July 19, 2015

Donald Trump wasn't the only one spouting offensive nonsense at this weekend's Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. Here's his fellow 2016 GOP clown car occupant, the good Dr. Ben Carson, explaining to Frank Luntz why we should send ground troops to fight ISIS.

Prepare yourself for a big heaping helping of revisionist history accompanied by a whole lot of fearmongering and beating the drums for more war.

LUNTZ: It's 3 a.m. and that phone call comes and it's about a challenge to America's safety and security and the threat is ISIS. What does the next president need to do now so that phone call never comes.

CARSON: That's a very good question because what in fact is going on in the world right now is quite different from what went on before. You know, in 2003 for instance when we invaded Iraq and al Qaeda was a big deal, there are many people who weren't totally on board with that because they didn't see where that was a significant threat to our national security and you know, I could be one of those people, because I wasn't very enthusiastic about that.

However, we are facing now a completely different situation. We have radical Islamic jihadists who want to destroy us and they want to destroy our way of life and their existence is a threat to us. And we cannot be in that mind set that says, “Oh we made a mistake and we spent a bunch of money and we caused a lot of strife, so therefore, let's just get into our little cocoon, and that's a problem for somebody else.”

That's not going to work. The fact of the matter is, they want to destroy us and we have two choices. We can sit here, ignore them, bomb the dessert and think that we're doing something, or we can destroy them first, and I choose the latter. And what I would do... what I would do is use every resource available to us.

You know, I think that our offensive capabilities and defensive capabilities militarily are good. They have been degraded because they've been neglected, but they're still extremely good.

LUNTZ: Would you send ground troops?

CARSON: I would send ground troops if I needed ground troops in order to take the land.

LUNTZ: Do you have an idea what the threat is? You defined it. Is it a likelihood that ground troops would be necessary to succeed?

CARSON: I think it is a strong likelihood, the reason being, in order for them to develop their caliphate, they need land, and if we really want to break their backs, we take the land. You're not going to take the land without troops.

You know, we made this mistake in Vietnam. You know, we would go in, we would clear out the Viet Cong. We would declare victory. We would leave and they would come right back. That doesn't do any good. And of course the reason that ISIS arose is because we vacated Iraq after we had secured the victory there.

That's a whole lot of bloodlust from a man who wears Jesus on his sleeve.

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