10 November 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
All those leftist protestors who are crying and wailing over Donald Trump's
election are only showing how the liberal movement has become as morally
bankrupt as the conservative movement.
After all, consider what they could be protesting. They could be protesting
the 15 years of continuous death and destruction at the hands of the U.S.
national security state in Afghanistan and the Middle East. They could be
leading mass demonstrations demanding that President Obama and President-Elect
Trump stop the U.S. role in the death and destruction and bring all U.S.
soldiers home now.
Don't forget the run-up to the Iraq War, the war that Republican President
George W. Bush sold to the American people on the basis of a false WMD scare.
The left rightly rose up in angry protest against a war of aggression against
a country that had never attacked the United States. There were giant anti-war
demonstrations all over the country. Liberals pointed out that a war on Iraq
would necessarily entail killing or maiming tens of thousands of innocent
people — that is, people who had done nothing to the United States.
Of course, Bush, the Pentagon, and the CIA ignored the protests, but at least
there was virtue in the fact that the left had taken the right stance.
But then look at what happened when Barack Obama came into office. Although he
had led voters into thinking that he was going to shift the country in a
different direction, Obama instead decided to give the country what amounted
to 8 more years of Bush's interventionist foreign policy. Suddenly, it was a
Democratic president — a liberal president — who was bringing the death and
destruction to Afghanistan and the Middle East.
All of sudden, the left went silent or, even worse, began supporting Obama (as
did the conservative movement). Obama was now the liberals' president. Feeling
a sense of political loyalty to him, they abandoned their principled
opposition to the continuous death and destruction that Bush had wreaked and
that Obama was now wreaking in that part of the world.
In her forever quest for the presidency, Hillary Clinton decided a long time
ago that she needed to become a warmonger. She obviously figured that if she
was perceived to be like George McGovern or some other liberal peace-oriented
Democrat, she would never be elected president. She was bound and determined
to never be called a peacenik or soft on communism (or Russia).
So, Clinton became an extreme interventionist and militarist — a supporter of
invasions, coups, wars of aggression, and foreign aid to dictatorships. She
embraced the old Cold War national-security establishment and NATO. She was
hoping that the political middle and even the conservative movement would
elect her president.
In the course of the current presidential race, the left rallied to her cause,
even after she made it clear that she would use America's military might to
continue bombing, killing, maiming, or assassinating ever more people in
Afghanistan and the Middle East. She even boasted on how she had brought about
the death of Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi in a regime-change operation in
which Clinton herself had played a prominent role. Clinton also made it clear
that as president she was prepared to have U.S. military forces shoot down
Russian planes over Syria, thereby risking all-out nuclear war with the
Russians.
Throughout the campaign, most (but certainly not all) of the left remained
mute in the face of Clinton's warmongering and thirst for more death and
destruction. Concern over Donald Trump's sexual assaults on women predominated
over abuse of women (and children) that Clinton and Obama had engaged in
Afghanistan and the Middle East through bombings, shootings, and
assassinations.
And now we have Trump, who, like Clinton, is clearly an interventionist but
who also has not demonstrated the extreme enthusiasm and eagerness for more
death and destruction that Bush, Clinton, Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA
have.
In other words, given Trump's relative ambivalence toward continuous death and
destruction, here is an excellent opportunity for liberals to align themselves
with us libertarians in calling for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops
from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Instead, what is the left doing? They're crying and wailing that their
candidate didn't win — the candidate who promised them more death and
destruction in the Middle East. What better evidence of moral bankruptcy than
that? Those leftist protestors remind me of those soldiers in the movie The
Bridge Over the River Kwai, who got so vested in constructing a bridge for
their Japanese captors that they effectively forgot which side they were
fighting on.
The liberal protestors and other leftists should be ashamed of themselves.
They need to do some serious soul-searching as to where they are in life and
what their lives should be all about.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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