January 3 – The Foreign Policy Landscape Ahead in 2016; The Domestic Policy Arena Ahead in This Election Year

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with a veteran Middle East CIA operative Robert Baer, who is now a best-selling author and the national security affairs analyst for CNN. He joins us to discuss whether 2016 will be the year that we dig ourselves deeper into the Middle East quagmire or finally extricate ourselves which was clearly the objective of President Obama before the Islamic State beheaded an American journalist on video. We discuss whether rationality and proportionality in terms of our overheated reaction to the minor threat of ISIS compared to what we faced in the Cold War are possible in an election year environment.

Part 2

Then we look into the already raucous and even raunchy domestic political arena ahead in this election year as unconventional political candidates on the Republican side push the bounds of civil discourse while on the Democratic side the Party establishment seems to be going out of their way to bury the presidential candidate who is drawing the biggest crowds while protecting the front-runner from any self-inflicted wounds which seems remote given Hillary Clinton’s disciplined and confident presence in the debates that the DNC apparently didn’t want Americans to watch. John Nichols, The Nation magazine’s Washington correspondent and author of “Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America”, joins us to discuss populist energy on the left and anger on the right and whether the DNC’s attempts to marginalize Bernie Sanders will drive young voters away from the polls, as well as whether the angry insults from Donald Trump with eventually catch up on the Republican frontrunner who continues to climb in the polls.