Yes, another good one. It’s a serious piece, but I was still laughing at a couple of points. You know the WSJ has some damn good reporters. This one certainly fits that “mold”. And what she’s talking about is a subject that is currently near and dear to our hearts. Acknowledgement to Raw Story:
Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan has a message for Donald Trump: You took America to war without ever explaining why. In a column published Thursday, the Reagan speechwriter and longtime conservative voice delivered a pointed rebuke [subscription needed]of Trump’s failure to make a serious public case for the war in Iran — and didn’t spare his vice president either.
“We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?” Noonan wrote.
What is the plan, indeed? Inquiring minds want to know. That’s most of the people in this country. *Why* did he start this thing, and has he planned for the future? How many people, including us, have asked about this since we woke up to find we had gone to war? We can safely state the number is pretty damn high. We’re not getting anything except Hegseth firing people in the military, who we need in the damn war, and the occasional ranting from him, as well, which doesn’t give us anything either.
Drawing on two of the most prominent examples of presidential war communication — JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis address in 1962 and Reagan’s Grenada announcement in 1983 — Noonan argued that both men shared a quality conspicuously absent from Trump: disciplined, evidence-based, morally serious rhetoric that brought the public along.
“You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.”
Ooooof. Laid it right out there. We don’t know, and some of us are worried. Iran has the high ground right now, and we have no insight into their thinking. We just have to wait. Trump isn’t helping with his inconsistencies and late-night/early-morning rants. Hegseth doesn’t help. Vance doesn’t help. So, the question now is: does anyone know?
Noonan suggested that someone in the administration needs to intervene and make the case. “If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?” Noonan concluded that Trump’s failure to communicate is “part of why the president’s popularity is falling.”
We would be more than happy to have Rubio actually step up and *do something*, tell us about the war, tell us what the hell is going on. But does he know anything? Having Mr. Rubio step up might not be as good as it sounds. But if Iran is ready to start talks about a complete ceasefire and an end to the war, send him. He’s certainly smart enough. And find an interpreter on *our* side, not one Iran provides, because they lie just like our ‘president’ (and Ghislaine) does. They need someone who will tell the truth. We’re already at a disadvantage if that doesn’t happen. But in the meantime, what *IS* the reason for the war that we lost?
See you soon!
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Noonan’s got some truly astounding (if only metaphorical) balls to be making that claim about Reagan and Grenada. Reagan LIED about the “threat” to American students on the island; the island nation’s government posed ZERO threat to the students there. The only “real” threat the island posed to America was the fact that the Socialist prime minister had very close ties to Cuba and had been allowing Cuban troops to use the island as a “layover” for flights to Angola (where they’d been helping the Marxist government there to fight an American- and South African-backed rebel force). In fact, Cuba was preparing to help Grenada enlarge their airport so that larger Cuban planes could land and take off from the island and Reagan was having none of that. Also, Reagan needed a nice little distraction from the heat he was still taking over the Beirut eff-up (which led to the deaths of over 240 marines) just a couple of days earlier. And what’s so horrible about it is that he made it seem as though the US had actually fought and beaten Cuba or the Soviet Union directly rather than a fairly nondescript minor Caribbean island country (to put it in perspective, Grenada is roughly twice the size of Washington DC in area–and only had about 1/7th the population). And had Margaret Thatcher not been the UK’s Prime Minister at the time, the invasion of the Commonwealth member country could’ve led to a major rift in US/UK relations.
Ouch! Wow, do I appreciate the information! I seem to remember Reagan did something to delay news on something (can’t remember details) to make him look gold in comparison with, I believe, Jimmy Carter. That still pisses me off. I’ll have to go look it up again. Nonetheless, Reagan hurt the country more than helped it, no matter how it’s viewed.
Susan,
I think you’re remembering that Reagan told the Iranians to hold the Embassy hostages until after the election so Jimmy Carter would lose. After Reagan won the 1980 election we got our cowboy president.
So what she’s saying is that Dimwit Donny has failed to ‘market’ his stupid war by using the correct rhetoric to ‘bring the country with him’ ?
So it’s not that the war is stupid, it’s just not been ‘sold’ in the right way?
Someone needs to tell her that no matter how well ‘packaged’, ‘sold’, or ‘marketed’ stupidity is still stupidity and thus, by definition, stupid.