GOP Bonehead Scott Walker Bones Up On Foreign Policy-- Gets It All Wrong

Republican hopefuls running around Iowa Sunday were using American foreign policy as a prop in their fierce intra-party battle for the presidential nomination-- just the way they are exploiting every other important issue, from immigration reform to equality under the law for minorities. It's all up for demagoguery in Iowa. Unindicted Jersey criminal Chris Christie is promising to make marijuana illegal again in Colorado and Washington if he's elected. Scott Walker told primitive Iowa GOP gatherings that he'd back a constitutional amendment preventing gays and lesbians from marrying and he'd consider re-invading Iraq. I suppose Iowa Republicans who vote year after year for tribal politicians like Chuck Grassley and Steve King-- and just elected pig-fucker Joni Ernst to the Senate-- eat up this kind of rhetoric. Normal voters don't. And front-runner Walker and the rest of the pygmies in the clown car are leaving the normal voters for Hillary and Bernie to talk to. And Bernie is.

"This great nation and its government," tweeted Bernie Sunday morning, "belong to all of the people, not to a handful of billionaires, their Super-PACs and their lobbyists." And his newest meme:

Unlike most Democratic politicians, Bernie is running a clear, consistent campaign that is about something, an interconnected series of principles and values and solutions that can be easily understood by voters who are busy with their own lives and not busy poring over political treatises. Bernie is the Senate sponsor of the Employ Young Americans Now Act, which would create a $5.5 billion fund to employ and train a million young people between 16 and 24. Sanders, touring a similar type project in DC last week: "In America now we spend nearly $200 billion on public safety, including $70 billion on correctional facilities each and every year. So, let me be very clear: in my view it makes a lot more sense to invest in jobs, in job training, and in education than spending incredible amounts of money on jails and law enforcement." This is the kind of thing Bernie's campaign is about-- using the power of government to strengthen the middle class, rather than to enhance the power and wealth of the 1 percent. He's making headway-- at least with normal voters. 

Scott Walker has a different audience he's trying to woo:

Eric Zuesse is predicting that Bernie will beat Hillary and go on to beat any of the GOP pygmies who somehow manages to win his party's nomination. His polling analysis shows Hillary and all the Republicans other than Walker and Rubio sinking beneath the waves.

The 2011 ideological poll showed that of the five ideological orientations that were named, the one with the highest net-favorability-- the ratio of “positive” to “negative” ratings-- by the American public, was “Progressive,” at 67%/22%, or 3.05; and the second-highest was “Conservative,” at 62%/30%, or 2.07. Like Senator Warren, Senator Sanders is one of the U.S. Senate’s three leading (if not the Senate’s only three) progressives. He clearly represents the most-widely-shared ideology: progressivism. If he wins the Democratic nomination, then the nation will be in for its first clear ideological choice since 1932 in a two-major-Party contest between a progressive Democrat versus a conservative Republican. That time it was FDR versus Herbert Hoover.

Of course, FDR won. Back in 1932, the conservative’s deadweight load, which the Republican had to overcome but couldn’t, was the crash of 1929. In 2016, the conservative’s deadweight load, which he’ll have to overcome but won’t be able to, will be his record of supporting or opposing George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Everyone but Republicans already knows that that was a catastrophic decision in every way, and was never justifiable; so: no candidate who is even on the fence about this important matter can stand even a chance of winning the Presidency if his or her chief opponent has always been clearly opposed to it, as Sanders has been, in both words and actions. Sanders, then a member of the U.S. House, was one of the small minority who voted in 2002 against it.

...Scott Walker, is a pure mainstream Republican on the matter, saying that the decision was based on bad intelligence, “but knowing what we know now, we should not have gone into Iraq.” This line might suffice for him to be able to win the Republican nomination, but, if Bernie Sanders will be the Democrat he’ll be running against, then the Democrat will win, no matter how much money Republican billionaires pour into supporting their nominee. (Again, if Hillary becomes the Democratic nominee, the Republican nominee might win the Presidency-- and probably will win if that Republican happens to be Rand Paul.)

...In an earlier article, I stated the case Why Hillary Clinton Would Be a Weak Presidential Nominee for Democrats and I explained why Ms. Clinton will never be able to rise from her present poor net favorability ratings. All the good publicity about her is past (from her flaks), while her support (being based purely on PR, sheer fluff) was a mile wide and an inch deep. The more that voters get to see her actual record, the more they’ll distrust her words. That reason she’d be a weak general-election candidate is: she’s not at all a trustworthy person (except by her financial backers), and there’s nothing she’ll be able to do at this late date to convince general-election voters that she is. The trust issue is so bad for her, that no matter how much money is spent on her campaigns, it’ll be like trying to paddle a boat not in water but in air-- there won’t be the traction that’s needed to get her to being the first person past the finish-line in the boat-race. That boat has already been sold to the highest bidder, even before the race begins. She can evade, but she cannot hide, now that the contest has actually started. As more Democrats learn about this, they’ll turn away. Too many Democrats will avoid voting in the final, the general-election contest, or else will protest-vote for some third-party nominee; whereas the Republican nominee, whomever he is, will clearly be Republican in more than just his official designation. By contrast to Clinton: if Sanders is the Democrat, then voter-turnout on Election Day on the Democratic line will be enormous. And turnout in a Presidential election is crucial also in a much broader sense: it largely determines which of the two Parties will control both the Senate and especially the House (where everybody is up for election every two years). Even if Clinton were to win (which is unlikely), she would then be dealing in 2017 with a strongly Republican Congress, because of 2016’s resulting depressed Democratic voter-turnout. By contrast: if Sanders is the nominee, then not only will he win, but he will possibly (maybe even likely) be dealing with a Democratic Congress in 2017, by virtue of his drawing so many Democrats to the polls on Election Day 2016.