Bolton's Exit Shows Neocons' Lock on GOP

[Purveyor]

y Jonathan Bernstein
a A
The winnowing continues. John Bolton, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, announced today that he isn't running for president after all.

Up to this point he has talked about running, appeared at candidate forums and run about a million Twitter ads. But for a protest “candidate” such as Bolton, winning the nomination was never the point.

His goal was, as he put it, “to make certain that foreign policy is critical to winning the nomination” -- in particular, his hawkish foreign policy.

With Republicans fully on board with the (dubious) notion that 2016 will be a “foreign policy election,” with Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and others in sync with neoconservative national-security priorities, and with the Paulite heresy (Ron or Rand versions) in retreat, Bolton may have thought his work was done. Indeed, it's easy to interpret today's announcement as more evidence that Rubio passed his audition in his foreign-policy address on Wednesday.

There was also the debate logjam. Bolton was likely to have been excluded from any plausible forum of eight to 12 Republican candidates. If talking about his positions as an “expert” gets as much attention as talking about them as a “presidential candidate,” then what’s the point of going through the paperwork and other hassles involved? This calculation may matter to other small-niche candidates going forward, too.

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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-14/bolton-s-exit-shows-neocons-lock-on-gop

[okaawhatever]

1. Bolton never met a country he didn't want to go to war with. nt

[Gothmog]

2. The GOP is controlled by neocons

[Reter]

3. Yup, and tea baggers despise them

Problem for them is all the bosses like the Speaker and Majority Leaders are neo-cons, and the nomination goes to neo-cons. The closest thing to someone that was on the ticket in the past 30 years that wasn't a neo-con was Palin.

[JoePhilly]

4. The teaparty will adopt any neocon that throws Jesus into the mix.

Just place the endless war within some end-times rhetoric about how Shria law is coming to America, and so we have to go invade those evil countries, and the tea party will be all in.