Paul Wolfowitz 'might have to vote' for Hillary Clinton

And I thought the Bush years were surreal.

This is like a Dali painting on fire.

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v

Dak wrote:

I really think now it’s just right-wing elites are afraid that they can’t trust Trump to do their bidding for the richest 0.1%.

You wish.

It’s because the people who were a mess before recognize with vivid clarity that Trump is even MORE of a mess. Oh, and, he will be helpful to the 1%…just look at his policies. His domestic economic policies help them even more than Bush did. So that is not the issue.

Even the last round of Bush nutcases recognize how bad Trump will be.

Remember in this thread we’re talking about what some nutcases got away with under Bush. That’s true.

AND then we act like Trump won’t get away with things? Forget it. It’s a pipe dream.

Of course he will. This wish that Trump isn’t going to be bad as he seems is just not going to hold up.

Even the previous assholes recognize that.

Yes he is worse, and yes once in office he can do things.

…

wv wrote:

Well, i am not convinced he’d be worse than Bush, and I’m not convinced ANYONE really
knows what Trump would do

w
v

It’s out there. As much as with any candidate. And even the neo-cons can already see he is worse than they were. (Not that they would put it that way.)

Dak wrote:

I still say it’s about control when it comes to the ruling elite. And, if you can’t control your rhetoric, you’re a bad candidate. Trump’s a nightmare for many reasons, but I think down deep at the core of the issue for the most exalted wingnuts is that he’s shown he will play to the unwashed herd over the Party Leaders. That’s both his appeal to his voters and his downfall to the party leaders. Luckily, his message of hate and bigotry turns off enough voters. WV’s probably right. We can stop worrying about Trump and start worrying about Hillary.

Honestly? First I don;t think it;s that conspiratorially united. I don’t see them acting in regulated concert any more than I see the left doing that. Second I don’t think they care one way or another who Trump appeals to as a base. I don’t think these guys sit there going “how do the 1% feel about a populist demagogue cause we need to act in unison.”

The guys we’re discussing looked directly at Trump’s foreign policy–which yes is knowable in its general outlines–and blanched. They blanched because it genuinely is disastrous from any other viewpoint except Trump’s.

And all of us here should be blanching too because it actually IS that bad.

On this issue anyway, these guys we’re discussing are just plain right about Trump and the effect he would have in foreign policy. They’re right that yes it IS that bad.

….

Many GOP foreign policy experts see Donald Trump as unfit to be president

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-fg-trump-foreign-policy-20160731-snap-story.html

To the extent Donald Trump has articulated a coherent foreign policy, it appears a dark shoot-from-the-hip unilateralism that puts him at odds with thinking that has dominated the GOP for generations.

As Trump starts his general election campaign, many Republican foreign policy and national security advisers and thinkers who have spent decades promoting America’s preeminent role in world affairs remain deeply skeptical of his views.

They say they are aghast that the GOP nominee boasts of reading little and ignoring expert advice, and instead of gleaning his knowledge of global events from Sunday TV talk shows.

“Donald Trump still has the habits of a reality show host. He says things as dramatically and as provocatively as possible,” said Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank founded by President Nixon.

Trump rang establishment alarms — again — last week when he urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s deleted State Department emails, apparently daring a foreign adversary to hack a federal agency or a U.S. presidential candidate. (Trump later said he was being sarcastic.)

The episode, along with his fresh criticism of U.S. alliances during the Republican National Convention, cemented doubts for many who still had hopes Trump would tamp down his rhetoric for the fall race against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“When he entered the race, the overarching concern was lack of experience and an inability or unwillingness to define what his policy would be,” said Elliot Abrams, a Middle East expert and military hawk who served as deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush.

“Now, particularly after the convention, he has defined it. And it would destroy the greatest single asset we have, which is our alliance structure,” he added.

It was hardly Trump’s first break with orthodoxy.

Trump not only has expressed admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin. He has said he might recognize Russia’s military annexation of Crimea, which America and its allies consider illegal, and might lift U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow for its regional aggression.

Trump has challenged the importance of NATO, the transatlantic military alliance born out of World War II, and shaken one of its pillars by saying he might not defend a member nation under attack from Russia or other invaders, as the treaty requires.

He has called for using torture against terrorism suspects, and has said America has no standing to lecture other nations on human rights and the rule of law, as administrations have done since the depths of the Cold War.

He also has suggested upending decades of U.S. efforts aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons by suggesting Japan and South Korea should build their own atomic arsenal rather than rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

By embracing these and other controversial positions, Trump has turned America’s postwar political dynamic on its head. Many foreign policy experts now view the Democratic nominee as a more stable hand on national security than the wobbly GOP.

Trump’s most ardent supporters see his freewheeling approach as refreshing. They relish his role as a rule breaker who mocks the pious language of diplomats and policy wonks. They agree with his allegation that so-called experts have made America weaker and less respected.

But the response from the GOP foreign policy and national security establishment has been fierce.

Some stalwarts — including Richard Armitage, a former high-ranking Pentagon and State Department official, and Brent Scowcroft, who counseled four Republican presidents — have thrown their support to Clinton.

“It’s the fact that our friends aren’t going to trust us and our enemies aren’t going to fear us” if Trump is elected, said Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy defense secretary under George W. Bush.

Wolfowitz said he has serious concerns about Clinton’s foreign policy but will probably vote for her. And he mocked Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, as other presidential candidates have done for decades.

“I wonder how [he would] feel if they leaked his tax returns,” he quipped, referring to suspicions that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails.

The criticism emerged early in the primaries when Trump began rising in the polls.

In February, Robert Kagan, a prominent neo-conservative who argues for American exceptionalism, free-market capitalism and an interventionist foreign policy, called Trump a “Frankenstein’s monster,” capable of destroying the GOP. He has since backed Clinton.

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In March, 121 self-described members of the Republican national security community signed a public letter pledging to work against Trump’s election and blasting him as utterly unfit for the White House.

“His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” they wrote. “He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”

Eliot A. Cohen, a senior State Department official under President George W. Bush, said he helped draft the letter “so I can look my grandchildren in the eye 15 years from now.”

“It’s not just demagoguery,” Cohen said of Trump’s campaign rhetoric. “It’s an appeal for a certain kind of dictatorship.”

While others won’t go that far, at least publicly, they have expressed grave concerns about Trump’s lack of specifics on how and when he would use U.S. power.

“Donald Trump, essentially, has simply indicated that he would be tough enough to sock it to him,” said Richard Lugar, a former Indiana senator who chaired the foreign relations committee and now leads a think tank devoted to global leadership. “There’s not a great deal of analysis [and] almost none at all for the complexities.”

Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and then secretary of State under George W. Bush, declined a request for comment. But someone familiar with her thinking said she has been “disgusted by this whole thing.”

Like her, many in the foreign policy elite cut their teeth in the Cold War. They see Trump’s apparent camaraderie with Putin, who is steadily reasserting strongman rule in Russia, as naive.

Lanhee Chen, policy director for the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, decried what he called Trump’s “flippant nature” in addressing foreign policy.

Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, took time to study and think about foreign policy questions long before he ran for president, Chen said.

“It’s a little bit late in the game” to start now, he said. “But the temperament is not something you can study. It’s just sort of who you are.”

Trump has begun receiving briefings from more knowledgeable policy experts, and now that he is the nominee, will be offered classified intelligence briefings from U.S. officials.

Some conservative policy experts say Trump is being underestimated.

“He appears to have a number of strong instincts that have not yet crystallized into a comprehensive world view,” said Paul Saunders, executive director of the Center for the National Interest.

Saunders said wearing his lack of expertise on his sleeve may not impress foreign policy circles, but likely appeals to some voters.

Trump appears unbothered by criticism from people who should be his political allies. His gamble is that voters will disdain “experts” as much as he apparently does.

Those experts, he told a news conference Wednesday in Florida, got the world in the trouble it’s in.

“So a lot of the people that you think are good because you know their name or because you see them on television, I don’t think are good,” he said. “Because look at the end result. The end result is our country is a mess.”

Zooey wrote:

You may be right, Billy, about the “workers” rhetoric. That completely fits.

In any event, on a number of issues, it is apparent that Trump is just completely unfit for the job. He’s reckless. Bottom line. He is just reckless.

And nobody wants a reckless president.

(except for those people who root for the Joker).

I can see that, Zooey. Reckless. The chaos candidate. Also, have heard interviews from people who have written books about him say this:

He really doesn’t care at all about policy. He doesn’t read about the issues of the day. Many people who know him say he’s woefully incurious. He sets goals, and if he reaches them, he’s too bored by the nuts and bolts of things to stay with them. He just moves on.

(This makes me think the rumor of that VP offer to Kasich is true. That he was told he could basically run the Executive, and the Donald would just be all about “making America great again.”)

The above sounds to me like a combination of Reagan, Dubya and Palin. I really don’t want us to go there again.

Like you and most of the folks here, I don’t like HRC as a choice, either. But compared to Trump? I’m still going to vote my conscience and go Green Party. But if the race ends up being HRC or Trump, I hope HRC wins.

Well, zn, I’ve read all of the stuff you’ve posted here before. I’m coming at this from a different angle. I have paid attention to the “horse race” stuff during this campaign. And, the GOP was against Trump from the get-go because he wasn’t an insider. That’s exactly his appeal to his supporters. Throughout his campaign, he refuses to be the GOP leader, but instead is the leader of Donald Trump for President, and says, hey, Republicans, get on my wagon, because I ain’t getting on yours.

Now, the neocons, they have their own idea of how you do things overseas, and their vision was scary, too, it’s just that they didn’t openly talk about it so much as quietly do everything they could to make it happen. If Trump talked about invading a country after he becomes president, without any evidence that country had involvement in a terrorist act, he’d be excoriated. He doesn’t have the backing of the Powers That Be in his party. He’s a “wild card.” The difference between Trump and the neocons is that Trump comes more obviously deranged. So, while “even the neocons realize Trump’s vision is bad” is true, the reason for their fear is that they know the Powers That Be don’t have Trump under their thumb. And, they probably do think that his way of doing things will be bad for the world. And, I agree on that point, too.

But, in general, the GOP has been fighting a Trump presidency since early in the primaries, and the wealthy elite threw their money at his opponents and against Trump, so that they got their candidate. The Koch Brothers of the world lost that battle, a rarity in this day and age. So, they would rather go with Hillary. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s what’s happened. And, I think it’s obvious that it happened that way because Trump isn’t a candidate who has been groomed through the political process, and that scares the elite running things … more so than the “liberal” Hillary Clinton. Much more so.

This isn’t directed at anyone here:

I think some Americans fall for the idea of the “outsider” candidate, and they think, “Well, if the establishment is against this guy, he must be awesome!!”

Thing is, as bad as the establishment is, some “outsiders” are worse. It’s just not automatically the case that they’re going to be better. And I can’t see anything in Trump’s past or present that would indicate he would be better than the establishment. His business record is abysmal. He’s been sued literally thousands of times, including for discrimination against blacks and other minorities. His rhetoric is obviously incendiary, with serial lying being a major factor.

Aside from his well-known greatest hits of lies, he lied that the NFL agreed with him about debate schedules; he lied about meeting with Chicago top cops to discuss how to fix crime there; he lied that Clinton is targeting black businesses for a tax hike of 50%.

The above also points out another reason to doubt him when he says he will do X, Y or Z — whether it will help or hurt Americans. He lies so often, it’s impossible to know. But, on balance (IMO), given his personal history of NOT helping workers, minorities, women, etc. . . . and making his entire trade pitch a matter of workers against workers . . . I think it’s safe to conclude he’s unlikely to be good for the country.

Oh, and there is this rather important question Trump asks:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked a foreign policy adviser multiple times in an hourlong briefing why the U.S. can’t use its nuclear weapons, MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough said Wednesday morning.

Scarborough revealed the story while he was interviewing former CIA Director Michael Hayden on “Morning Joe” about Trump’s campaign.

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert went to advise Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “And three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons — three times he asked. At one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’”

thehill.com

Billy_T wrote:

Oh, and there is this rather important question Trump asks:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked a foreign policy adviser multiple times in an hourlong briefing why the U.S. can’t use its nuclear weapons, MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough said Wednesday morning.

Scarborough revealed the story while he was interviewing former CIA Director Michael Hayden on “Morning Joe” about Trump’s campaign.

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert went to advise Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “And three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons — three times he asked. At one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’”

That bit froze and horrified the GOP military and foreign policy establishment to the point where many who were prepared to grin and bear a Trump candidacy just went “no screw this.”

Zooey wrote:

Trump is going to get nothing but negative coverage. He is toasted.

Trump is your next president.