If it’s Bush’s responsibility to fix it, then maybe we should elect Jeb instead? If you want to be President, that means you take responsibility for addressing the problems of your predecessors. THe fact that it’s someone else’s fault doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for fixing it. Obama wants to run out the clock. Clinton will have to have an actual strategy, and almost certainly will. And she’ll actually listen to the generals.
That’s the conventional wisdom, and liberals’ insoucience about it only contributes to the perception.
And the correct way to handle Russia? A return to Cold War politics? Or perhaps something else? Again, there’s no evidence of a strategy here, so this is a problem that will be a big deal for the next President.
It will get better if the next President does her job well. The next President won’t be tied down by ACA’s legacy. She can get rid of whatever she thinks is necessary because it’s not her baby.
Medicare is not far from insolvency. Disability is pretty much there already. Social Security gets there in 20-25 years. Time is running out for a President to grow a pair.
The VA only? Sure about that? Have the government’s IT problems been resolved, so that what happened with the ACA website doesn’t happen to future big projects? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both complained that the government overclassifies information, although strangely this only became a problem they cared about when it got the nominee in trouble. Obama in a speech said we have something like 17 different agencies that regulate tangerines or some such. Has that been addressed? The GAO has identified $200 billion in duplicative spending. Has that been addressed? The government is not complying with FOIA requests. That’s probably intentional though.
In the 1980s the Grace Commission identified the federal government as the worst run enterprise in the country. Things have not gotten better.
That’s a change I think we can all agree on. She’s a local woman, great human being. She should have never taken a job that required her to lie and spin all the time, because she sucks at it.
It helps that the payday lenders urged their customers to call their Congressmen. And the customers did. It’s one thing to go after an industry. Pissing off a big customer base is stupid.
Trump represents unpredictable and likely irrational change (beyond being “a gruesome amalgamation of the Monopoly Man and Elmer Gantry”). Clinton is more a continuation of what they’ve been dealing with, the pragmatic incrementalist approach of the Obama administration. They know that approach and it is not scary to them, just regrettable. The more stable and predictable the better from a true conservative perspective and between the two Clinton “whatever her manifold faults, is the only candidate promising some form of economic, social and political continuity with the present …” Clinton is “far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic.” Or as another one of the quoted stated; “Hillary Clinton ultimately operates within the normal remit of an American political leader.” Hard to argue with any of that, completely correct, and exactly how I would expect a neocon to see it.
While we are at it … Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens is not so far off that same page. He can’t bring himself to vote for her but compared to Trump? “I think that for the United States, Hillary Clinton, as awful as I find her, is a survivable event. I’m not so sure about Donald Trump.”
When the alternative is batshit insane even by the standards of the far right a good ole liberal promising to mostly expand upon Obama’s two terms (yes, with a bit more of a tendency to see military muscularity as an option than Obama has) looks really good.
Many conservatives hate Clinton deeply. But they know she is competent and rational. Trump they see as neither and as an existential threat to what they still want to think of as “their” party. Between the two they’d much rather survive Clinton.
So, after spending a quarter century making Clinton out to be some kind of Bond villain, conservative pundits now have to somehow make the case that she’s still better than the guy their party just picked to battle her. Sucks to be them.
Pretty sure no neocon does that, certainly as well as Clinton did - in the article I linked to, Patrick Clawson, senior fellow and research director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says he is “not a fan nor a political supporter of Clinton,” but still agrees that she was a pivotal player in making it happen.
That’s actually conservative doctrine: peace through strength. Force your enemies to the negotiating table.
Sure, there are subtle differences in Clinton’s approach, and after all she was working for Barack Obama. But even with a decent Republican opponent, the differences between Clinton and neocons are pretty insignificant. Foreign policy has long been an area where all the worries are on your side.
We’ll see if she starts a bunch of wars and gets thousands of Americans killed. I don’t think she will, so I expect the chickenhawk warmonger coward neocons to criticize her just as they have Obama.
In that respect she is different. Clinton started the “bomb only” doctrine and Obama took it and put it on steroids. I imagine Clinton will take us from bombing seven countries to a dozen or so.
That’s by far the most important respect. And that’s why the neocons are so fucking terrible - they show no regard for risking the lives of service men and women. Some of us actually value their lives (not a shot against you - just against the coward warmongers like Kristol).