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Rubio Wars Against Phantom “Isolationists”

Rubio doesn't know how to argue with someone taking even a slightly less interventionist position without relying on the old "isolatonist" lie.
marco rubio

The Rubio-Cruz feud intensifies:

Rubio responded to Cruz’s criticism at a campaign stop in West Des Moines, Iowa today, saying that Cruz is a “neo-isolationist” who has weakened America’s national security.

It is telling that Rubio has to resort to this sort of pathetic name-calling. The candidate who says that he offers “21st century solutions” has to fall back on insults that are even more outdated and irrelevant than his own foreign policy views. The “generational” candidate is still stuck using labels from over eighty years ago just as his foreign policy remains stuck in the last century. As Doug Bandow points out today, calling Cruz a “neo-isolationist” is obviously false and a sign of Rubio’s desperation:

What Rubio unintentionally illustrated was the fact that “isolationist” today has been stripped of almost all meaning to become an all-purpose epithet. It is routinely used against dedicated non-interventionists and war-happy interventionists alike, irrespective of the facts.

Indeed, if “isolationist” means anything today, it simply is “you don’t want to intervene where I want to intervene.”

It is remarkable that Rubio doesn’t know how to argue with someone taking even a slightly less interventionist position without relying on the old “isolatonist” lie, and he doesn’t realize that by using against someone as hawkish as Cruz he is simply making a fool of himself. Except for Rubio’s own advisers, he isn’t persuading anyone that he has better judgment on foreign policy than Cruz by flinging discredited slurs at his opponent. Rubio has also been caught making things up about NSA surveillance to attack Cruz on that issue. All of this should gradually erode Rubio’s exaggerated reputation on foreign policy, and that reputation is practically the only thing that he has left to run on.

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