How to Answer the Question of the Week

“I am mystified as to why Republicans are always so polite to journalists who are, obviously, allied to the liberal side of American politics and are willing to carry water for it,” John Steele Gordon writes at Commentary. And we all know what the question is, at this point, right? ““Knowing what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq in 2003?”

So, if I were running for president (alright, no snickering in the back of the room, please), I’d answer in one of two ways. First way, ask the journalist a question. In response to “Knowing what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq in 2003,” ask “Knowing what you know now, would you have abandoned Iraq in 2011?” and then talk about how the new president in 2017 will have to deal with the results of the most shockingly inept American foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson sailed for Paris a century ago.

The second way to answer would be to ask, “Excuse me, is this a history show or a news show? Are you a historian or a journalist? If the latter why aren’t you asking about what I would do in the future, not what I would have done in the past? Are you trying to protect the Obama Administration from the criticism it so richly deserves for its disastrous foreign policy?” When the journalist, inevitably, says no to that, say, “Well, you could have fooled me. How about asking me an honest question?”

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, punch back twice as hard.

This is the GOP primary, remember? Republican voters love it when their candidates punch back twice as hard against the MSM. George W. Bush lost no voters in 2000 when an open mic caught calling out the New York Times’ Adam Clymer as the big, well, Clymer he is. Newt Gingrich rose from the political dead to becoming a hair’s breadth away from securing the GOP nomination in 2012 purely because GOP primary voters loved watching him taking clueless DNC-MSM reporters’ questions and jamming them back into their throats. We saw Rand Paul do something similar recently when he tossed a hand grenade of an abortion question right back to the MSM and one of their de facto leaders, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

But why aren’t we seeing clip after clip this year of all of the Republican candidates employing similar tactics? They’ve had three years since watching both Newt nearly secure the nomination and Mitt Romney’s earnest but clueless presidential bid that followed. Old media’s tactics are, well, old. For once, why can’t the Stupid Party grow a brain?

At his new Diary of a Mad Voter site, Roger L. Simon noted last night, “Refighting the Iraq War of 2007 is waste of energy.  We are up to our necks in a bigger one now and absolutely devoid of strategy.”

John Nolte answers the question thusly:

Dear Dumbass @GOP: REPORTER: Was Iraq a mistake? YOU: It will be if Obama continues to lose a won war in Iraq. –You’re welcome.

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) May 18, 2015

Particularly when, as Moe Lane writes, “Barack Obama campaigned on losing the war in Iraq” — and campaigned hard on doing just that in 2008. And concurrently banked (successfully) on his allies in the media having a serious case of amnesia concerning their fellow Democrats:

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Update: “Ted Cruz dropped the hammer on the media for continuing to ask him about gay rights.” Don’t miss the clip at the conclusion of the post of Cruz pushing back against a DNC-MSM “that is obsessed with sex,” as Cruz tells one Democrat operative with a byline.