Democrats, who were doves when George W. Bush was president, are now hawks. "Democrats Back Obama on Libya," said a MinnPost.com headline.
And Republicans, who were hawks when George W. Bush was president, are now doves.
In fact, in the tradition of President Warren G. Harding, the Republican commander in chief who invented the word "normalcy," Sarah Palin created her own new word: squirmish.
"Are we at war?" she asked the other day (as quoted in The Chicago Sun-Times). "I haven't heard the president say we are at war. And that's why I too [don't know] do we use the term intervention, do we use war, do we use squirmish?"
Here's the really crazy part: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party favorite, is now using the same rhetoric and logic employed by the Antiwar Movement in 2002 and 2003!
Listen to Paul's rebuttal (above) to Obama's speech defending Coalition intervention in Libya yesterday and you'll see what I mean. Many of the exact same arguments that prominent antiwar figures articulated eight or nine years ago, Senator Paul is repeating now.
At one point, Senator Paul said the United States is
already in two wars that we are not paying for. We are waging war across the Middle East on a credit card, one whose limit is rapidly approaching. And this is just wrong. We already borrow money from countries like China to pay for our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and it would be interesting to know how many Americans believe we should continue borrowing money and saddling future generations with debt to pay for our current actions in Libya.
The senator went on to say, "We can no longer afford to spend what we don't have. And we can't afford to address every other nation's problems before we address our own." If that isn't classic Antiwar Movement rhetoric, I don't know what is.
It is a sad day when Republicans are the main voices in favor of restraint and non-intervention, whereas most Democrats are circling the wagons around Obama.
It goes to prove an old theory of mine - that once a Democrat comes to power in the White House, the forces of "progressivism" in the United States, which are so adept at resisting Republican misrule, often completely shut down.
This fact, coupled with the sudden appearance of a strong antiwar sentiment in the Republican Party, speaks to just how fiercely tribal and partisan so many high-profile political figures in the United States are today.
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