In a Trump-Free Debate, Everyone Tries to Out-Trump Trump
If Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, the world will be a much more dangerous place. A thoughtless, impulsive, thin-skinned lunatic obsessed with his own machismo is not someone you want in charge of the most powerful military (not to mention nuclear arsenal) on the planet.
But Trump wasn’t on the debate stage Thursday night. Instead, we were treated to the vision of seven other men who want to run the country, and for the most part they’re just as terrifying as their party’s frontrunner.
They may not all be as bombastic as Trump, and their plans may not sound quite as vague. But when it comes to America’s role on the world stage, the other Republicans vying for the presidency are just as ill-informed, unprepared and downright dangerous.
“I will apologize to nobody,” Ted Cruz announced with his usual flair (the same flair he showed as a debate team star in college without ever learning to speak like an actual human being), “for the vigorousness with which I will fight terrorism, go after ISIS, hunt them down wherever they are, and utterly and completely destroy ISIS.”
That’s Cruz’s entire foreign policy. He’s going to destroy ISIS, unlike Barack Obama, who likes to take ISIS out for ice cream and talk to it about its behavior.
How will Cruz destroy ISIS? He’ll carpet bomb them. Since ISIS is embedded in cities with thousands of civilians, how will he carpet bomb it to death without murdering ISIS’s victims?
“You want to know what carpet bombing is?” Oh good! He’s going to explain it. “It’s what we did in the first Persian Gulf War; 1,100 air attacks a day, saturation bombing that utterly destroyed the enemy.”
In the first Persian Gulf War, we were attacking Iraq’s army, not a terrorist organization embedded into a population. It was easy to find 1,100 targets a day, and of course there were still civilian casualties. Where would Cruz find these targets in the fight against ISIS? Maybe he’d politely ask them to leave the cities.
At least Cruz is focused on a genuine threat — ISIS is a vicious band of terrorists who murder, rape and torture in the name of a twisted ideology. Chris Christie has a little trouble figuring out where the real threats to America are coming from.
“Well let me tell you what the country should really be worried about,” Christie said, leaving us all on the edge of our seats. What was this threat that ought to keep us up at night? He went on to tell the story of an Iowa voter who had a pointed question for Hillary Clinton.