It is time once again for a feature you will only find on OG Liberal blogs that dare to dig back into the Before Time to notice how much of the deranged, disastrous Trump policies are not an aberration but a continuation of the trajectory the Republican party has been on for decades.
Now we could spend this post talking about Republican hypocrisy around debts and deficits, their reliance on demonizing relatively powerless groups to win elections, or their obsession with stripping women of their bodily autonomy. But since today's headlines are all about a ruinous Republican war-of-choice in the Middle East, let's talk about that. And let's begin by reminding ourselves that next week will mark the 22nd anniversary of this moment from the 2004 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
You know, back in the Good Old Days! Back when Republicans took America to war soberly and seriously, with careful preparation and on the basis of unimpeachable intelligence!
Yes, that was the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, cracking wise about not finding WMD in Iraq. Which, you might remember, was the entire predicate for that disaster. And right therewith him, applauding and laughing their asses off, were Washington's political elite, the cream of the Washington press corps and their celebrity guests. Because Bush making light of not being able to find the WMD was just so damn funny!
You will also remember that, three years later, as the Bush administration was imploding and the war in Iraq was now indisputably a catastrophe – after Hurricane Katrina, after Terri Schiavo, after Republicans were crushed in the midterms and Bush’s poll numbers had cratered – we find Bush's Brain, Karl Rove, doing this at the 2007 WHCD:
And who's that right behind Rove? One of his backup dancers on that infamous evening?
Yes it's David Gregory. Four years after the Iraq invasion, three years after Bush’s WMD joke video, during a period when the Bush administration was under heavy criticism over the war and the Valerie Plame scandal, there’s Dancin' David Gregory happily going along with the bit.
A year later Gregory would be promoted to the Big Chair on Meet the Press, where he would spend the next six years destroying whatever shreds of credibility that show still had. In 2018 he would be replaced by Chuck Todd, who was just as terrible as Gregory in exactly the same way. Todd would go on being an embarrassment to his profession for nine long years, until 2023, when they replaced him with Kristen Welker, who is just as terrible as Gregory and Todd in exactly the same way.
So pardon me if I'm not shedding too many tears over what Bezos is doing to The Washington Post or Ellison is doing to CBS News. Yes, it's terrible, but the legacy media was doing quite an efficient job of immolating themselves in a bonfire of cloistered arrogance long before Trump's billionaire button men showed up.
Now that we've covered Bush making jokes about WMD at the White House Correspondent’s dinner during a time which our Never Trump friends desperately want us to remember as the Good Old Days of serious, cautious Republican leadership, don't forget that our Never Trump friends also would like us to remember that time as a period of Republican transparency. None of this "hiding critical wartime information from the American public" nonsense. And, of course, we are to believe that Republicans during this time were always respectful, never attacking or slandering their critics. All of that is Trump stuff!
Except is it? Really?
From Democracy Now, March 26, 2004
Rice Agrees to Meet 9/11 Commission But Only in Private
After coming under intense criticism, the White House offered Thursday to have National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice meet again with the 9/11 Commission. But White House officials said she would appear only in private and not under oath.
Rice was the center of criticism during the recent 9/11 hearings for refusing to appear. Former Senator Bob Kerrey said “My gosh, I think she was on every single network the day the commission opened its hearing this week, attacking our witnesses.”
The New York Times also reports–almost in passing — that Rice is planning to leave her job at the end of the year.
Meanwhile the White House continued to attack former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke who is accusing the Bush administration of not heeding warnings before Sept. 11.
Senator Tom Daschle said “I have a simple request for the president today: Please ask the people around you to stop the character attacks they are waging against Richard Clarke. Ask them to stop their attempts to conceal information and confuse facts. Ask them to stop the long effort that has made the 9/11 commission’s work more difficult than it should be.”
And of course you remember this.
So let’s compare Bush’s Iraq debacle with Trump’s Iran debacle. The Good Old Days when Republicans were awesome, and the Bad New Days when Republicans are terrible.
Lying us into war? Check.
Claiming that we had no choice because the threat was imminent and terrifying? Check.
Making up excuses after the fact? Check.
Radically downplaying the downsides? Overpromising and underdelivering? Check and check.
Complete failure to prepare the public for what this war would really mean? Check.
Keeping critical information from the public? Check.
Slandering critics? Check.
Well, OK, but what about this?
From The New York Times, March 16, 2026:
With Threats and Claims of ‘Treason,’ Trump Pressures Media on the War
The Trump administration has unleashed a multifaceted pressure campaign against news organizations as it increasingly bristles at media coverage of a Middle East military operation that many Americans oppose.
Official Pentagon briefings now include attacks on outlets like CNN, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nit-picking headlines. President Trump is turning to his bully pulpit on Truth Social to accuse “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES” about the war and musing about “Charges for TREASON.”
The goal seems to be pressuring journalists to back off critical coverage of the war effort, or to at least encourage the public to second-guess reporting that runs counter to the administration’s preferred narrative. And the effort has gone well beyond words.
Mr. Trump’s top media regulator, Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”
Surely there was no Bush administration equivalent of these attacks on the free press during the Before Time, right?
Well...
From The Brookings Institution, April 11, 2006:
Misplaced Blame: The Media’s Performance in Iraq
Throughout the Iraq war, the Bush administration has complained about the tenor of media coverage in Iraq. Paul Bremer did so during the first year of the American presence there, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as well as Vice President Dick Cheney make the point repeatedly. The complaint that we see only the bad news, not the good, has become increasingly prevalent within the U.S. armed forces as well.
…the broad argument by the American media’s critics is often badly overstated. While the overall image of Iraq conveyed by the mainstream media may be somewhat more negative than reality, it is not far off. If we lose in Iraq, it will most likely be because of events on the ground there, not a prematurely wavering political support here.
In fact, one can make a reasonable argument that the American public’s view on Iraq is just about where it should be given the facts. The public is enormously impressed by our troops, but depressed about the general lack of major progress on the ground and upset with the Bush administration for overpromising and underpreparing in regard to the war.
And then there is the filthy business of war profiteering.
From The Huffington Post, September 17, 2006:
Halliburton and Cheney: War Profiteers in Chief Fight to Keep Their Wallets Fat
Halliburton's stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three and a half years ago. David Lesar, its CEO, made over $40,000,000 in 2004 alone.
We all by now know that Dick Cheney retired from the Pentagon in 1993 to accede to the throne of Halliburton, an oil field services company based in Houston. After Mr. Cheney left Halliburton with tens of millions of dollars in his pocket largely earned because of his connections to Middle East dictators, Halliburton had to cough up $2.3 billion in cash, about $1.2 billion in stock and another $55 million in IOUs to help pay off the tens of thousands of people in this country who had suffered and/or died of asbestos poisoning at the hand of Dresser, which Mr. Cheney had acquired and for which Mr. Cheney was (and apparently still is) handsomely compensated. If this sounds a bit like Mr. Cheney's due diligence with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it should. He never bothered to look at what Dresser had before he bought it for Halliburton and he never bothered to look at what Iraq had before he broke it for the U.S...
Until very recently, there has been relatively little penetration into the popular psyche of the role played by Halliburton in particular and other private military contractors in general.
The reason is simple: the Bush Administration and its Congressional foot soldiers ranging from George Allen and John Warner of Virginia to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have refused at every turn to allow for any oversight at all, even though Democratic Senators have asked for such bi-partisan review for years.
Of course, it’s still early days in Trump’s Iran Fiasco, but does anyone doubt with so much money sloshing around and so little oversight, that Trump and his mob of looters and plunderers will soon be stuffing their pockets as fast as possible?
From The New York Times, March 13, 2026:
The Oil Tankers Trump Seized Are Costing the U.S. Millions of Dollars
Although President Trump said seizing tankers would be a financial boon, the cost of maintaining just one aging ship has already reached $47 million.
The seizures have put the U.S. government in a financial bind. The ships are highly expensive to maintain. And the Trump administration cannot legally sell the oil in these tankers without a judge’s permission.
Maintaining the seized tankers has already cost the United States tens of millions of dollars — in one case, $47 million in only three months — and complicates Mr. Trump’s claims of swift financial victories from his military operations targeting Venezuela and Iran.
From Time Magazine, March 19, 2026:
'It Takes Money to Kill Bad Guys': Trump's Iran War Set to Boost Profits For These Defense Contractors
Administration officials have signaled that Trump will soon request Congress approve tens of billions of dollars in supplemental funding to replenish U.S. weaponry supplies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on Thursday that the Pentagon had sent the White House a request $200 billion in additional funds, though he stressed that the figure "could move."
"It takes money to kill bad guys," Hegseth told reporters. "So we’re going back to Congress to ensure we’re properly funded, for what’s been done, what we may have to do in the future." He added that the money was needed to ensure that the country's stockpile of ammunition is "not just refilled, but above and beyond.”
Then there is this depraved Trump-era innovation. From The Atlantic, March 18, 2026:
Maybe Turning War Into a Casino Was a Bad Idea?
A disturbing new low in the Polymarket era
On March 10, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported on a missile that had been launched from Iran. The warhead hit an open area outside Jerusalem, which Fabian confirmed by speaking with rescue services and reviewing footage of the explosion. He wrote a short post on The Times of Israel’s live blog and moved on.
Meanwhile, gamblers had wagered millions on the unfolding events of the conflict. Fabian’s post became the subject of a major dispute on Polymarket, a popular prediction market where people can bet on the outcome of almost anything. The site had allowed users to guess when Iran would initiate “a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil”: More than $14 million was riding on whether such an attack had happened March 10.
People started reaching out asking Fabian to change his article. Some argued that Israel Defense Forces had not officially mentioned such an attack occurring on that day, and others said that the explosion he had reported was the result of a missile being intercepted, which according to Polymarket’s terms wouldn’t count as a strike “on Israel’s soil.” Confident in his reporting, Fabian did not amend the text.
And just to button it up, let's go back to the promises these two Republican presidents made to the American people when they were candidates.
During the October 11, 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore, Republican candidate George W. Bush said this:
“If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us… Our nation stands alone right now in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble.”
And this:
"I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be.'"
24 years later, here is Republican candidate Donald Trump running for president:
You see kids, Trump was not a break with the Republican past, he was a continuation of it: the end-state of a trajectory the GOP has been on for half a century.
Of course the parallels aren’t exact, but if you put all of the malignant, corrupt, arrogant elements of the Bush administration's war with Iraq into a compression machine that would make it all bigger, faster, dumber, much louder and more reckless and with a giant, billionaire-backed hammer coming down on the media… you’d have Trump’s Iran War.
