The Republican Party Is On The Wrong Side Of Foreign Policy

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – This is a very healthy dynamic and a healthy thing going on, if you’re into these sorts of these things, into party wars.  There’s a healthy internecine battle or feud going on for the soul of what you would call today the Republican Party or the conservative party, what people “think” is the conservative party, inside Republican ranks.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Daniel Larison has an interesting take on this from American Conservative Magazine, “Bolton’s Advice for Republicans,” on foreign policy, that what is needed is — basically the GOP has sissified itself to the point where it is no longer reliable.  It can’t be relied on.  What Republicans need is more action on foreign aggression, not less, more.  Listen.

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John Bolton offers this comment from the parallel universe in which he apparently resides:

“I think the entire Republican party has spent four years making a huge mistake really retreating from its historic role as the main advocate of sound national security policies. [Mike: You mean like the Iraq War? This is sound?] And in that sense the campaign’s unwillingness to take on Obama’s failed foreign and defense policies was symptomatic of the problem of the party as a whole.”

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Mike:  This is a very healthy dynamic and a healthy thing going on, if you’re into these sorts of these things, into party wars.  There’s a healthy internecine battle or feud going on for the soul of what you would call today the Republican Party or the conservative party, what people “think” is the conservative party, inside Republican ranks.  The numbers aren’t there yet.  The McCains and Grahams and Boltons and Bill Kristols of the world still dominate.  They are still dominant.  They may not be ascendant any longer, but they are still the dominant voice inside the party.

I think this is probably what led and what leads to such huge electoral defeats in two consecutive elections, 2008 and 2012.  You can blame it on votes being rigged and all the other conspiracy theories that are out there, but at the end of the day, there is more desire and there is more taste for less war than there is for more war, yet one particular party seems to be the advocate of a never-ending diet, a crash diet, if you will, of more war and more aggression, which is, I think, the exact opposite of what the conservative position ought to be.

By the by, this is the man who could have been — we could be talking about right now Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State Bolton, the same man that goes on with John Stossel three weeks ago and says that the United States executed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens without due process during the Civil War and that was a good thing. Larison writes:

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Granted, I don’t expect John Bolton to offer a lot of solid policy or political analysis, but this is an extraordinary thing to say all the same. Activists and ideologues normally believe that a party would always do much better if it adopted their preferred tactics and ideas. On its own, that isn’t surprising or remarkable. It’s a given that a national security hard-liner such as Bolton thinks that Republicans should spend more time talking about national security. What makes the statement so strange is that it’s so completely divorced from what’s actually been happening over the last four years. [Mike: Boy, isn’t that the truth! By the by, if you tie this back into Rand Paul and his filibuster, there were seeds of questioning in the filibuster debate, seeds of questioning the overall “war on terror.”  This is probably what alarmed McCain and Graham more than anything.]

It’s quite clear that Republican hawks have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to throw everything they could come up with at Obama in the hope that something would stick to him, and their efforts were in vain. They haven’t been in “retreat” on these issues, except in the sense that most Americans don’t trust them on national security and foreign policy. It’s not that they have been retreating on these policies. They continue to support the same bad policies, and most of the public has been running away from them. Republican hawks didn’t realize that they were at a disadvantage on national security and foreign policy for the last four years…

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Mike:  The bottom line at the end of the day is that — you can dislike this all you like but it does not disprove it.  At the end of the day, the bottom line is that President Obama beat Governor Romney largely on and because of foreign policy.  To say anything else is to draw the wrong conclusion.  Of course, people that are of the Bolton / McCain / Graham / Rubio persuasion are never going to admit that that was the fault.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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