{"id":13078,"date":"2011-12-07T10:23:13","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T18:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=13078"},"modified":"2011-12-07T10:23:58","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T18:23:58","slug":"republicans-itch-to-trash-obama-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/07\/republicans-itch-to-trash-obama-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans Itch to Trash Obama Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&#8217;s <em>New York Times<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/12\/07\/us\/politics\/obama-foreign-policy-a-republican-target.html\">pointed out two very interesting notes<\/a> on the last Republican debate. The candidates were asked to name the national security issue they most worried about which had not already been discussed. Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry all agreed on their answer:\u00a0radical Islamists like Hezbollah in Central and South America.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That the candidates would cite the same threat \u2014 one denied by the Mexican government, and which seemed to contrast with a State Department report that there are no Hezbollah-related operational cells in this hemisphere \u2014 was not a coincidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Indeed, I think I sufficiently addressed this paranoid fiction in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/08\/war-on-terror-iran-paranoia-expands-to-latin-america\/\">a previous blog post<\/a>. Do read it. Their response is indicative of the utter lack of real &#8211; as in existing &#8211; foreign policy gripes with the Obama administration.<\/p>\n<p>This is the very next passage in that <em>Times<\/em> piece:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Now that several months of full-throated campaigning are on the books, a major thrust of the Republican foreign-policy argument has emerged: that President Obama has not strongly supported\u00a0Israel\u00a0and that he has been too soft on its adversaries, Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians. That softness, they say, extends to other parts of the world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ah, another fiction. The GOP field is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2011\/11\/13\/gop_and_tp_on_obamas_foreign_policy_successes\/singleton\/\">so secretly enamored with Obama&#8217;s foreign policy<\/a> that they have to engage in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Magical_thinking\">magical thinking<\/a>, inventing fantasy gripes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&#8217;s New York Times pointed out two very interesting notes on the last Republican debate. The candidates were asked to name the national security issue they most worried about which had not already been discussed. Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Rick Perry all agreed on their answer:\u00a0radical Islamists like Hezbollah in Central and South America. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-13078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13078"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13080,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13078\/revisions\/13080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13078"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}