It's Time to Disband "Libertarians for Trump"

Since it is clear that Donald Trump is terrible on economics, terrible on trade and terrible on private liberty, "Libertarians for Trump," aside from Trump's street-style  dismissal of political correctness (although he is even weak here when it comes to gays), has had to hang its support on the idea that Trump would be less war-like than Hillary Clinton.

This despite the fact that Trump has stated that he would send U.S. ground troops  to the Middle East and that his apparent favorite general believes that we will be at war with Islam for generations.

But Trump, this morning, has just showed us how misdirected LFT members are. Trump just went out of his way to praise the super neocon John Bolton.



Yes, Trump is talking about the same John Bolton, who was a foreign policy adviser to the  2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and has an affiliation with  various neocon organizations, including the  Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,  the Council for National Policy and the Institute of East-West Dynamics

He is alos chairman of The Gatestone Institute.

Here are some comments on Gatestone and Bolton:

From the Institute for Policy Studies:

Many of Gatestone's commentaries offer standard neoconservative tropes urging a more forceful and aggressive U.S. foreign policy. An April 2014 offering from Elliott Abrams, for example, complained that the Obama administration's foreign policy "really is the foreign policy of Belgium: negotiations, negotiations, negotiations. … What is missing in this formulation? In one word: power." Referring to President Barack Obama and his past affiliations with figures commonly vilified by his Republican critics, Abrams added, "This is the man who learned foreign policy from Rashid Khalidi and William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. The habits [to be broken], as the Administration might see them, are 'militarism,' 'aggression,' 'Cold War thinking' and an alleged effort to dominate the world, 'Imperialism'—or what many others might call patriotism." Other Gatestone posts have urged a second military intervention in Libya and inveighed against a diplomatic agreement over Iran's nuclear program.

From The Atlantic:

Which brings me to John Bolton’s Thursday New York Times op-ed, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” Bolton was both a booster, and a minor architect, of the war in Iraq. As George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state in late 2002, he told the BBC that, “We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq.” He added that, “the Iraqi people would be unique in history if they didn’t welcome the overthrow of this dictatorial regime,” and that although building a democracy would prove a “difficult task,” the people of Iraq “are fully competent to do it.” So competent, in fact, that “the American role [in post-war Iraq] actually will be fairly minimal.”That’s what Bolton said publicly. Privately, according to a 2005 report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, he distributed classified information about Joe Wilson in an attempt to smear the former ambassador, who was then questioning President Bush’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. Bolton also played a key role in forcing out Jose Bustani, director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, because he feared Bustani’s inspectors in Iraq would undermine the case for war. It was behavior like this that led Washington Post columnist David Ignatius toobserve that Bolton “epitomizes the politicization of intelligence that helped produce the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.”

Bottom line: Bolton is the ultimate warmonger. There is not a problem anywhere in the world that he believes can not be solved by U.S. military might. And he will lie, deceive and distort to protect and get the military machine moving. I can't think of a more aggressive warmonger.

"Libertarians for Trump" how could you possibly support a man for president who says  John Bolton is a good man and called him "very, very strong" and said he always liked him?

The anti-establishment posing by Trump is attractive, but it is just that posing. Trump has no intellectual depth. He is a talented street hustler. But the establishment sharpies like Bolton know how to run circles around the political rube Trump.

It's time to pull the plug on LFT. Trump is too flawed a candidate to be associated with libertarianism.

 -RW