links
Jacobin magazine throws a lot in for Mike Gravel
Biden’s comment to 10 year old is cause for pause
He’s the closest thing we’ve had to an antiwar president in 40 years—but the entrenched interests have proven too strong. … Consistency has not been a strong suit of Trump’s administration. Yet terminating our interminable wars while lowering the U.S. military profile in the Islamic world does seem to be something to which the president is actually committed. …
Every elected President has been a ‘peace’ candidate at least back to Clinton, but we don’t get peace for the reason expressed at the end of the article … the ‘war party’ has too much power. For those who think that Trump is simply too stupid to resist, we have the example of Obama. Obama is clearly intelligent (if not wise). He was also a peace candidate … proudly proclaiming his opposition to the Iraq War. He ended by destroying one country, Libya, and trying to destroy another, Syria. Probably killed half a million people and in the last year of his Presidency dropped 26,000 bombs.
We have another peace candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, and perhaps Bernie Sanders. I don’t give either of them much hope. Gabbard will be crushed by the war party, because she is even more clearly their enemy than Trump was (the only reason Trump wasn’t subjected to even more dirty tricks by the CIA, etc. is that they had no real expectation that he could win), and if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would be another Obama.