• The Stench of the Clinton Ethics  By Debbie Young
• Neocons Against Donald Trump  By Richard C. Young
• Who is Supporting Donald Trump?  By Richard C. Young
• “This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s GOP”  By Richard C. Young
• Donald Trump Misfires on ISIS  By Richard C. Young
• Illinois and Missouri on March 15th  By E.J. Smith
• Hillary for Prison 2016  By E.J. Smith
• Obama Makes the Case for—and Against—Obama  By Justin Logan
• No More Business as Usual  By Debbie Young

Michael Scheuer, former CIA chief of the bin Laden unit, explains the neocons’ position against Donald Trump. “[T]hey always have opposed Trump because, it seems, they sense that he will always put America first and let those individuals, nations, and groups irrelevant to the republic’s security and economic prosperity swing in the wind. ”

Dr. Scheuer includes Ted Cruz and John Kasich in telling readers, “They know that neither Saddam nor Gaddafi was ever a serious national-security threat to the United States; indeed, both were key and extraordinarily lethal allies — and ones we did not have to pay — in the war against the Islamists. Saddam kept Iraq’s door locked tight and so prevented the Islamists located east of Iraq from moving westward in large numbers, and he made the Iranians little more than marginal players in the Levant. How are things looking in that area now[?]”

Reuters offers a few answers along with an astounding and embarrassing individual admission.

Asked during a debate last week who he trusts on national security, Trump had warm words for three men with world views that differ from one another: former diplomat Richard Haass and retired U.S. Army officers Gen. Jack Keane and Col. Jack Jacobs.

And on his campaign website last month, Trump announced that he had received endorsements in Florida from two “top national security experts.

Foreign policy experts say they know little about those Trump supporters.

They are Gary Berntsen, a former senior CIA officer, and retired Colonel James Waurishuk, a one-time deputy chief of intelligence for U.S. Central Command during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who also once served on the National Security Council staff.

“These people are not well known in foreign policy circles…I never heard of any of them,” said Harvard professor and former Kennedy School of Government dean Joseph Nye.

Well, Gary Bernsten, the guy Harvard Professor and former Kennedy School of Government Dean Joseph Nye says he never heard of, is only one of the most important and well publicized CIA operatives that came out of the bin Laden era. Mr. Bernsten told his story to America in the New York Times’ best-seller, Jawbreaker.

Cofer Black, former Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center, has this to say about Gary Bernsten: “Berntsen was the CIA’s ‘go to guy’ when it came to leading in Afghanistan, owing to his exceptional operational and leadership skills in situations involving the threat of immediate danger. Berntsen is brave and bold and a true American hero.”

I read Jawbreaker when it first came out and have read it a number of times since. I’ve also written about Gary often at Richardcyoung.com (for instance, here, here and here). Gary and Cofer Black would be among the first names that would come to my mind in thinking of a presidential foreign policy team.

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My friend and Cato Institute Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Chris Preble gives readers an inside look at what is really going on today in the foreign policy arena, looking at neocons, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Donald Trump.

We should begin by understanding the people who comprise today’s GOP foreign policy elite, and what motivates them. This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s GOP, or even George H.W. Bush’s. Their bias toward interventionism is not grounded in traditional conservative precepts of order and fiscal discipline. When forced, they will call for higher taxes to fund more military spending. And they are openly disdainful of whatever small government instincts the modern conservative movement draws from libertarianism.

So no one should be surprised when some neoconservatives speak openly of choosing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump as many are now doing. If they do ultimately pull the lever for Clinton, they will merely be reaffirming their core beliefs.

After all, some of the older neocons cut their teeth writing policy briefs for the hawkish Democrat Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. The earlier generation’s intellectual descendants fastened themselves firmly to the GOP, which they saw as the most convenient vehicle for implementing their foreign policy views. But that doesn’t mean that the association was either automatic or permanent.

The neocons would occasionally show their hand, admitting that they would choose foreign policy orthodoxy over party, and threatening to return to their Democratic Party roots. In 2004, for example, Bill Kristol praised the Democratic nominee John Kerry’s proposal to double down on the U.S. military presence in Iraq, at a time when some Republicans were wavering on Iraq. Kristol pointed out in an interview with the New York Times  that his magazine The Weekly Standard, “has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives.” In 2014, in a long feature article in the New York Times magazine, Jacob Heilbrunn noted that many putative GOP foreign policy elites would abandon the party if Republican voters nominated a skeptic of U.S. military intervention, such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. The party’s own nominee for president in 2008, John McCain, when asked who he would vote for in 2016 if it came down to Clinton vs. Paul said, with a nervous laugh, “It’s gonna be a tough choice.”

Writing at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher quotes CBS’s Sopan Deb as saying, “GOP frontrunner Donald Trump suggested at Thursday’s CNN Republican presidential debate in Miami that he would be willing to support a massive ground force to take on ISIS.”

Such an approach is certainly inconsistent with The American Conservative and Dick Young’s preferred strategy of conservative realism and restraint, emphasizing prudence. Please click to former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer’s ISIS strategy to gain a clearer perspective on a prudent and realistic approach to finishing off ISIS.

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Florida and Ohio are obviously the big states in tomorrow’s GOP primaries, but let’s not forget about Illinois and Missouri. Both states award delegates on a congressional-district level. If a candidate wins the districts he wins all the delegates. “Together, Missouri and Illinois will award 121 delegates — which would go a long way in helping Trump stay “on track” for the nomination even if he loses either Florida or Ohio,” writes David Wasserman:

And so Illinois and Missouri are a big part of the reason Tuesday is such a huge fork in the road. If Trump sweeps Florida, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio, he will have at least 748 delegates and would need to win only 44 percent of all remaining delegates,² a remarkably low bar, potentially ending the nomination fight.

If Trump loses Ohio but still wins Florida and sweeps Illinois and Missouri, he would need to win 50 percent of all other remaining delegates, a slightly higher bar but still very doable — and he would probably still be “on pace” for the nomination according to our delegate targets. But if Trump were to lose both Ohio and Florida, along with, let’s say, half of Illinois’s and Missouri’s districts, he could find himself needing to win 63 percent of remaining delegates to clinch the nomination, a much less plausible goal, considerably raising the odds of a contested convention in Cleveland.

Which of those scenarios is most likely? There haven’t been any polls of Missouri since August, but considering the state’s relatively large share of evangelicals (36 percent of the population), it would seem that Ted Cruz would be Trump’s main threat in the Show-Me State. But, unlike the last three states Cruz has won (Kansas, Maine and Idaho), Missouri has an open primary — the type of contest Trump has dominated thus far. In fact, Illinois and Missouri are among the relatively few states remaining to vote where the rules permit non-Republicans to vote in the party primary.

Technically, Illinois holds a “loophole” primary in which district-level delegates will be elected directly on the ballot. But unlike in the loophole primary in Pennsylvania, delegates’ presidential preferences are stated on the ballot, making it highly likely that the preferred presidential candidate will win all three delegates at stake in a given congressional district. The only recent poll taken in Illinois, a Chicago Tribune survey  from the first week of March, showed Trump leading with 32 percent, to 22 percent for Cruz, 21 percent for Rubio and 18 percent for Kasich. A double-digit lead raises the possibility that Trump could sweep most or all of the 18 congressional districts.

Trump currently holds 462 delegates, 43 percent of the 1,065 delegates that have been at stake so far. But up until now, just 5 percent of all GOP delegates (the 50 Trump won in South Carolina) have been awarded on a winner-take-all basis. From March 15 forward, a whopping 64 percent of delegates will be awarded on a winner-take-all basis (39 percent based on statewide winners plus 25 percent based on district-level winners). This means continued Trump pluralities would be more than sufficient to earn him a majority of the 2,472 delegates by June.

Mrs. Clinton would have you believe that the 30,000 plus emails she deleted from her secret, private server pertained to yoga and weddings, and had nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation or “the unethical mixing of Mrs. Clinton’s public work and her personal fundraising/speech-giving/favor-doing,” writes Kimberly Strassel in the WSJ. “And yet as evidence comes forth, it looks as if the server was set up as an off-the-grid means for “those two worlds to interact.”

Here’s what the press has uncovered from just the few emails and Clinton Foundation details that have been released:

• Clinton Foundation cash after Russian mining approvals.
• More than a dozen speeches by Bill to corporations and governments with business pending before Hillary’s State Department.
• Dozens more donations to the Foundation from companies that were lobbying the State Department.
• Checks to the Foundation from a Swiss bank after Secretary of State Clinton solved its IRS problem.
• An email to Huma Abedin, while she was at State, asking for help winning a presidential appointment for a Clinton Foundation donor.

“The Clinton Foundation existed in recent years to serve as an unofficial PAC for Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential run. And Mrs. Clinton’s job at State was designed to serve the same end. Of course the business of the two was intertwined. And here’s to betting the server was maintained to facilitate that intertwinement.” Read more from Ms. Strassel here.

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There will be more fights. George Soros’ funded Moveon.org will guarantee it. “Can one imagine how the media would pile on Trump if working-class white males in Trump T-shirts invaded a Hillary Clinton rally and shut it down?” asks Pat Buchanan. Actually, I’d prefer they wear the “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirts.

Prediction. Given their “victory” in Chicago, MoveOn.org and its allied nasties will try to replicate it, again and again. And as Americans came to despise the ’60s radicals, they will come to despise them.

And, as in the 1960s, the country will take a turn — to the right.

America has changed from the land we grew up in. But she is not yet ready to allow ugly mobs screaming obscenities at Trump and his folks inside and outside that hall in Chicago, or their paragons like socialist senator Bernie Sanders, to take over the country.

Those raising hell in the street in Chicago and that convention hall are unfit to be citizens of this democratic republic.

For as Edmund Burke reminded us, “Men of intemperate minds can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Jeffrey Goldberg has released an epic-length Atlantic Monthly cover story on the “Obama doctrine.” While one is reminded at times of an anonymous Vatican official’s quip about George Weigel’s biography of Pope John Paul II—”It left one with the question: Who is that man in white standing next to George Weigel?”—you have to give it to Goldberg for waiting till the end of Obama’s presidency to explain his Doctrine. Other Washington foreign-policy watchers have been defining it since before it existed.

Two Barack Obamas emerge from Goldberg’s unprecedented access: Obama the President, and Obama the Pundit. Obama the Pundit has the far wiser foreign-policy mind.

Obama the Pundit, to my great surprise, echoes many of the things I have said and written about foreign policy. (I only visited the Obama White House once, where the Iran deal was marketed to a group of scholars.) Take the following selections as a sampling:

On Syria:

Obama also shared with [White House Chief of Staff Denis] McDonough a long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.

On the tendencies and biases of the Washington foreign-policy establishment:

“There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses…”

[Obama] resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as “Arab-occupied territory.”

Let it be said that every word of this is more true than the president would have it. He also ridicules the US-Saudi relationship to good end. The dispiriting part of the interview comes during the parts where Obama the President politicks.

On Libya, Obama called the country at present a “s**t show,” explaining that:

[T]he degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly.

This is really unforgivable. A poor, naive president misled by perfidious advisers assuring him that situation was ripe for regime change. Does that sound familiar? To paraphrase FDR, it may be a s**t show, but it’s our s**t show.

If Obama, who prides himself on being a Scowcroftian realist, really believed that tribal divisions in Libya were minimal, or that simply decapitating the Qaddafi regime would provide a “structure there that we could interact with and start training,” he should stop differentiating himself from President Bush the Younger in every respect except for one: cost.

Obama has made a number of unforced errors in foreign policy, to include much of the drone campaign, the Libya war, the Yemen war, and others. But what he has not done, and what does differentiate him from Bush the Younger, is his avoidance of costs. Where Bush’s naivete produced thousands of dead Americans and tens of thousands of Americans grievously wounded in pursuit of a phantom, Obama has played by the rules of the foreign-policy establishment without incurring high costs.

Washington changed Obama, and not for the better, but given the deranged proposals that swirled inside the Beltway during his tenure, he looks comparatively restrained. Grading on the curve of American presidents, perhaps we should be thankful. The next president, whoever s/he might be, will almost certainly be worse on foreign policy.

Are there two candidates further apart in this presidential election year than Donald Trump, a billionaire businessman running for the Republican nomination, and Bernie Sanders, a democratic-socialist seeking the Democratic nomination?

What is the appeal of Trump and Sanders to voters who believe that Washington’s economic framework is rotten? NPR answers, “The candidates want to tear it down, and millions of working-class Americans agree.” The electorate is not convinced that the economy is preforming well. Many voters are angry over “how the economy has not performed for them, and their anger is stirred by presidential candidates in both parties.”

For example, according to NPR, annual corporate profits after taxes shot up by about 250%, to nearly $1.7 trillion, from 1999 to 2014. Yes businesses did well, but outside of Washington, many, many Americans are not living in the framework of the “good life.”

They are living in houses that have lost value, in cities where they don’t trust the water pipes and where companies can suddenly announce they are moving jobs to other countries.

With their support of Sanders and Trump, those workers have made it clear they want a new paradigm. Trump talks about building a wall to stop immigrants; Sanders talks about breaking up big banks. So their solutions are quite different, but the message is the same: No more business as usual.

NPR points to Argentina as a warning. A century ago Argentina was one of the world’s richest nations. It declined dramatically after falling behind in technological innovation and education as it increasingly became politically chaotic.

Recently, Becky and E.J. took our oldest grandchild to visit the public high school in Newport, RI, from which I, my sisters, and Matt and Becky graduated. Their review was sad and disheartening. In Florida, after a couple of years of trying the Naples’ school system, Matt and Allison decided they were doing their children a disservice by keeping them in the public schools.

In a PIAAC study (Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies), which gauges the skills adults need to do everyday tasks, whether at work or in their social lives, U.S. performance was average or well below average in each category.

Overall, Americans’ everyday literacy skills were average. But if you zoom in and focus on just the young adults, a more complex picture emerges.

Americans who went to college and graduate school did well. They scored above their peers with similar degrees in other developed countries.

For young adults with a high school diploma or less, things did not look so good. These Americans performed significantly worse than those in other countries with the same education level.

Postsecondary institutions should be happy. But on the other end of the continuum, we have young people coming out of high school — or not graduating from high school — that are struggling with everyday competencies.

These findings, advises NPR, “should be concerning to everyone, especially leaders in the business community and in the K-12 school systems.” And yet all the while, the politicians rail against income-inequality as they turn a blind eye to our nation’s schools, which are disgracefully failing the middle class, as well as African-Americans.

It’s no secret that Washington, D.C.’s school system is one of the worst in the country. Michael Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, notes that D.C. schools spend nearly $30,000 per student each year, and yet more than a third of students fail to graduate.

The failure of D.C.’s schools has profound and long-lasting consequences. For example, we know that nearly 29 percent of people aged 25 and over who did not have a high-school diploma lived in poverty in 2014, compared to 14.2 percent of high-school graduates with no college, and just 5 percent of college graduates. And those high-school dropouts will stay poor. With all the talk about poverty and inequality that we hear, let’s remember that a failing public-school system is one of the reasons for those problems.

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