Why, yes, come to think of it, this does sound like a Marco Rubio speech with a few paragraphs in support of the Iran deal tossed in. I’m sure plenty of hawkish Republicans noticed too. And I’m sure it was written with that very much in mind.

Although, given the way Rubio is going these days, he may volunteer to deliver the nationalist rebuttal at the convention.

The video is long but you’ll find a transcript here. The indictment of Trump early on is especially bruising. Here’s the dilemma for a #NeverTrumper in this election: On the one hand, everything Guy Benson says about Clinton’s own myriad foreign-policy failures in the following passage is dead on.

She said that America “stands up to countries that treat women as animals,” ignoring the lucrative donations her family foundation has happily accepted from repressive nations. She praised the terrible and fraudulently-sold Iran deal that Trump rightly opposes, erecting strawmen as the only alternatives to striking a recklessly lopsided and concession-laden bargain with an evil regime that the US government just affirmed remains the planet’s top state sponsor of terrorism. She suggested that Trump’s poor judgment and juvenile impulses could embroil the United States in ill-advised conflicts and overseas interventions. This, from a woman whose record and rhetoric on Iraq has been craven at every level, and who championed and advocated costly misadventures in Libya and Syria.

She sneered at Trump’s ridiculous secret plan to defeat ISIS, stating flatly that he doesn’t actually have one. But ISIS’ rise and proliferation was directly caused by the Obama/Clinton foreign policy, which insisted upon a precipitous and politically-motivated withdrawal from Iraq, and that manipulated and ignored intelligence that demonstrated that the terror army constituted a far more serious threat than a ragtag “jayvee” team. “There’s nothing I take more seriously than our national security,” she averred, hoping that viewers would simply forget how she knowingly and deliberately compromised our national security with her improper and unsecure email scheme — about which she’s endlessly lied, and for which she’s under active FBI investigation.

Not many Americans can say they played a role in getting the U.S. government to intervene in Iraq and Libya but darned if the Democrats didn’t find one who did to become their nominee. Can President Hillary continue her string of good luck and sound judgment in Syria next year? We’re probably going to find out.

On the other hand, what’s one supposed to say to this bit from her speech?

He is not just unprepared – he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes – because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin.

Errrrr, yes. That’s correct. It’s easy to imagine Trump blustering his way into a standoff somewhere in which he’s forced to either act or lose face and concluding that a strongman simply can’t afford to lose face. She’s right, and it’s not a minor thing to be right about. Like I said last night, if Hillary manages to turn this election into a referendum on whom voters would rather see with their finger on the button, she wins in a waltz. Voters will take the crook over the hothead narcissist. The fact that she’s already hammering that point this early in the campaign means that it is likely to be part of her core message.

Speaking of strongmen, what’s the rebuttal to this?

I have to say, I don’t understand Donald’s bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen who have no love for America. He praised China for the Tiananmen Square massacre; he said it showed strength. He said, “You’ve got to give Kim Jong Un credit” for taking over North Korea – something he did by murdering everyone he saw as a threat, including his own uncle, which Donald described gleefully, like he was recapping an action movie. And he said if he were grading Vladimir Putin as a leader, he’d give him an A.

Now, I’ll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.

She forgot to mention him literally boasting at one of the debates that the military would follow illegal orders from President Trump if he chose to issue them. And to some of Trump’s fans, these things don’t even amount to criticisms. He gives Putin an “A” for leadership? Well, so do they. If you happen to think the answer to America’s problems doesn’t involve placing a Putinesque authoritarian with his own national-savior cult of personality in charge of the world’s greatest military, what exactly is the response to Hillary here?

Trump livetweeted his own response to her this afternoon (of course) but it wasn’t what some Republicans were hoping for. Hugh Hewitt, thinking along the same lines as Benson, nudged Trump early to go after her on her own manifest FP deficiencies:

Hoping @realDonaldTrump fires back this afternoon, pointing to Syrian genocide, ISIS jayvees, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Ukraine

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) June 2, 2016

Trump being Trump, his mind was elsewhere:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/738449664752553984

Hugh should have him on his radio show and give Trump a chance to run through his considered thoughts about the politics of Mubarak’s ouster, the ensuing tentative U.S. embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, and how he’d negotiate the Middle Eastern dilemma between secular authoritarianism and Islamist populism. Or, alternately, he could let him talk about Clinton’s stiffness in reading a Teleprompter. Either way.