At least Marco Rubio didn’t answer the attacks in Paris by demanding that the United States accept only Christian refugees. He left that to Ted Cruz. But given the Florida senator’s reputation in GOP circles as a foreign-policy wonk, it’s worth looking in some detail at just how ridiculous his response was. …
Great news for Jeb Bush! Jon Meacham’s new book has just set off several more days of debate about his brother’s decision to invade Iraq. In Meacham’s forthcoming biography of George H.W. Bush, the old man unloads on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for having wrecked his son’s foreign policy. The elder Bush says Cheney joined forces with the “real hard-charging guys who want to ...
Jeb Bush fashions himself the thinking man’s Republican candidate for president. Donald Trump, he declared late last month, is “not serious.” When it comes to foreign policy, Trump hasn’t “thought these things through.” Trump is “not taking the responsibility—the possibility of becoming the president of the United States really seriously.” So what are Jeb’s well-thought-out, serious foreign-policy views? He offered a few on Monday in ...
If you’re feeling sorry for Jeb Bush after Wednesday night’s CNBC debate, don’t. His defenestration by Marco Rubio should make even those who support neither of them for president smile. It’s a sign that maybe, just maybe, the system still works. …
The success of Donald Trump and Ben Carson has turned the members of the GOP elite into anthropologists, struggling to understand those ordinary Republicans who now resemble an exotic and hostile tribe. “I have no feeling for the electorate anymore,” George H.W. Bush’s former chief of staff John Sununu told The New York Times last Saturday. “Their priorities are so different that if I tried ...
It’s now clear: Jeb Bush wants to speak about his brother’s record on 9/11 as much as possible. Donald Trump launched the controversy last Friday when he told Bloomberg News, “When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.” But then Trump quickly tried to tamp it down. Later that day, after Bush ...
Donald Trump utters plenty of ugly untruths: that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “rapists,” that Syrian refugees are committing “all sorts of attacks” in Germany and represent a “Trojan Horse” for ISIS. But he tells ugly truths too: that “when you give [politicians money], they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” And that “the Middle East would be safer” if Saddam Hussein and ...
Bernie Sanders didn’t prepare much for Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate. And on foreign policy, it showed. It began when Anderson Cooper asked the Vermont senator “what would you do differently” than Hillary Clinton about the conflict in Syria. Sanders answered that, “We should be putting together a coalition of Arab countries who should be leading the effort. We should be supportive, but I do ...
The most revealing moment of last night’s Democratic presidential debate came near the end, when CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asked the candidates to “name the one thing—the one way that your administration would not be a third term of President Obama.” Bernie Sanders replied that, unlike Obama, he would “transform America … through a political revolution.” Hillary Clinton answered that, unlike Obama, she’s a woman. ...
On the subject of abortion, Marco Rubio is as conservative as it gets. He’d outlaw the procedure even in cases of rape or incest. But he doesn’t sound like a hardliner. “Listen, you’re 15 years-old and you become pregnant and you’re scared and you have your whole life ahead of you and you’re facing this, that is a hard situation,” the Florida senator told Meet ...