Especially in regard to the sort of thing the authors are warning about. It's not that we keep electing individuals who want to go to war into the White House, it's that other interests keep hijacking them. No one believes that Trump is a willing player in such things, so this alleged danger of Trump misleading people into a war is kind of silly. It's more like he's as vulnerable as the man on the street to these kinds of false flag chicanery. More than anyone else, people trust Trump's gut reactions to be similar to theirs, and he's less likely to go along with entrenched agendas which present military action as the only possible choice. It's probably not true, for one thing, the turnover in his White House is pretty conducive to sliding in the sorts of people who will kiss any ass and endure whatever they have to in order to service their long-term goals. But that's also another by-product of the relentless media assault, is that the grown-ups realize they have better things they could be doing with their lives, and that they don't want those lives ruined on bullshit, so they bail and leave slots for the people who are willing to make that kind of sacrifice for a foot in the door. Think about how Rumsfeld & Cheney got theirs in - working in the pathetic, emasculated Ford White House, while an out-of-control media and Democrat congress, riding the post-Watergate high and frustrated that they really DIDN'T have Nixon to kick around anymore, took it out on the GOP incumbents, not least to prevent letting the election slip away in '76. But Cheney, Rummy & friends took their licks, carried the water and then, found places when other weak GOP presidents thought they needed pros to help them survive. They don't have lives outside of the political sphere, so they do what they have to in order to stay inside it, and work for lobbying firms and think tanks when they are under too much of cloud to stay on someone's staff.

But for the authors of the article to articulate this situation would be cutting too close to home and maybe even beyond their ability to perceive, so they make it about Trump.

I wasn't trying to vindicate Bush, I was criticizing the demonization of him. It's less effort for people to say "Bush lied" than, "Bush is an uncritical executive who is far too accepting of the narrative of a particular bureaucratic agenda", so they spout the nonsense I described, and much like the excessively partisan attacks on Trump, generated false sympathy because their personal attack was both easily discredited and shown for what it was. It's really easily for Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh to tell the less-informed of the center-right "See Bush was just quoting the CIA, it's not his fault if they made an honest mistake. But rather than work with him to fix the problem, the libtards are driven by Bush-derangement Syndrome. They'd call him a liar if he said the sky was blue."

Do I think George W Bush personally used weasel words to avoid breaking the Three Oaths while claiming Saddam had nukes? I don't care either way. It's entirely possible that the neocons had such a hard-on for Saddam because they genuinely believed that he had WMDs (his use of chemical weapons is not in question, and US policy makes no distinction between the use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction - legally, we can answer anthrax or nerve gas with aa nuke; the general electorate being sane, no one dares test the optics of such a response), and a nuclear-armed Hussein regime would be too difficult to dislodge or ignore in the region. Rather than a ripe and profitable ground for American political colonization, it would fall under the sphere of influence of new regional powers.

If I seemed to be nice to the Bush administration, it's simply because I do not care about their peccadillos so much as their major failures by principled standards. The rapid information cycles mean that nitpicking venial sins isn't going to get anywhere productive, and can only much up the works in preventing real reform or progress. Bush could have had the best of intentions in the Middle East, but the point is, he started a war, and should have paid for it. There should have been strong challenges in the Republican primary AND the Democratic. We have to stop seeing each presidency as a partisan territory we need to hold, or a flag we have to keep-away from the other side, for eight years. It means we accept the failures of administrations on our own side, because the alternative is someone worse, so we circle the wagons for a second term to get more of the crumbs. And of course, it is genuinely necessary survival behavior, because if only one side abandons politics for principles, the other side will get their way, and keep coming.