May 5, 2016
Bolton and Gorka Slam ‘Neocons For Hillary’
by John Hayward
Breitbart.com
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, and Breitbart News National Security editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, both denounced the nascent “Neocons For Hillary” movement in their Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM appearances Thursday morning.
Bolton and Gorka were both sternly critical of Republicans who suggest Hillary Clinton might be preferable on foreign policy issues to Donald Trump, or that Clinton would represent a substantial change from President Obama’s disastrous policies.
“I’m really very disturbed about how we have people who say they are conservatives, or Republicans, or simply on the Right, and say now they’re going to campaign or vote for Hillary Clinton,” Gorka declared.
“Let’s just boil it down to the bare essentials,” he continued. “I’ve met Mr. Trump on more than one occasion. I’ve talked to him about national security issues, and I am disturbed by his lack of background on these issues. Yes, he is a black hole at the moment.”
He noted that as a businessman, there was no reason Trump would dwell on “the difference between Sunni and Shia, and really, you know, what you should be doing with North Korea or Russia.”
There is time for Trump to master these issues, while Clinton has an appalling track record that cannot be excused by a lifelong focus on private-sector endeavors.
“Compare that to his other competitor. Compare him to Hillary,” Gorka urged. “This is a woman who’s responsible for Libya, for Benghazi. This is a woman who should simply recuse herself from running for public office, or working in the government, because of her email server scandal. This is a person who could be blackmailed tomorrow.”
Gorka said it was “absolutely clear” that Clinton’s illicit, insecure email server was vulnerable to foreign intelligence agencies, and that Clinton faced a “slam-dunk” indictment on at least twenty “felony charges” – absent political intervention, of course.
Bolton had a comparable assessment of Trump’s thin foreign policy record, while saying that the candidate’s recent foreign-policy speech reassured him that national security issues would hold a prominent position in the general election campaign.
“I’ve always said, before this campaign began, that I would support the Republican nominee, whoever that was, because of the choice that we saw coming from the other side – which, unless she’s indicted, will be Hillary Clinton,” said Bolton.
“One of the things that’s misunderstood, even among conservatives, is exactly where Hillary is on national security issues,” he continued. “There’s this myth out there, kind of an urban legend, that somehow she’s gonna be tougher than Obama. I think that’s unquestionably not the case.”
Promising that his future writings would take a closer look at the decision-making process behind the appalling disaster in Libya, Bolton said that whatever choice voters are going to make, “they should not make it on the basis that Hillary will somehow be better for national security than Barack Obama.”
“I think she’s Obama’s third term, on domestic as well as national security, but certainly on national security,” he said.
Bolton thought some of the “Neocons For Hillary” buzz was artificially nourished, a tribute to “the consummate political skills of her husband.”
As for conservative pundits and national-security analysts who claim to find Clinton more palatable than Trump, Bolton said, “I just think they don’t understand what her basic philosophy is, I don’t think they’ve studied her adequately, and to the extent they have looked at her record, I don’t think they understand it.”
He called it a “fundamental mistake,” made by some “respected voices on the Right,” who are “just flatly wrong – and they’re gonna live to regret it.”
Gorka also made the point that Clinton’s philosophy, bent even further to the Left by her primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, would make her “completely a third Obama term” as Commander-in-Chief.
“She’s actually said on the campaign trail, ‘I refuse to use the phrase radical Islam,’” he noted. “That’s just Obama reheated. This is the continued denial of who the enemy is, and what it’s going to take to defeat them. So it will simply be another four, or another eight years of the current catastrophic national security policy.”
Bolton distanced himself from the NeverTrump movement by saying he would be willing to bring his expertise to the Trump Administration if asked. “I’m going to support him, and support him enthusiastically – not because I agree with him on everything, that’s for sure, but because I think he can do the job.”
“Again, you’re down to a binary choice here. It’s either going to be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. You don’t even have to say you’re going to vote for Hillary to be making a mistake here. Simply saying that you’re going to stay at home is also a mistake, because that is yet another step on the road to electing Hillary,” Bolton added, making the argument most grating to the ears of Trump’s dedicated Republican critics.
Part of this “binary choice” framework involves understanding that conservative national security advisers have a chance to get Trump’s ear, while they would have none at all with Hillary Clinton.
Bolton said he would advise Trump on dealing with the “strategic threats that exist out there, in the form of Russia and China, which I don’t think Barack Obama even understands what a strategic threat is, and I certainly don’t think he has any policies to deal with them.”
He anticipated that one of the biggest challenges for a President Trump would be “dealing with the wide variety of problems that Obama’s going to leave.”
“This is not a circumstance in the national security field where there’s one, or two, or three things you can identify – it’s an across-the-board failure” from diplomacy to the defense budget, in Bolton’s view.
Gorka similarly warned that military officers he has spoken with “understand that we don’t have a strategy, that we’re just nibbling at the edges of an existential threat, and the Obama policy is one of being ‘half-pregnant.’”
Both Bolton and Gorka saw the death of Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV during an unexpected Islamic State counter-attack from Mosul as a sign of the Obama Administration’s strategic disarray, with Gorka noting the absurdity of positioning “a couple of hundred SF guys here, a couple of hundred Marines there” around a beehive of 80,000 jihadis.
“That is not how you win a war. It is clear that the current Administration is kicking the can down the road, to the next Commander-in-Chief to be responsible for,” said Gorka.
Bolton called Obama’s ignorance of solid advice from seasoned military commanders “disrespectful to the men and women who are in harm’s way.”
“To have a President who is constantly saying there are no ‘boots on the ground,’ when we have, obviously, people are being killed and wounded – and yet they’re being put out there in a piecemeal fashion, without a coherent strategy, simply to get Obama past Inauguration Day next year. That is a disservice to them,” Bolton charged. “They’re performing honorably. It’s too bad their President is not up to their standards.”
The question posed by Bolton and Gorka’s analysis is: why would any rational person believe Hillary Clinton would represent a significant change from what Obama has done – especially since her fingerprints are all over that list of “across-the-board failures” that will be waiting on the next President’s desk?
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/05/bolton-gorka-slam-neocons-hillary/
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