GOP National Security Officials: Trump Would Be "Most Reckless" President in History

Last week it was former CIA head Michael Morell endorsing Hillary Clinton for president and citing Donald Trump's ignorance, temperament and near co-opting by Vladimir Putin for his decision. Morell had always been an independent during his three decade plus career at the CIA.  Now, fifty (50) former GOP national security officials have released a scathing anti-Trump letter which states that Trump is not only dangerous and unfit for office, but that he'd be the most reckless president in America's history.   The full letter which is worth the time to read in full can be found here.  I truly do not recall in my lifetime such a revolt against a major political party nominee by prominent members of his own party.  The New York Times has details:

Fifty of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials, many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” to be president and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Mr. Trump, the officials warn, “would be the most reckless president in American history.”

The letter says Mr. Trump would weaken the United States’ moral authority and questions his knowledge of and belief in the Constitution. It says he has “demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding” of the nation’s “vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges, its indispensable alliances and the democratic values” on which American policy should be based. And it laments that “Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself.”

“None of us will vote for Donald Trump,” the letter states . . . Monday’s letter included many senior former officials who until now have remained silent in public, even while denouncing Mr. Trump’s policies over dinners or in small Republican conclaves.

Late Monday, Mr. Trump struck back. The signatories of the letter, he said in a statement, were “the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” He dismissed them as “nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power.”

Mr. Trump correctly identified many of the signatories as the architects of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But he also blamed them for allowing Americans “to die in Benghazi” and for permitting “the rise of ISIS”

Among the most prominent signatories are Michael V. Hayden, a former director of both the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency; John D. Negroponte, who served as the first director of national intelligence and then deputy secretary of state; and Robert B. Zoellick, another former deputy secretary of state, United States trade representive and, until 2012, president of the World Bank. Two former secretaries of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, also signed, as did Eric S. Edelman, who w as Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser and as a top aide to Robert M. Gates when he was secretary of defense.

Robert Blackwill and James Jeffrey, two key strategists in Mr. Bush’s National Security Council, and William H. Taft IV, a former deputy secretary of defense and ambassador to NATO, also signed.

[A] number said in recent interviews that they changed their minds once they heard Mr. Trump invite Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton’s email server — a sarcastic remark, he said later — and say that he would check to see how much NATO members contributed to the alliance before sending forces to help stave off a Russian attack. They viewed Mr. Trump’s comments on NATO as an abandonment of America’s most significant alliance relationship.

Mr. Trump has said throughout his campaign that he intends to upend Republican foreign policy orthodoxy on everything from trade to Russia, where he has been complimentary of President Vladimir V. Putin, saying nothing about its crackdown on human rights and little about its annexation of Crimea.

"We agreed to focus on Trump’s fitness to be president, not his substantive positions,” said John B. Bellinger III, who w as Ms. Rice’s legal adviser at the National Security Council and the State Department, and who drafted the letter.

He said that among the signatories, “some will vote for” Mrs. Clinton, “and some will not vote, but all agree Trump is not qualified and would be dangerous.”

[P]erhaps most striking about the letter is the degree to which it echoes Mrs. Clinton’s main argument about her rival: that his temperament makes him unsuitable for the job, and that he should not be entrusted with the control of nuclear weapons.

“He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood,” the letter says. “He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate personal criticism. He has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behavior. All of these are dangerous qualities in an individual who aspires to be president and commander in chief, with command of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”

Frankly, I have to agree with these individuals' assessment 100%.  They may have been wrong on the Iraq War, they have it right when it comes to Trump.

A Night of Bellicose Republican Bluster

The husband and I had dinner last night with friends at a local country club, so I missed a good part of the Republican presidential debate last night although I listened to a part of it on satellite radio driving home.   While the main topic of the evening was national security, what I heard did anything but make me feel safer.  There were many promises of murder and mayhem towards ISIS and Ben Carson justified the killing of women and children in the process.  Then of course, there were promises of "boots on the ground" even though (i) it was American boots on the ground under the misrule of George W. Bush and Darth Vader Cheney that set the stage for ISIS's rise, and (ii) few if any of the GOP demagogues have served in the military or had family members in harms way in the Middle East. From what I heard, my vote is definitely, none of the above.  A column in the New York Times looks at the batshitery that thrills the hearts of the GOP base but which ought to make the rest of us very fearful.  Here are highlights: 

When you call for carpet bombing, as Cruz did again on Tuesday night, you are not outlining a strategy of pinpoint targeting or of any discernment.

You are sounding big and bold and advocating something indiscriminate. That’s the nature of a carpet. You can’t pretend otherwise.  Unless you’re Cruz, who can pretend just about anything.

“You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops,” he said, as if there’s no mingling and the fighters of the Islamic State are somehow clustered apart from everyone they control, extinguished with the mere dropping of a rug.

“The object isn’t to level a city,” he added, never specifying how he would separate the good edifices and actors from the bad.

[I]it was a prime example of the bluster and oversimplification on vivid, infuriating display in this Republican presidential debate, the fifth.

It was dominated as none of the four before it by one word, one syllable — “safe,” which was uttered so regularly that it was essentially the heartbeat of the debate.

And each of the nine contenders on the stage had one goal above all others: to convince viewers that he or she could be the agent of that fiercely desired security. That he or she could bring back “safe.”

But many of the aspirants had additional aims: to wound the rivals for the nomination who stood most directly in their way. As the night wore on, it degenerated into tedious, often puerile quarrels: between Cruz and Marco Rubio; between Rubio and Rand Paul; between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump.

Actually, the Bush-Trump crossfire was welcome and satisfying, because Bush more than anyone in any of these debates effectively called Trump out for his galling recklessness, and Trump’s responses were as naked a display of his adolescent narcissism as he’s engaged in yet. That’s saying something.

“He’s a chaos candidate,” Bush said when asked to elaborate on a tweet in which he’d called Trump “unhinged.” “And he’ll be a chaos president. He would not be the commander in chief we need to keep our country safe.”

The candidates rightly observed that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton had articulated a strategy or found an answer for reassuring jittery Americans.

But their own attempts to do that also failed, eclipsed by their sparring and preening, by an emphasis on puffed chests and sound bites over nuanced policies and earnest reflection.

In that sense Cruz was the night’s defining figure, his certainty verging on cockiness, his ambitions transparent, his attempts to tap into some warmth a mesmerizing exercise in futility.

John McCain - Reckless and Now Demonstrably Unfit for Office

There are times I wonder WTF is wrong with Americans. By any intelligent objective standared there are few reasons to support a McCain presidency now that McCain has sold his soul to the Christianists and shown himself to be reckless and cynical in making his pick for his VP running mate. In addition to looking like a Christianist nutcase, Sarah Palin lacks any serious executive experience that is one of the alleged reasons for her selection. Just because the GOP mouth pieces keep saying she has it doesn't make it so. A glance at the number of cities in the USA with populations LARGER than that of the entire state of Alaska underscores just how ridiculously McCain acted in selecting Palin as his running mate. There are nineteen (19) cities with populations larger than that of Alaska (10 have populations one and a half times or more of that of Alaska). Locally, Norfolk and Virginia Beach combined have a larger population than all of Alaska. Using McCain's insane standard, the mayor of any one of these cities is competent to be Vice President of the United States. This level of idiocy is truly worthy of the Chimperator and ought to say all that needs to be known. Here are highlights from Andrew Sullivan's take on McCain:

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What we have learned about John McCain from his selection of Sarah Palin is that he is as impulsive and reckless a decision-maker as George W. Bush. We know this not because of what we have learned about this Pentecostalist populist since she exploded on the scene last Friday morning (and God knows we have learned more than we ever wanted). We know it because of how McCain made the decision. He wanted his best friend, Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate for Al Gore. That pick would have been remarkable for its bipartisan nature, would have impressed independents, and signaled a centrist presidency centered on foreign policy. It would have been bold while not being rash.

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McCain is in charge of a party that is now, at its core, religiously motivated. Joe Lieberman, for all his political talents, is Jewish, pro-choice on abortion, gay-inclusive, and domestically liberal. McCain faced an insurrection in his party base if he picked him. Without the evangelical base, he wasn't going to win.

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So last week, McCain picked someone he had only met once before. I repeat: he picked someone he had only met once before. His vetting chief sat Palin down for a face-to-face interview the Wednesday before last. It's very hard to overstate how nutty and irresponsible this is. Would any corporate chieftain pick a number two on those grounds and not be dismissed by his board for recklessness?

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The recklessness was much more fatal in the new media world than in the old one. In the old media world, the Republicans could try to control the flow of information, browbeat the press and prevent the entire weird family background and series of scandals and rumors of quite incredible events from getting into the mainstream. But those days are over. Within minutes of the announcement, everyone reached for Google. I recommend for starters the two following stories that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News last March and April. Story 1 / Story 2

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McCain's major domestic issue in the election, moreover, is the economy and the rocky time many middle class Americans are having. . . . It would be very hard to pick a governor in America who knows less about the struggles of most Americans in the current economy.

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And Palin's edcuation? Six colleges in five years ending in a degree in sports journalism from the University of Idaho. That's the background of someone who could be president of the United States at any moment after next January. Who does John McCain think he's kidding? And what on earth was he thinking? This was a rash, impulsive, reckless pick.

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If you thought a president who went to war on flawed intelligence with no plan for the aftermath was reckless, then I have news for you. You haven't seen anything yet. Imagine the kind of decision-making McCain has just demonstrated applied to life-and-death decisions with respect to Iran and Russia. Yes, you have permission to be afraid.