Surprise! Ted Cruz's Foreign Policy Team Is F*cking Psycho.

In which the Tailgunner has invented a new definition for "moderate."

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Great Caesar's Ghost!


Once you start with Frank Gaffney, there's no place to go but…down?

As Cruz makes the case that he is the last, best chance to prevent Trump from winning his party's nomination, his foreign-policy advisers include not only Gaffney, but also three others who work for Gaffney's think tank: former CIA officers Fred Fleitz and Clare Lopez and former Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Jim Hanson. Also on the list is Andrew McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombing. McCarthy has been outspoken in his view that adherents at least to political Islam are seeking to impose Sharia law in the U.S.

Ah, but there are some moderates in the house to keep these people in line.

At the same time, Cruz's team includes former officials who reject Gaffney's broad view that any Muslim who believes in Sharia law by definition believes in a totalitarian and violent ideology at war with America. "We're at war with a coalition of radical Islamists and radical secularists. It's not all one thing, nor is Islam all one thing," Michael Ledeen, a former Reagan administration official and a Cruz campaign adviser, told me. Jim Talent, a former Missouri Republican senator who was a key adviser to Romney in 2008 and 2012, is signed up for the Cruz team. So is Mary Habeck, a former staffer on George W. Bush's national security council, who is an expert on jihadi organizations and has warned against demonizing the entire religion of Islam. Another Cruz adviser, Elliott Abrams, helped craft Bush's policy to empower moderate Muslims in the Middle East against radicals. He told me he feels much the same way as Habeck.

Michael Ledeen is a man of many interesting ideas:

However, nobody is perfect, and Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror. One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists."

The fact that Ledeen invented a word there—"cauldronized"—is only about the ninth-worst thing in that paragraph. And, of course, our old friend Elliott Abrams is still dripping with the blood of American clerics and Salvadoran farmers. These are the two guys whom the Tailgunner brought in so his entire foreign-policy team wouldn't be made up of crackpots like Frank Gaffney.

That guy's nuts. I'm just a bureaucratic barbarian.

Truly a Team of Rivals.

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