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.