Jim Webb's Analysis

Most of you know who Jim Webb is--but the quick/dirty political comparison is "Pat Caddell."  However, Webb is a decorated (Silver Star) USMC veteran who served as SecNav in the Reagan Administration, later becoming a (D) Senator from Virginia.  Webb spoke at The American Conservative's foreign-policy event a week after the election.

...The basic unavoidable conclusion is that for a very long time both parties abandoned the hardworking people out in fly-over land, who have done so much to make this country great. It took an outsider, whatever his wealth and lack of government experience or credentials, to speak the truth unencumbered by the boundaries of political correctness, and the need to grovel before millionaires in order to finance an election.

I attempted to do this as a Democrat, I quickly learned the power of pay-to-play political machines in an era where it takes either a billion dollars or a lot of luck on social media. With few exceptions, we know in this country that a hardwired elite now controls or dramatically influences our media, major media, our financial institutions, and in many ways our political system itself...

Yup.  And with specific reference to war, a topic Webb knows about:

...Look for a moment at the most glaring foreign policy failures of the past 15 years. Ask yourselves how could one Republican presidential administration have made such an incredible strategic blunder as the invasion and occupation of Iraq, only to see the next Democratic administration make an equally grave strategic blunder, at least as bad and possibly worse, by initiating what was called the Arab Spring? Unilaterally intervening in Libya and instilling an inflammatory foreign policy concept known as humanitarian intervention, giving a president, any president, the power to unilaterally intervene anywhere, under the euphemistic rubric of responsibility to protect.

Responsibility of whom to protect whom? At whose risk and whose benefit?

Good questions!  Anyone get Krauthammer or Kristol to answer them lately?

HT:  Grim