating right around the 2008 election was 25%. How did the GOP deal with this? Mostly by pretending it hadn't happened. Regarding the deficit, Matt Taibbi observed about the Tea Party:
Quote:
After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. (“Not me — I was protesting!” is a common exclamation.)
Regarding Iraq, the line was pretty much that they went allin with AK preflop and hey, they didn't win, but it was a pretty reasonable play given the information. For example, the insufferable Megan McArdle wrote
this insanely whiny piece in 2008, complaining that she was being treated like an architect of the war merely for supporting it (and having described opponents as "pathetic", "nuts" and "paranoiac" in the run-up):
Quote:
Given that the defense and diplomacy staff of several administrations, a large number of IR scholars, and enormous swathes of the think tank world got it wrong, the one thing it clearly wasn't is obvious.
If you want to be congratulated on getting it right on Iraq: congratulations. But that is only sufficient if we are going to be asked again whether to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. If we are, I promise to leave the decision entirely in your hands.
...
Better to rely on process than persons. And that's where those who erred have something to add. The cognitive biases that affected us were not unique, as witness to the fact that many of them are now in prominent display among many war opponents. It is, obviously, also a good idea to listen to those who got it right--and thank God, we don't have to choose, what with this spacious new internet thingie we've got on. But if you had to pick only one, listen to the one who went wrong.
The entire American Right has collective narcissism. They will never admit that things going badly wrong was their fault. A year after Trump is gone, it'll just be "well I mean looking back, Trump wasnt a Real Conservative, mistakes were made, can you stop going on and on about it? Can we talk about the fact that Sanctuary Cities are traitors to America?".
Last edited by ChrisV; 01-04-2019 at 02:08 AM.