Here's a little quiz, boys and girls. Which crazed, power-mad candidate for president said the following?

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran.

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Donald Trump in 2016?

Nope. That was Hillary Clinton in 2008, when she was running against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It came in an interview with Chris Cuomo of ABC News.

Cuomo was asking her about a comment she made in a recent debate with Barack Obama. Clinton prefaced her remark by stating that in the debate she was discussing a nuclear attack with Iran.

She said, "the question was if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what would our response be?"

The transcript of the debate shows that moderator George Stephanopoulos first discussed Iran's possible efforts to develop a nuclear weapon and then asked how the U.S. should react.

Obama's response was diplomatic. He said, " I believe that we can offer them carrots and sticks, but we've got to directly engage and make absolutely clear to them what our posture is."

Stephanopoulos pressed on.

"So you would extend our deterrent to Israel?" he asked both candidates.

Obama again responded diplomatically, saying that in the event of such an attack, the U.S would take "appropriate action."

Here's what Clinton said:

"We should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region."

In fact, the U.S. does not have defense treaties with any country in the region.

In the absence of such a treaty, threatening to "totally obliterate" a foreign country through "massive retaliation" sure sounds like something a trigger-happy hawk might say.

Imagine if the Donald used such language.

The media would call him a crazed warmonger.

Clinton's quote did generate some reaction of that sort back then. The reliably left-wing Daily Kos had this to say about the quote: in a piece headlined "Hillary Clinton: Bomb, bomb Iran."

"Could this quote possibly sound any more like the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Neocon rhetoric? Has Hillary completely forgotten to which party she belongs?"

That Kos writer had it right.

Clinton has always been far more comfortable with the neocons who used to infest the Republican Party in the pre-Trump days than with the anti-interventionist wings of either party.

When I attended the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia over the summer, I interviewed many protestors outside the hall. All had backed Bernie Sanders in his unsuccessful race against Clinton. Now they said they would support Green Party candidate Jill Stein over Clinton.

As for Stein, she got a big round of applause from that crowd when she called Clinton a "warmonger" in an impromptu speech.

Then there's the anti-interventionist wing of the Republican Party. Back in the 2008 race, Ron Paul was a lonely voice for sanity when he outraged the GOP establishment by stating of terrorists "They're over here because we're over there."

He ended up losing that race to McCain, of "Bomb, bomb Iran" fame. And he lost again in 2012 to Mitt Romney, another committed neocon.

But in the intervening years Obama's bungled interventions in the Mideast - for which Secretary of State Clinton was the No. 1 cheerleader - convinced a whole lot of Republicans to abandon the neocons and go over to Trump.

The neocons are returning the favor. Many of them, including Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz, have gone over to the Clinton side.

The reversal couldn't be more complete. Clinton has even gone so far as to adopt the favored cliche of the neocons, the argument that America is "an exceptional nation" that deserves the duty of sorting out all of the world's affairs - at our taxpayers' expense.

This 2008 quote is quite illuminating in regards to Clinton's recent attack on a straw man she created called "the alternative right."

In her big speech on the subject, Clinton tried to portray the alternative right as a cult of racists and rednecks.

But when I talked recently with the guy who coined the term in 2008, Paul Gottfried, he said the main issue for most of the intellectuals on the alternative right is foreign policy.

(Read Gottfried's latest piece, which is on those supposedly "conservative" neocons who have abandoned conservatism to back Clinton.)

The two most prominent sites in question are the libertarian Lew Rockwell site, for which Gottfried writes, and the antiwar.com site, which as you may deduce from the name is antiwar.

From the early days of the Bush 43 administration, both of these sites have been fighting a lonely battle to revive the traditional conservative view of American foreign policy, one in which Washington "goes not abroad seeking monsters to destroy" in the words of John Quincy Adams.

The view that America should look after its own citizens rather than embark on endless crusades to help the citizens of other countries is in complete contrast with the neocon/Hillary view of the world.

In that view, we are "the indispensable nation" that is tasked with sorting out every trouble spot in the world.

That's the positive way of phrasing it. The negative way is that we've been acting like classic imperialists by supporting such despots as the Saudis in faraway places like Yemen.

Another site favored by the alternative right is the American Conservative, where you can read this piece by Daniel Larison on "The starvation of Yemen."

"Like other modern famines, the one that is being created in Yemen is entirely man-made, and the coalition and its Western backers bear the greatest responsibility for it. It could still be prevented if there were a concerted effort to save Yemen from starvation, but there seems to be very little interest in making that effort. All of the governments with the resources to do this are either oblivious to the need or complicit in creating the catastrophe."

Among those complicit is the U.S. government. We've been supplying arms to the Saudis (which was "good news" to the Clinton crowd according to recently released emails) as they crush the Houthi tribesmen, mountain people who are no threat to the U.S.

When I discussed this with former CIA agent Bob Baer, who spent years in the Mideast, he said Clinton is "the biggest warmonger" on the national scene.

In Yemen, he said, "she's basically supporting the Saudis bombing Doctors Without Borders hospitals," said Baer.

If Hillary ever held a press conference, I'd love to see her asked about Yemen. Does she care about all those women and children being starved and killed by our "allies" the Saudis.

That would be a tough one. The Saudis, who are Sunnis, are attacking the Yemen because they're Shia and thus friendly to Iran.

To a certain kind of mind, that makes them worthy of being bombed out of existence.

That kind of mind is much more likely to reside in the head of Hillary than the Donald.

When Clinton goes after "the alternative right" she is focusing attention away from the many conservative intellectuals who have been correct from the beginning about the U.S. role in the world. She's instead focusing on a few of the many loudmouth know-nothings who inhabit the internet.

You can find such characters on the left as well, but they're irrelevant to this race.

The mainstream media have been trying to portray Trump as the candidate who can't be trusted with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

I can't recall him threatening to obliterate some other country with nukes.

But you can watch Hillary do so below.

ALSO - HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A NEOCON SCORNED: Chris Christie used to be reliably neocon until he dropped out of the GOP primaries and became a Trump supporter. That apparently upset the Washington Post, which has declared a jihad on the Donald because of his attacks on neocon foreign policy. Read this piece in which the writer goes to great lengths to make it sound like Christie is unusual for doing what losing primary candidates routinely do - support their party's candidate in the general election.