OBAMA MADE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY SAFE FOR ISOLATIONISM

President Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, and while the moves led to the resignation of Trump's defense secretary and upset congressional Republicans, I'm not seeing the kind of alarm in right-wing media that we all saw when Trump temporarily gave up on the wall.

Fox & Friends found a double-amputee Afghanistan veteran to back Trump's Syria withdrawal:

A wounded Marine veteran is supporting President Trump's plan to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria despite harsh criticism from many Republicans.

... Marine Staff Sgt. Johnny "Joey" Jones (Ret.) -- who lost both of his legs and suffered other permanent injuries in an IED explosion in Afghanistan -- said Trump is making the right move and it's completely on-brand with his campaign messaging.

Breitbart used this juxtaposition of headline and photo to make clear what it thinks of Trump's detractors:



It's very strange to me. I'm old enough to have lived through Vietnam; then we all lived through a succession of Republican wars -- Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again -- each of which was accompanied by a heavy-handed propaganda campaign to compel support. It's hard for me to believe that so much of the right is comfortable with not being the war party.

But the president seems to have found the sweet spot: have an enormous military, but never use it. (It's reminiscent of the way many gun owners in America amass huge arsenals of powerful weapons and then never use them except for target practice.)

But Democrats were caricatured on the right as the sandal-wearing, daisies-in-gun-barrels, peacenik appeasement party for so long -- what led to the change? The answer is the Obama presidency. Barack Obama retreated from George W. Bush's wars, but he never disengaged from the war on terror. Drone strikes! Bin Laden dead! Obama and his base boasting about bin Laden being dead!

If Democrats are for it, Republicans have to be against it. And so here we are.