GRAHAM WARNS ON SECURITY – AT 7:58 A.M. ET:  Some Republicans don't like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – apparently he isn't pure enough – but Graham has been a stalwart on national security.  And now he is warning that he are taking our eye off the ball, with potentially catastrophic consequences. 

As we pointed out yesterday, the 1960s crowd at The New York Times labeled Graham a fearmonger, but in fact he's on the button, and we'd better start listening.  From Fox:

Countering conventional wisdom that President Obama's foreign policy successes bolster the president's credentials ahead of the 2012 election, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that the Republican presidential candidates must be more forceful in challenging his decisions.

"To the Republican Party: national security matters, step up on it. ... We've got a jobs problem. We've got a national security problem that is growing by the day," Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Sunday."

Graham credited the president with killing Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden and supporting the overthrow (and death) of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, but, by Graham's account, the president has failed by allowing Tehran to get a leg up in Iraq and get that much closer to nuclear weapons.

Obama has thrown Israel "under the bus," Graham said; he has blown his policy on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and has made a politically expedient decision to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 2012, before the election.

Obama's decisions are being "run out of Chicago, not Washington," Graham said.

"At the end of the day these are decisions President Obama has made. I think they are strategically unsound and I think we'll need to step up and challenge him," he said.

COMMENT:  Sadly, foreign- and defense policy have been played down thus far in the campaign.   The economy dominates, as it did in America in the years before World War II.  Also, sadly, part of the Republican Party is turning neo-isolationist, a catastrophe for this country.  Graham has warned that the party of Ronald Reagan may be no more, a jolting statement.

I'm glad Lindsey Graham is speaking out, and speaking to his own party.   There are other things in politics besides the tax code.

Our foreign policy under Obama is incoherent.  It goes every which way, to good actions like taking out bin Laden, to very bad actions like appeasing the Iranian and North Korean regimes.  It's a foreign policy on the cheap.

October 24, 2011