This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 30, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Republicans are complaining a lot about spending, except when it comes to how much we spend defending other countries,

and on a day that was purported to offer a

celebration of Ron Paul's steadfast support of the Constitution, a whole lot of talk focused

on expanding the American bootprint around the world.

Justin Logan, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute,

offers his thoughts on the GOP convention.

One of the interesting contrasts of the Republican National Convention so far is that there

seem to be two tracks of discussion.

Paul Ryan talked a lot about the profligate spending of the Obama administration and yet so many of the speakers on the very same day taking that very same stage

we're talking about America's responsibility abroad and how we simply cannot

afford to let our leadership in the world diminish in any way, and there seemed to be no attempt save for maybe a single

statement by Rand Paul on the stage yesterday that these things had anything to do with one another.

Ladies and gentlemen, your contemporary Republican Party.

I mean, it is, you know, on a general note, it is unsettling to see at the circus that is the Republican foreign policy world

the very same clown car pull up the very same door open and the very same cast of

characters fold themselves out of the car who were on the scene 10 years ago

when some of the biggest catastrophes to befall American foreign policy in the past half century

came.

So there's really been a failure to cultivate not just new thinking, but new thinkers.

We saw speeches from Senator McCain, who obviously has been a longstanding in stalwart

...