Donald Trump and the "Chickenhawk" taunt
The state of modern politics: Democratic operatives and elected officials were "outraged" when Donald Trump agreed with them.
Back in 2003, one of the most common memes among Democrats was that Republicans were "chickenhawks" - that Republicans were willing to send people to fight and die in Iraq but were unwilling to serve themselves. This theme continued on for years afterward, winding down only after Barack Obama was elected President. Interestingly enough, Obama himself was never condemned as a "chickenhawk" despite ordering the military to intervene in Syria and Libya.
Along comes Donald Trump, who is reflexively non-interventionist. When he was President the first time, Trump famously called off a retaliatory strike on Iran because he decided 150 fatalities was disproportionate to Iran shooting down an unmanned spy drone. Trump has almost single-handedly transformed the party that enthusiastically backed George W. Bush and the Iraq war into a party that is skeptical of military adventures.
Trump stirred up fake outrage a couple weeks ago when he used the "chickenhawk" argument against Liz Cheney. Trump used nearly word-for-word the same argument Code Pink and both Democratic operatives and elected officials had been using daily for years, but they were "outraged" when Trump agreed with them. Obviously, this is deeply hypocritical.
So to cover their hypocrisy, Leftists employed dishonesty. They fraudulently claimed Trump wanted Cheney to face a firing squad for being a "warmonger." One of the first rules of politics is that when you are in a hole, stop digging, but the attacks on Trump proved the Left does not follow that rule.
So, no, Trump never called for Liz Cheney to be executed for supporting military intervention abroad. But that does not mean his argument is correct, any more than it was when Code Pink used the same argument twenty years ago.
The argument for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power was that Hussein's regime had long been a threat to stability in the Middle East, a threat to our ally Israel, and had been uncooperative with sanctions to keep them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Faulty intelligence indicated Iraq actually had WMD. An authorization to use military force against Iraq easily passed the U.S. Senate, where Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all voted for it.
The logical merit of the argument for "regime change" does not change based on whether or not the people who voted affirmatively personally served, any more than the logical merit of declaring war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack depended on whether the elected representatives who voted for it personally boarded an aircraft carrier bound for the Philippines. There are certainly many reasons to argue why the 2003 war was a bad idea, but the fact that Clinton, Kerry and Biden did not serve is irrelevant to those arguments. "Chickenhawk" is designed to stir up emotions, not make a meaningful policy argument.
Trump, who will join Grover Cleveland as only the second man to serve non-consecutive terms as President, should respect his own office enough to make more logically coherent arguments instead of cribbing from Code Pink. His own history of violent rhetoric added credibility to a fallacious and hypocritical criticism of him. After decades of refusing to have any self-control, discipline or restraint, I am not optimistic that he will do that.