Avatar of the War Party

All the presidential candidates are awful. But only one can be the worst.

Atlanta, GA

November 13, 2023

For what it’s worth, the next presidential election is a year away (assuming one is allowed to be held).

Democrat aspirants are always dreadful, exemplified by the unscrupulous sock-puppet the now occupying the office. And as the current crop makes abundantly clear, most Republicans are about as bad. To amplify that party’s worst aspects, let’s examine its most repulsive avatar. 

Seeking the throne is the former governor of South Carolina and erstwhile ambassador to the United Nations. The personification of painted claws scratching an endless blackboard, Nikki Haley is a faded bumper sticker from 2003.

She’s John McCain in mascara…Dick Cheney without the charm…a Chatty Cathy of neocon clichés.

Hearing her is like suffering a scolding from America’s ex-wife. And she’s hellbent on taking everything we’ve got…the money and the kids…to waste them all in worthless wars.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being worse than whatever ventriloquist is manipulating Joe Biden. Yet this woman might be. At best, she’s another rancid slice from the same contaminated beef.

By their imbecilities and idiocy, the wackos in Biden’s party can make him seem relatively “moderate.” But Haley only magnifies the madness of Republican warmongers. As awful and inept as Biden has been, Haley criticizes him for not being more maniacal with misadventures overseas.

To be fair, she has millions of reasons for doing so. As Bill Bonner reminds us, people are inherently neither good nor bad, but always subject to influence. Like most politicians (including the “Human Roomba” she wants to succeed), Nikki Haley is heavily influenced.

And thoroughly corrupt.

Among Haley’s more harmless offenses is her claim to be an accountant despite never passing the CPA. As one who thinks state licenses are what you get when the government steals your rights then sells them back, I don’t much care about this fib.

One shouldn’t need permission from government (of all entities!) to balance the books (not that she’s very good at that anyway). Haley’s lie simply accentuates that Joe Biden is more prolific and elaborate fabricating fake credentials. After all, he’s been doing it for decades.

But Nikki needn’t make things up to divulge her defects. What she’s actually done is bad enough. Somehow, in the few years since being ambassador to the UN…when she was flat broke and on the verge of bankruptcy…she quickly became quite wealthy.

Haley’s hustle as a munitions contractor and war promoter may have something to do with her rapid riches. It also explains her abiding interest in inciting chaos, fomenting conflict, and widening wars. 

A lapdog for Lockheed who sat on the board of Boeing, she gets flush when “our” government bankrupts Americans by bombing foreigners. Even while running for president, she’s received compensation from the connected corporations for which she shills.

Nikki Haley isn’t unique. Most leading politicians (including many of the hacks she’s running against) share her incentives and her instincts. Like sandpaper amid industrial toilet tissue, she’s just a more abrasive version of an insidious strain.

For two decades…in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Uganda, Niger, Yemen…Haley’s prototypes got essentially every intervention they wanted. After their catastrophic failures, we’d have hoped those policies would be repudiated and attempts at revival disgraced. 

With such a heinous résumé of human slaughter, physical destruction, and financial wreckage, you’d think those who promoted these calamities would retreat to monasteries rather than re-inflict themselves on hapless Americans.

But no.

Since the invasion of the Ukraine…and especially after the attacks in Israel…they’re back, and more shrill than ever. And, like Pickett at Gettysburg or Custer at Big Horn, Nikki Haley now leads the charge.

She says “America needs friends” while pushing perilous policies that create more enemies than we could possibly need.

She continues to categorize every country as “good” or “evil”, as if the world is a comic book where both sides can’t be bad (while never recognizing hers is the worst). 

Even the sophomoric “Axis of Evil” label has been revived, with Russia and China replacing Iraq and North Korea (what did they do to escape the list?) in an “unholy trinity” with ever-awful Iran. And Haley’s positions on Israel and the Ukraine are as inconsistent as they are asinine.

Minding our own business is out of the question. Haley insists it’s somehow in America’s interest that a few Russian-speaking regions half a world away be ruled by a Ukrainian regime that hates their guts. 

To the War Party, it’s always Munich 1938, and never Sarajevo 1914. They preposterously pretend each skirmish is World War II and every designated villain Adolf Hitler. Discretion is “appeasement”, and anyone advising caution is another Chamberlain. It’s like they imported their geopolitics from the third grade.

With no rationale or evidence, our hysterical warriors insisted for a year that if left unchecked, Vladimir Putin would recapture the Baltics and invade Poland. It’d then be only a matter of time before Russian troops were chugging vodka on the Champs-Élysées. 

But why? Just because Hitler and Stalin made similar moves? Putin has given no indication he’d go beyond the Ukraine…or that he plans to annex more of that. 

He merely wants what he’s always said he wanted, and what the West had repeatedly pledged: that NATO honor its guarantees, that Russia retain its historic access to the Black Sea, and that Ukrainian thugs leave Russian-speaking regions alone. 

But because the US provoked and prolonged this horrific war, a generation of Ukrainian men is gone for good. And for what?

After squandering half a million Ukrainian lives and a couple hundred billion American dollars, the US will likely give Russia what it requested before the war.

But far from repentant, people like Nikki Haley double-down, and demand more. Not only should “we” keep poking nuclear Russia, but the US must also gird for battle with nuclear China! And of course she licks her chops to pummel Persia.

Within hours of the atrocity in Israel, Haley proposed targeting Iran because they’d funded Hamas. Leaving aside Israel’s role creating and sustaining this vile foe, Haley’s reflexive reaction was as imprudent as it was predictable. But it clears the way for another war she wants to widen.

Haley said the attack on Israelis was “an attack on America”, which is preposterous. She also asserted “It is not that Israel needs America. America needs Israel”, which is ludicrous.

She obviously made these absurd pronouncements to convince Americans of the urgent need to fund her firepower benefactors “in support of Israel.” But why should they do that if Israel doesn’t need America? She’s as nonsensical as she is insufferable.

She says she wants to “claw back” spending while promoting countless wars around the world. China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela all fall within her global crosshairs.

The Jeffersonian ideal of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations” is completely foreign to Nikki Haley (which is probably why she wants to incinerate that idea too). As with Russia last year, China now, or Iran tomorrow, her reflexive reaction is always to sanction, ban, or bomb. 

But, once again, to be fair…

Like Joe Biden and all prominent politicians, Haley dangles and dances from Deep State strings. She does what she’s told, and parrots the policies she’s paid to promote. Her mandate, and that of anyone in quest of the imperial office, is to meddle.

Like every Republican president since Coolidge…and particularly her fellow candidates trying to be president now…she feels no compulsion stick to our knitting, “tend our own garden”, or shrink the State. The very thought is laughable. And not just internationally.

Does anyone really believe Nikki Haley would restrain spending or diminish the debt? Or that she would’ve resisted the covid hysteria, prohibited lockdowns, or fought coerced consumption of favored pharmaceuticals? Of course not.

She knows where her bread is buttered, and in whose back the knife should go.

JD