The progressive anti-war group Code Pink heaped praised on Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump after he said during Saturday night’s debate that George W. Bush “made a mistake” invading Iraq.
“I watched the debate last night and LOVED IT,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told The Huffington Post in an email. “It felt surreal to hear Donald Trump, the leading Republican contender for President, saying what we at CODEPINK have been shouting to the winds for 14 years now: that Bush and his cronies lied about WMDs, that the Iraq war was catastrophic, and that Bush never ‘kept us safe’ because 9/11 happened on his watch.”
Mr. Trump has been criticized by his Republican rivals for accusing the Bush administration of lying about weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of invading Iraq: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none,” he said onstage in South Carolina Saturday night.
“A ‘big, fat mistake,’ indeed,” Ms. Benjamin told the Post. “Trump even talked bout the cost of war and how the trillions we wasted on war could have been used to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure — a theme we have been harping on all these years with a campaign called ‘bring our war dollars home.’ It was wild.
“Honestly, on this issue, Trump has gone farther than even Bernie Sanders,” she said. “It was great. I’m not sure it will win him any votes, though. He certainly won’t win over the anti-war crowd with his Islamophobia and anti-immigrant tirades. But on this issue, I’d give him a Pink Badge of Courage. I only wish that the bed was as YUGE as Trump’s bank account. Most of the country should fit in that bed.”
