Hillary delivered what was billed as a major foreign policy address yesterday in San Diego. If you missed it, find the time to watch the full thing.

As far as foreign policy speeches go, this wasn’t JFK calling for a nuclear test ban treaty or Reagan telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall. But that’s not what the moment called for. To paraphrase other reviewers of the speech, it was a blistering evisceration of Donald Trump, a complete unmanning of the Republican nominee and jackass.

The speech was masterfully written, eschewing any cringe-worthy gotcha phrases, and Hillary delivered it skillfully. She looked presidential. She also looked like she was enjoying herself. And she seems finally to have mastered the Obama approach of being presidential, somewhat aloof, and yet devastatingly funny and biting in her comments.

She pushed all the chips into the middle of the table, calling Trump unqualified to be president, questioning the state of his mental health, generally ridiculing him, mocking all the stupid things he’s said about foreign policy. And she did all of this without getting down into the gutter with him. This was a former first lady, former senator, former secretary of state just brushing this clown off.

I certainly hope this speech presages the Democrats’ strategy for the rest of the summer. To simultaneously remind people that she’s a serious candidate for president and to just call Trump out as the national joke that he really is and to render him a laughing stock.

And, He’s Still Lonely . . .

Meanwhile, Trump’s all by himself.  I haven’t seen a single prominent Republican step up to defend Trump. Certainly, no national security surrogates to respond to Hillary on foreign policy. Trump tweeted some half-hearted nonsense. And his “comments” at a rally in California last night were so uninteresting that MSNBC didn’t even bother to air more than :30 seconds of them. He apparently spent the day still complaining about the “Mexican” judge in the Trump University case.

“Charlie, They Took My Thumb!”

Paul Ryan used the occasion of Hillary’s speech to sneak out his non-endorsement endorsement of Trump. He said that he would vote for Trump. He didn’t really ask anyone else to do the same.  And he published his “support” in an op-ed piece in his local paper in Wisconsin. I’m surprised he didn’t slip it into the classifieds section.

He did appear on television explaining his decision. I can’t find a video on Youtube. I’m sure that Ryan’s staff insisted on watching the reporters delete the files from their hard drives. He looks sad and mumbles some things about “policies” that Trump would advance without bothering to mention what those “policies” are.  If you turned the sound down on the video and just watch his body language, you could easily imagine him saying things like, “we think we caught the cancer in time” and “Uncle Bill lived a long and full life. . . “

The Pope of Greenwich Village is a really bad eighties mobster movie starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts (I realize this sentence is a tautology). Roberts’ character is unavoidably named “Paulie”. There’s a scene where Paulie’s Uncle Pete is dispatched by a mob boss to amputate Paulie’s thumb in retribution for some offense. Before doing the deed, Uncle Pete tells Paulie to “go numb . . . . Nothing ever hurts as much as you think it will.” Paul Ryan had that look on his face yesterday.