Writing in the National Review, David French, Bill Kristol’s most recent nominee, withdrew as a potential independent candidate for the office of the President of the United States.
The article is unintentionally illustrative, largely explaining why rounding up the usual Republican establishment suspects for President didn’t work.
Let me begin by noting the snippets within his article that French got right:
“…a pretty darn obscure lawyer…both parties failed so spectacularly…”
French goes on to say:
“Hillary Clinton lies habitually and changes position on virtually every public issue except for her pro-abortion extremism, and she has a suspicious record of making public decisions that favor donors to the Clinton Foundation. Her signal foreign-policy “achievement” was helping launch a war in Libya that not only cost American lives in Benghazi but also helped transform the nation into ISIS’s latest playpen.”
Well, “duh.”
Yes, but French doesn’t mention or perhaps doesn’t understand the origins of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Libyan foreign policy and how the Republican establishment, whose views he seems to endorse, facilitated it.
It was actually the George W. Bush administration and the neo-conservatives, in their delusional quest for “moderate” Islam, who set the stage for the Libyan fiasco.
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration, sought a long-term political solution to international terrorism, which they believed emanated from the lack of democratic participation, where resentful individuals, having been excluded from the political process in their own countries, directed their hatred and violence against the West. Bush chose the invasion Iraq as a starting point for the democratization of the Middle East, from where he had expected democracy to spread and, consequently, would both assimilate and contain potential terrorists.
When democracy failed to take hold in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter, Bush initiated an alternative approach, the idea to integrate unspecified “moderate” Islamists into their own countries’ governments. The concept quickly gained popularity, particularly in Qatar, a long-time supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, who sponsored seminars, conferences and meetings, all promoted by the Al-Jazeera Channel to speed up a process that they hoped would reshape the entire region to reflect Muslim Brotherhood beliefs and practices.
If the Bush method had been mostly passive and reactive, the Obama Administration, sympathetic to Islam and arguably infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, formulated a preemptive policy, all of which would lead to catastrophe in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and the rise of ISIS.
In August 2010, Obama, ordered his advisors to produce a secret report, which subsequently determined that, without sweeping political changes, countries across the Arab world were ripe for popular revolt.
The still classified document, Presidential Study Directive-11 (PSD-11), concluded that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting stable but authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa to one backing, what Obama Administration officials considered as, “moderate” Islamist political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish AK Party, now led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
None of the Libyan or related pro-Islamist foreign policy initiatives pursued by the Obama Administration were seriously opposed, and all were fully funded, by the Republican Congress, the same people French is recommending for re-election.
It is just one of hundreds of examples, when the Republican establishment ignored its constituency and fueled a political insurgency.
Sadly, at one point in his article, like many in the Republican establishment and representative of the problem, French seamlessly transforms himself into a Democrat Party shill, denigrates millions of patriotic Americans and parrots the chants of the violent Bernie Sanders street thugs:
“His (Trump) supporters believe it demonstrates “strength” when he mocks the disabled and bullies women. He has attracted an online racist following that viciously attacks his opponents and their families.”
French claims that he gave the idea of running for President “serious thought,” but concluded that he is “not the right person to challenge Trump and Hillary.”
I don’t know David French. He could very well be an excellent candidate for President, but he should have thought of that a year ago and not played the role of a last-minute spoiler to resuscitate the prospect of maintaining the corrupt status quo.
What French and his promoters still don’t seem to understand is that the success of Donald Trump is directly proportional to the failures of the Republican establishment and its unprincipled collaboration with the massively destructive policies of the Obama Administration.
French is correct when he states:
“I believe with all my heart that there is an American movement ready to both resist the corruption, decadence, and dishonesty of the American elite and restore the promise of the American Dream;”
but, like all in the Republican establishment, he appears clueless when he says: “that movement may not emerge for some time.”
Sorry, but that train has already left the station. (For more from the author of “Non-Starter Doesn’t Start: David French’s 15-Minutes of Fame” please click HERE)
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