Neoconservatives Endorse Hillary Clinton for President Because They Know She’s One of Them

Neoconservatives like Iraq warmonger Robert Kagan aren’t endorsing Hillary Clinton for president merely because they want rid of Donald Trump, but because she’s one of them, writes Trevor Timm at The Guardian.

Several neoconservatives have spent years gushing about Clinton’s penchant for supporting basically every foreign war or military escalation in the last decade, including Kagan, who said in 2014: “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy … If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Her campaign hasn’t really deviated from that position, either. While she’s hit Trump for being too erratic and dangerous a man to have in charge of the nuclear codes, she also promised more ground troops in the fight against Isis, expressed support for a no-fly zone in Syria (effectively a declaration of war against Assad) and called for more weapons for various rebels in the region.

Just this past weekend, we learned yet another lesson about what constant military intervention in the Middle East has gotten us: one more disaster where untold numbers of US guns and weapons fell into the hands of the people we are fighting. The New York Times reported that the classified CIA program that armed and trained Syrian rebels directly fighting Assad – a policy Clinton pushed for while in the Obama administration and that she has subsequently said we should expand – led to the systematic stealing of millions of dollars of US weapons, which were then sold on the black market and even contributed to the killing of Americans.

On the economic front, Hank Paulson – former Goldman Sachs chief and the man who oversaw the financial collapse and economic bailout as George W Bush’s treasury secretary – put himself firmly in the #NeverTrump camp while also endorsing Clinton in a Washington Post op-ed. After talking about Trump’s business acumen (or lack thereof) and Trump’s appeal to ignorance, Paulson says this: “I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won’t touch social security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

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—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.