Presidential contender Marco Rubio is trying his level best to bring back the glory days of the Project for the New American Century, aka The People Who Brought You The Iraq War. Are you the sort of person that misses Dick Cheney and the "one percent" doctrine? Do you wet your pants every time you see an unshaved brown man? Do you like war—a lot—but have the memory of a fruit fly when it comes to the consequences of those actions? Good news, you little addle-brained dullard: Marco Rubio is courting you directly with a drive he calls
"NOTHING MATTERS IF WE AREN'T SAFE."
The economy will always be a major domestic issue. It’s the daily concern of millions of Americans, but it won’t matter if we can’t keep the people and processes that run it safe from foreign threats.
By the same token, we won't be able to afford all those super-important armies and border guards and super-awesome flying robot death squads if the next president and our next set of economic policies auger the economy into the ground. Which, as we have recently seen, is a thing that can happen.
From China, to Russia, to Iran, there are multiple threats to our national security at this very moment. The world has never been more dangerous than it is today,
Horseshit, and spoken like someone who never had to practice protecting themselves from a nuclear blast using nothing more than their own hands and a wooden desk.
but in the New American Century, a stronger America will make the world safer.
What's puzzling about this is that the Project for the New American Century, on which his own campaign is based, was a failure of historic magnitude. That's not being dramatic; their plans for the Middle East, executed by the last administration, were catastrophic in expense to the nation and in eventual outcome. It's not often a foreign policy "plan" can meet with such sweeping failures and the architects of that plan don't end up beheaded or imprisoned—America is a bit special that way, which is very civilized of us but does tend to mean we have heaping piles of incompetents and policy failures cluttering up the capitol, all still typing away and collecting regular paychecks—and to have a candidate trying to embrace all those failures
as if none of it ever happened is, well, remarkable even for us.
Marco Rubio and his staff (of aforementioned discredited neoconservatives, go figure) are premising their entire campaign on the American public being imbeciles. The ones that were keen on the PNAC notions of Peace through Bombing Things will, presumably, gravitate to the campaign as part of the ongoing cycle of neoconservatives demanding do-overs every time their prior policies killed a few hundred thousand people or so; the rest of America, the ones that now recognize the Iraq War as a mistake and expect their candidates to think the same, is assumed to be so very stupid that they won't put two and two together to think, golly gee, the last time we put these yokels in charge it cost us a trillion dollars, our children came home in bodybags, and we ended up with nothing to show for it except a destabilized Middle East with barbaric nutjobs running around committing acts of terror and ten years of America's worst pundits telling us that it's because we didn't spend enough, or die enough, or clap our f--king hands for Full Metal Tinkerbell enough.
There's no question that Marco Rubio is a dumb fellow. It's not a debatable point; he had every opportunity to not surround himself with the worst failures in America, and somehow not only gravitated toward them but themed his entire campaign around them. Even if he's overtly targeting America's dumbest voters, though, Rubio's New American Century campaign theme seems such a specific insult toward anyone who's paid the slightest bit of attention to foreign policy over the last decade that I have to imagine even America's usually pliant pundit class isn't going to have much use for him.
He's still vowing up and down that Iraq was not a mistake, for God's sake. Even the Fox News version of a Sunday show can't stomach that crap.