A month ago, Mr. Scowcroft criticized the Obama administration and Republicans alike as failing to push for a comprehensive Mideast settlement. In an appearance on CNN, he was asked then by Fareed Zakaria, the host, whether he was comfortable with the Republican Party. Mr. Scowcroft looked down and paused before observing that ?many parts of the party? now call him a ?Republican in name only.?
?I don?t think I?ve changed my views at all,? he added. ?I think the party has moved.
Then you have former Bush 43 Secretary of State Colin Powell, who last week on MSNBC's Morning Joe lashed out at Romney for saying that Russia was America's biggest geo-strategic problem. Watch:
Later in the interview Powell said Romney has been ?catching a lot of heck? from the more ?regular? folks within the GOP foreign affairs community. ?We?re kind of taken aback by it,? he said. ?How could you do that? Look at the world."
The Times quotes James M. Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, as saying of Romney's foreign policy team, ?seems to be tilted more toward the neoconservative wing of the foreign policy establishment.?
But a paragraph later we learn that the "Romney campaign bristles at the 'neoconservative' description."
So for those readers who forget about that term, so ubiquitous in the media less than a decade ago, the term "neoconservative" or "neo-con" was quite popular as a way to describe some of President George W. Bush's top foreign policy aides, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Richard Perle.
These individuals were gung-ho on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, well before the 9-11 attacks, which as most people understand, were perpetrated by the Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network, not Saddam.
President Bush spoke in his second inaugural address in 2005 about having a foreign policy that would promote democracy in "every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Although some may say the U.S. mission in Iraq was successful, the general consensus these days is that it was a mistake, especially after the central thesis ? that the country possessed chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons ? proved to be false.
Mitt Romney was in the San Francisco Bay Area Wednesday night, where he was formally endorsed by former Secretary of States Condoleeza Rice and George Schultz. Although that's "news" only in the sense that the pair hadn't done so yet.
As the New York Times reports, there are some notable figures in the GOP political establishment who have yet to endorse the presumptive presidential nominee five months before the general election.
One of those heavyweights is Henry Kissinger, who the Times reports is a bit miffed at Mitt's dissing of China in the campaign.
Then there's Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush's former national security adviser, who believes the Republican Party has shifted so far to the right in the two decades since he left power in Washington that he calls himself a man without a political party.
