Posted on 04/30/2015 6:46:34 AM PDT by B4Ranch
You have packed so many worthy observations into few words. Thank you!
Glad to see you up and FReeping again, BlackElk.
Yeah, there's apparently another neo-Nazi move to subvert FR again. Earlier someone actually posted an article from a racialist, anti-Jewish web site--and written by an avowed neo-pagan.
Looks like there's going to be a spate of these things for a while. Even when they admit that the Left is anti-Israel they never stop. The status of Jews as the objectively chosen people of an objectively existing One True G-d sets these "nationalists" wetting their panties like nothing else. They can't get their "planet of peoples" where every ethnic group has its own "gxd," "holy land," and national religious truth. Poor little babies.
“The founders were neoconservatives.”
They were no such thing. They never dreamed of interventions to “spread democracy”. They only entertained the idea of fighting upon direct threats to US interests.
I noticed in your lengthy response you had nothing to say concerning the neocons making welfare statism mainstream within the Republican Party. Is this because you concede that this is true (which it is) and in your mind a necessary evil for the sake of having such dubious "intellectual" allies in the GOP, or is it because you yourself support the welfare state?
I also found it odd that you speak of Hoover's "failed policies" (with the implication that Roosevelt's were a great success), because it's wrong on two fronts. First it's wrong because it claims that Hoover and Roosevelt were antipodes in economic policy, the caricatured view of Hoover as a laissez-faire libertarian vs. Roosevelt's Keynesian policies. In fact, Hoover was the one responsible for initiating those aspects of the New Deal that WERE fruitful: investing federal dollars into infrastructre (roads, dams, and bridges), investments that contributed to wealth. Unfortunately, when he lost the election, Roosevelt perverted this fruitful and Constitutional use of public funds to create the foundations of a welfare state and make-work public programs.
f the GOP had done a better job of convincing Americans of its ideas, it might not have been necessary to welcome the heirs of Hubert Humphrey. Do you remember Hubert running as an old school Democrat for his party's POTUS nomination and being defeated and humiliated by McGovern's "rules" and communist cadres?
Not to change the subject, but one of the ironies of political history was that Richard Nixon (the prototypic welfare state Republican) was probably by today's standards well to the left of Humphrey on many issues. Nixon often stated that if he had his way handgun ownership would be illegal in the US, Humphrey was consistently pro 2d-amendment.
When I was a teenager in a labor Democrat family and when it was still possible to be a Democrat and a patriot, I became infatuated with Barry Goldwater's candidacy without knowing of his support for abortion and homosexuality. I saw Ronald Reagan's election eve 1964 speech for Goldwater and I became a Republican forever.
Just as neocons dishonestly claim realist Reagan as one of their own, religious Fundamentalists ignore the fact that legislating social issues was not Reagan's highest priority. As governor, Reagan signed a bill that made abortion much more permissive in California, for instance, and opposing abortion was never a centerpiece of his presidency either. On social issues, he and Goldwater probably weren't so far apart.
Would the country be somehow better off if they were judged by the color of their skin?
By skin color, no. By the content of their culture (which, like it or not, is as much a part of an individual's identity as personal character), yes. The race riots erupting in our cities today aren't a consequence of rotten individual characters, but of a depraved and rotten culture. Similarly, some groups of immigrants are extremely upwardly mobile and readily assimilable, going from poverty to education and prosperity within a generation. Others wallow in poverty and ignorance for generations with no improvement in sight. The differences are collective intelligence and cultural identity, not individual character.
At no time was it imaginable that conservatism could be confused with pacifist weenieism which was the dead hand of a dead "conservatism" of the 1930s: Lindbergh, Colonel McCormick
I don't know your personal history, but it seems to me there is no worse form of "weenieism" than the sort we get from people like the Kristols - they talk tough, they play commando from their armchairs, but neither they nor any members of their immediate family would ever volunteer for the front lines of their own pet causes. It seems to me that Charles Lindbergh, who opposed the war on principle but volunteered for service once it began, is much less a "weenie" than those who agitate for wars for others to fight in.
Neoconservatives are the biggest welfare queens in this country
Just look at what has happened to their net worth since the start of the Iraq War.
yet none will serve
11-12 million illegals hardly requires exaggeration, it speaks for itself. As does the fact that California went from the jewel of the western hemisphere to a Third World cesspool thanks to the immigration policies favored by liberals and by neoconservatives.
“Jefferson did commission the marines to attack the Muslim pirate bases in North Africa. That was not a “neo con conspiracy””
No it wasn’t. It was a use of military force when American interests were attacked. Neocons love using force where America is under no threat whatsoever, or where the outcome will be equally bad no matter who wins. Like Libya, Syria, Ukraine, the Balkans, Sub Saharan Africa,,,etc.
And being left alone works wonderfully when the nation is organized on trade with the world, defending against those who threated our interests. Not this is stated as “interests” this means our direct American interests, not the idea that we should arrange the governments everywhere on earth.
This embroils us in endless wars, and earns us the hate of people everywhere where we are always the interfering outsider.
You pretend we have always been neocon, but nothing could be further from the truth. The current wars have been active longer than our participation in the Spanish American War, WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam,,,,combined. Does that alone not tell you that something is different.
Lick the Bush/Obama/Clinton agenda all you want, but America was never intended to exist in a perpetual state of war.
And our founders were well aware that such conditions quickly destroyed the freedom they worked hard to create.
They didn’t even want a standing army, deferring to a militia and a strong Navy. That combo is bitterly hard for an invader to attack, but it is also a very poor combination for projecting power. That wasn’t an accident.
They envisioned robust defense of trade, and of fighting invaders. They never envisioned us based in 80+ nations and fighting 3 and 4 wars simultaneously,,,for 15 years with no end in sight.
Founders as neocon. That’s utterly mistaken.
“National defense and, frequently, interventionism are legitimate constitutional functions of the central government.”
The founders disagree. From the founding of the nation, we had the Barbary Pirates war, short and sharp, and in response to an external attack on shipping.
About 50 years later, we had the Mexican War in response to Mexican aggressive moves.
50 years later we had the Spanish American war. After all was said and done, the problem was Spain moving in violation of the well known Monroe doctrine.
So every 50 years,, we had a short and sharp foreign adventure. That is not what we have today.
When arguing for interventionist foreign policy, neocons love the old bait and switch. You point out how many of our recent (or not so recent) interventions have nothing to do with our national security or any rational strategic interest, and they change subject to argue in favor of intervention based on a defensive war, even though that defensive war was not the one you were arguing against to begin with.
Case in point: once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, nobody was arguing against retaliation. Yet the interventionists attacked the American First Committee (who were trying to pursue a foreign policy that would have PREVENTED Pearl Harbor) as if they had opposed the retaliation.
Similarly, critics of "Nation Building" in Afghanistan, who question the wisdom of using US troops to help one tribe defend its hilltop against an enemy tribe on another hilltop, are attacked with the Red Herring of opposing the initial bombing of Al Quaeda strongholds in Afghanstan following 9/11, even though this isn't the point being argued.
And when all else fails, they play the Hitler card. A historian who questions the merit of our involvement in World War I (which liberal crusaders for "Democracy" like Wilson supported, and conservatives like Coolidge and Hoover rightly opposed) somehow gets changed to a discussion about Hitler and World War II. Similarly, you might point out that there is little sense going to war against tin pot dictators like Assad, Qaddafi, or Milosevic when they people they're fighting are as bad or in some cases far worse, and they'll counter by saying "You're just Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler." If Assad were Hitler, you'd think he would have made a lot more progress in taking over much of the Middle East by now, as opposed to fighting to hold onto (or is it retake) Allepo from the Al Nusra front.
Yep, they can spin every war on earth into a dire immediate threat to America. Like Kosovo.
With Kosovo, they first tried to spin it as a mortal existential threat to the US. When most Americans weren't buying the notion of a tinpot dictator in a country smaller than New York state sending troops in to take Cleveland or St. Louis, they tried a different angle of the Hitler card, i.e. the "genocide" card. They took an ugly civil war with thousands of civilians murdered by both sides, and spun it into a tall tale of unilateral genocide perpetrated by thugs on solely one side against innocent unarmed civilians, solely on the other.
And a hallmark of Neocon wars like Kosovo is that we must care about it more than people who are much more involved. I didn’t see the armies of Europe mobilizing to deal with the existential threat of Kosovo.
Except of course, endless screaming that America should “do something”. And involving a sufficient minimal military commitment to ensure their officers could get joint staff and command duties. That’s very important to Europeans.
Amid plenty of good discussion, your remark is the best summary test of who is a neocon and what they stand for.
Looks like a good article, to read later.
Even if one construes the Barbary pirates as a mercantile threat, this remains a premise of supposed neoconservative thought.
This week Iran shot across the bow of a US flagged vessel. China would be happy to curtail global trade in their exclusive favor.
Russia seeks to militarily improve its trade positions.
North Korea ships missiles that are quite dangerous and even helps nations build nuclear weapons systems.
It is difficult to imagine how the present world would sit passively by while the post neo conservative elite governed America.
There was a tremendous amount of US military aggression from the inception of the nation. I think this thread has demonstrated that. The war of 1812 while an attack on us betrays the painful reality of how the world never leaves any nation alone.
the United States is doomed to transform the world into its own image. Many faux conservatives bemoan this but there is no magic anonymity to be had with such a vast array of truly despicable global powers.
Prior to 911, the Chinese militarily took down a US military aircraft into their own territory. That was hugely aggressive.
The world simply will not conform to the false dogma of isolationism/pacifism/ inaction that the critics of neo conservatism extol. It is only a matter of time until major terror attacks on the US convince the nation to again take up the mantle of militarism. I wish it were not necessary but it is empirically obvious.
“We went to war over the Republic of Texas applying to the United States for statehood and because Mexico would not sell us California. How is that agressive Mexican moves?”
Texas won independence 10 years earlier. Although defeated, Mexico never relinquished their former claim. Texas claimed to the Rio Grande as they applied for statehood.
Mexico claimed up to the Nueces.
The war established that Mexico did not own that strip and nailed down the limits of Mexican claims.
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