When you get to substance it is clear that GOP candidates "are frighteningly radical, and have learned anything from past disasters. The Bush administration’s determination to dismantle any restraints on banks looks remarkably bad in retrospect. But conservatives have bought into the thoroughly debunked narrative that government somehow caused the Great Recession, and all of the GOP candidates have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank, the fairly modest set of regulations imposed after the financial crisis.... You might have imagined that the story of the Iraq war, where we were not, in fact, welcomed as liberators, where a vast expenditure of blood and treasure left the Middle East less stable than before, would inspire some caution about military force as the policy of first resort. Yet swagger-and-bomb posturing is universal among the leading candidates. "
At www.nytimes.com
