IT'S NOT ABOUT RUSSIA, JUST RACE:

The coming years are going to require some courage -- not tough speeches, at which Republican politicians excel, but tough and politically difficult actions -- on entitlements, on immigration and especially on foreign policy and defense. Republicans used to be able to call national-security policy their strong suit. Can they still? All the tough young senators who railed at the Obama administration for its weakness on the world stage -- how tough were they when it came to their own political skins? Not tough enough to take on Donald Trump, even though his foreign policy, such as it was, betrayed many core Republican principles and was in most respects far worse than President Obama's.

After years of railing against the Obama administration's "reset," the leading Republican spokesmen on this issue said little and did nothing when their own nominee spoke admiringly of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and when his closest advisers were discovered to be intimately connected to the Kremlin and found to be lobbyists for Putin's puppets in Ukraine or Gazprom's pipeline plans. They were silent when Trump went so far as to urge the Russian intelligence services to hack Hillary Clinton's emails. These are the political leaders who are supposed to stand up to the world's real strongmen in Moscow and Beijing. Yet they did not stand up to this bullying would-be authoritarian when all he could do was steal away a few of their voters. They would not risk five points in their primary campaigns to stop this man from becoming commander in chief. They were willing to damage U.S. national interests, as they define them, to avoid a close race. These are the men and women to whom we should entrust the nation's welfare?

Tweet   @brothersjudd