Wednesday Open Thread [5.20.15]

“The race for the Republican gubernatorial election went down to the wire and then some Tuesday night,” the Lexington Herald Leader reports.

“After 214,187 votes were counted, Louisville businessman Matt Bevin held an 83-vote lead over Commissioner of Agriculture James Comer, but Comer said late Tuesday night that he owed it to his supporters to ask for a recanvass.”

Either way, the Democratic candidate, Attorney General Jack Conway, is strongly positioned. Either Conway takes on tea party freak Matt Bevin, or he takes on scandal plagued Comer, but either way, the GOP is divided.

KENTUCKY–GOVERNOR–SurveyUSA: Conway (D) 48, Bevin (R) 37

quoted by the Texas Tribune, when asked about gay rights. Only the most sophmoric knuckle dragging idiot would equate promoting equality for all, including those who are gay, with an interest in sex. Indeed, Mr. Cruz has it reversed. It has been all of our experience, proven time and again, that those who are the most homophobic are usually in the closet, having all the gay sex they can. Those promoting “family Christian values” and condemning women’s rights and divorce are usually those who one to four mistresses on the side.

James Fallows piece is a must read:

First some operating principles, then a little history lesson. The principles:

1) No one ever again—not a news person nor a civilian, not an American nor one from anyplace else—should waste another second asking, “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” Reasons:

a) It’s too easy. Similarly: “Knowing what we know now, would you have bought a ticket on Malaysia Air flight 370?” The only people who might say Yes on the Iraq question would be those with family ties (poor Jeb Bush); those who are inept or out of practice in handling potentially tricky questions (surprisingly, again poor Bush); or those who are such Cheney-Bolton-Wolfowitz-style bitter enders that they survey the landscape of “what we know now”—the cost and death and damage, the generation’s worth of chaos unleashed in the Middle East, and of course the absence of WMDs—and still say, Heck of a job.

b) It doesn’t tell you anything. Leaders don’t make decisions on the basis of “what we know now” retrospectively. They have to weigh evidence based on “what we knew then,” in real time.

Katrina vanden Heuvel:

Less than two months later, the most extraordinary thing about former governor Jeb Bush’s statement that he would have authorized the Iraq war despite “knowing what we know now” wasn’t the statement itself, but rather the immediate backlash it provoked among conservative pundits and candidates for the Republican nomination. “You can’t still think that going into Iraq, now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do,” said conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham. “If you do, there has to be something wrong with you.” And nearly all of the party’s would-be standard bearers, including Rubio, pounced on the controversy. “Not only would I have not been in favor of it,” he declared, “President Bush would not have been in favor of it.”

The uproar on the right was especially remarkable given that hawkish foreign policy has become something of a litmus test in the Republican primary.