Posted on 09/22/2016 10:37:38 AM PDT by detective
Of course Kristol's son, who has not repudiated his father's approach to ideology, has been one of the most virulently obsessed of the Never Trump coterie.
Your effort to suggest that there is some ulterior purpose in Conservatives' applying the name a group adopted for themselves, to that group, is absurd.
Suggesting that people who understood the wisdom of the traditional American foreign policy were "cowardly ostriches," is a ridiculous insult. Your suggestion that any such traditional Conservatives would not have responded to a direct attack on America, only displays your ignorance of the actual foreign policy you deride.
As Jefferson put it in a memo to President Washington, the policy always called for "punishing the first insult." When Jefferson was President a few years later, he demonstrated that policy by sending Marines to seize a Barbary Cruiser, and effectively wash its decks with Barbary blood.
Calling people, who understand the nuances of interacting with other nations better than you do, "Cowards," is not an effective argument.
If Bill Kristol is a better "Republican" in your eyes than "Mr. Republican," Senator Robert A. Taft, who was an "America First" patriot in the late 1930s, and the Conservative Republican candidate in 1952, who had the later support of the hero of the Pacific War, Douglas MacArthur; you are hardly a convincing spokesman for Conservative values. But I am not going to insult you as a "coward," even if you come across as a bit deranged in your prescriptions.
We are not little school boys exchanging hysterical insults.
“until the Japanese might have overrun St. Louis????? “
I hope that you intended that purely as hyperbole because the idea that Japan had the ability to invade the American mainland is the stuff of comic books. The Japanese threat was to their neighbors in the western Pacific and since that included a number of our possessions and allies war was guaranteed.
You do a good job of presenting the fallacy of the false dilemma. The foreign policy options of the United States have never been a stark one of the isolationism of Llewellyn Rockwell versus the interventionist meddling favored by neoconservatives.
The foreign policy view that began with the founding era and dominated American policy for most of our history is the Realist school, which is entirely missing from what you’ve written so far.
Liberal Internationalism in America traces itself back to Woodrow Wilson whose theory on reinventing Europe didn’t exactly turn out too well. Neoconservatives are his heirs, on steroids. Hubris is their blind spot, as well as never learning about the law of unintended consequences.
“Teheran has long since passed its shelf life and deserves to be incinerated. What are nuclear boomer submarines for?”
Yeah, that’s gonna happen. We live in an era when western political leaders won’t even ban the immigration of Muslims and you think that someone is going to launch a preemptive nuclear strike that will incinerate millions.
You and I are very much in disagreement and have tangled here before. I don't expect to change your mind and you can count on not changing mine.
The isolationism of the George Washington era was appropriate to a tiny newborn vulnerable nation. The business and upper class obsessions of Alexander Hamilton (including purposeful building up of national debt) were never appropriate and Aaron Burr deserves the thanks of a grateful nation for putting Hamilton out of America's misery.
Regrettably, though Federalist Party politics were extinguished at the ballot box as should have been, the Federalist big business/big government heresy lived on in the Whig Party which begat Lincoln who, as a Republican, destroyed the original republic once and for all, instituting an actual draft and a federal income tax to invade and blockade what he claimed was his own national territory after eleven states withdrew from the Union as their ancestors had withdrawn from Great Britain.
Today, both parties are in the grip of Hamiltonian favoritism for the wealthy and powerful and both piss on the general public. Trump gives Jacksonians hope that the republic might yet be restored. The purpose of this nation is greater than the nation's business interests. We don't need a New World Order (of crony capitalists) financed by American taxpayers' money and defended by American men at arms.
What we need is sovereignty and that anyone who, in any way, interferes with that sovereignty be firmly, finally and memorably punished. I don't know who is a better "Republican" (the new Whigs/Federalists) nor do I care. Bill Kristol, unlike his mother, has little use for social issue conservatism and I have little interest in him. Robert Taft the Elder, whatever his virtues, was a Unitarian, like Sandra Day (Planned Barrenhood) O'Connor. Name three socially conservative Unitarians.
Douglas MacArthur was a fine military leader but he introduced abortion, birth control and women's liberation to Japan after World War II. That is not what I want in civilian office.
How did our early leaders punish Britain's impressment of American sailors for Her Majesty's Navy AFTER we won independence. Diployak may have been all they had available against a powerful oppressor nation. It is neither useful nor effective when we have become a major power. Diployak brings us the Iranian nuclear empowerment sellout, plane loads of cash to mullahs to finance the development of their nuclear weapons and to finance terrorism everywhere. Diployak brings us the idols of internationalism and sovereignty sapping entanglements such as the United Nations and all of these treaties by which we have been committed by our useless idiot elites to regard attacks on any of ten thousand East Nowheristans as though they were attacks on mid-town Manhattan. Of course any actual battlefield combat will be hamstrung by infinite useless diployak generated rules of engagement guaranteeing stalemate at best. No, if war is necessary, find a Patton, unleash him and have the diployakkers get the hell out of his way as he uses the guts of the enemy to grease the treads of his tanks.
I have no interest whatsoever in "the nuances of interacting with other nations" nor in the diployakkers who squeeze for themselves every ounce of personal commercial advantage out of the diployakking at the expense of our nation's actual interests. This slime exuists to inhabit swank hotels for extended discussions over the best wines, the finest food, the finest women and increasingly the finest young boys, culminating in their own personal advantage. See Hiss, Alger, as a prime example. Where did he serve on the WWII battlefield before selling us out to the soviets. See John F'n Kerry (did you know he served in Viet Nam?) but of course he cozied up to the Viet Cong representatives in Paris in his Navy uniform as they haggled endlessly over a square ior round conference table as young Americans, hobbled by "rules of engagement" died or were permanently disabled. Better to have made Hanoi disappear from the face of the earth which was easily within our ability (preferably when kindly Uncle Ho was alive so that we could launch him straight to hell).
If we turn the fate of our nation over to useless treasonweasel diployakkers like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, George H.W. New World Order Bush, and their ilk rather than depending on the military force and hardware painstakingly developed to give us the ability to win at will, then we will deserve our fate.
Finally, there was nothing patriotic about the America First crowd in the 1930s. They were at best, sad anachronisms, certainly impractical fools, no wiser than the Viet Nam era Jane Fondas and George McGoverns, and they disappeared the day after they were humiliated by the attack on Pearl Harbor which they felt assured would never come. They were American Neville Chamberlains. Ask those who were in Tokyo during Jimmy Doolittle's raid whether they feared the American military thereafter or American diployakkers. Charles Lindbergh should have been flying one of those bombers over Japan and over Germany and continued to be an American Eagle. Instead he chose to be wined and dined and make business deals with Hitler at the 1936 Olympics and to lobby the American people for peace at any price like a regular little Neville Chamberlain.
Hysterical insults? No, cowardice is cowardice and it is the specialty of diployakkers. Isolationism and internationalism are two different but equally poisonous pills. Interventionism on our terms and for our purposes is the only sensible foreign policy focus. Trump has suggested that our "allies" will now be required to pay for their own defense. That is progress. Withdrawing from trade agreements is also progress. Withdrawing from the United Nations and kicking it out of all American venues would be further progress. Withdrawing from any and all "entangling alliances" committing us to defend most other nations is progress.
If you genuinely admire Douglas MacArthur in the context of his competence (military policy), remember and practice his simple statement: "In war there is NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY!"
St. Louis may have been an exaggeration. California was exposed. We would not have gone to war over Samoa or guam or the Mariannas. We did over Hawaii.
I dare you to find any expression of mine supporting internationalism. I would never have approved any involvement in the League of Nations or in the United Nations or in any long term alliance other than for strictly temporary purposes. I would gladly have ued American troops to push theNazis eastward to have a nice total war with the soviets, destroying one or the other with the survivor to be destroyed by the US. I would NEVER have allied with Stalin or Hitler. To our shame we propped up Stalin when we could have watched them destroy each other. We intervened heavily in Europe and Asia anyways, taking massive casualties. Why not to our national advantage with fewer casualties and the destruction of the major totalitarian powers? Never occurs to the diployakkers who are too busy swilling Chateau Lafitte Rothschild '29 by the case wile discussing the polo matches of their privileged youth.
How many millions (of US and our allies) will be incinerated in Tel Aviv, New York, DC, Boston, Chicago if we allow the wimps to continue to drag their feet while the Iranians develop their nuclear weapons and get the ICBMs from Putin?
Internationalism is unacceptable because it saps our sovereignty and ties us down as a pitiful Gulliver among Liliputian nations. Isolationism is the coward's way out for a major nation. It is unacceptable as totally impractical and as national suicide. The dilemma, if any, is between sensible interventionism and the false alternatives of isolationism or internationalism.
I don't give a damn about the opinions of uberwimp "Western Leaders." I am a Catholic and Frankie in the Vatican can also go fry ice. The basic dilemma is kill or be killed. I prefer that we kill as necessary and it is quite necessary. If your argument prevails, I hope you are at Ground Zero in New York when the Iranian nukes eliminate the city. You will deserve it.
I also agree with many of your sentiments; yet strongly disagree with the way you insult people who have legitimate points to make. We, of course, agree on New World Orders & other clear betrayals of the American purpose.
Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Dector, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Alexander Bickel, Martin Diamond, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Donald Kagan, Sidney Hook and others are "neoconservatives" as former socialists of long standing who fled the Democrat Party when it was seized by McGovern's communists permanently. They had to make a choice. They chose to reject the Demonrat Party. They were not the first to do so. Almost all of the original editors of National Review (other than WFB) were former Marxists and/or former Trotskyites. I am grateful that all of the above came over to the actually conservative side making compromises as necessary to fit in.
I am an actual Catholic before I am anything else. I was never a socialist, never a Marxist, Never a Trotskyite, never a Manhattan intellectual, not born in the 1930s heyday of most of the aforementioned. Yet I find myself and the mainstream movement right wingers of my time (the 1960s-1970s New Right, the actual American conservatives) reviled as "neocons" because we refuse to take the pledge for pacifist weenyism in the face of our nation's enemies. We refuse to live in the discredited isolationist horror of 1930s America.
Finally, if you deny that there are antisemites among otherwise conservative people, you are living in a dreamworld on that too.
Thank you!
Not to keep this back and forth going. But I agree that our troops were betrayed in Korea & Viet Nam. In the latter, LBJ ran the war not to win, but as a way of goosing the economy to create an illusion. It was an unconscionable betrayal of America’s finest youth.
” We would not have gone to war over Samoa or guam or the Mariannas. We did over Hawaii. “
The Philippines were attacked at the same time as Hawaii. That gets lost in the drama at Pearl but it was a sufficient casus belli.
“I dare you to find any expression of mine supporting internationalism.”
try this for example:
“In the 1930s, the sorry excuse for a GOP was dominated by what we now call paleos. They were an embarrassment until they folded their tents n disgrace on December 8, 1941.”
FDR had been spoiling to get us into the European war with the Lend-Lease Act and the sinking of U-Boats along our Atlantic coast. Germany wouldn’t take the bait. Senator Robert Taft opposed Lend-Lease saying it would “give the President power to carry on a kind of undeclared war all over the world, in which America would do everything except actually put soldiers in the front-line trenches where the fighting is.” Lend-Lease skirted the Neutrality Act of 1939 and allowed FDR to ship arms to Britain, the USSR, and China, among others.
Japan broke the impasse at Pearl but that still didn’t get the US into the war with Germany. Germany solved that problem by declaring war on us on December 11th. Feel free to support it, it may have been the wise course, but don’t kid yourself that it’s something other than internationalism.
“I would gladly have ued American troops to push theNazis eastward to have a nice total war with the soviets, destroying one or the other with the survivor to be destroyed by the US. I would NEVER have allied with Stalin or Hitler. To our shame we propped up Stalin when we could have watched them destroy each other.”
Well then you live in a world that no military planner had the luxury of inhabiting once we joined the war. Although the idea of letting the Nazis and Soviets slug it out while we watched is basically the policy that isolationists endorsed at the time, they just didn’t engage in the fantasy that the Germans would cooperate with the plan that you describe. We had plenty of trouble with the Germans as it was while we did our best to insure that the Soviets would keep them busy in the east.
The Soviets tied up close to 4 million German troops on the Eastern front. The biggest battles of the war were fought there in the months before we entered the war. Germany committed 99 divisions, more than half of their strength and many of their best troops. Had Stalin ceased fighting and freed up those German divisions we wouldn’t have had a prayer of making a landing like Normandy. The possibility that Stalin would come to some sort of ceasefire on the Eastern Front was a constant worry to the Allied planners.
“The dilemma, if any, is between sensible interventionism and the false alternatives of isolationism or internationalism. “
Which is precisely why the Realist school seems wise to many.
“If your argument prevails, I hope you are at Ground Zero in New York when the Iranian nukes eliminate the city. You will deserve it.”
For some reason you enjoy being a belligerent dope. I’m not sure why, but to each his own.
LBJ had lawyers and academics designing what passed for military strategy in Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy, John McNaughton, people with absolutely no military training, but that didn’t concern Lyndon Johnson who intended to keep the professional military out of the loop.
There was no military strategy. For Lyndon Johnson it was all about politics. He didn’t want to be stuck with losing South Vietnam, but he also absolutely didn’t want the war draining resources from his real love which was his domestic Great Society programs. So we was quite content with using American GIs for show in Vietnam with no plan for winning or bringing the war to a conclusion.
McNaughton and Bundy told Johnson that using their “strategy” the war could not be won before the first American ground combat troops ever set foot there and Johnson and McNamara went ahead anyway.
This is all described in detail on HR McMaster’s ‘Dereliction of Duty’ which I wish was required reading for every Congressman.
Internationalism is organizing a conference of elitist diployakkers to play Let's Make a Deal at the expense of the common folk. Typically, the conference will take place at some swell place like the Palace at Versailles with world class food and booze and women and (nowadays) pre-pubescent boys. All of the stratospheric business interests are represented directly or indirectly and they cut up the world's economy to their benefits in proportion to their clout. All the while aspiring diployakkers Biff and Skipper and Muffy have rousing conversations about this year's polo matches and tiddlywinks championships.
When, inevitably, the orgy and bacchanalia of the privileged must come to an end and NOTHING worthwhile has been achieved as usual, the ordinary grunts from Main Street USA can be drafted into military service for as long as they are needed by their elitist "betters" to be maimed and killed in endless ground wars hamstrung by RULES of warfare while the elites attend their debutante balls and "charity" affairs until the orgy and bacchanalia can be reconvened to argue about whether the conference table should be square or rectangular or round and John Kerry can show up in his Navy uniform (as the treasonweasel Kerry did) to kiss the asses of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemies.
We could have nuked Hanoi but NOOOOOOO that would be too sensible and would produce far too few casualties among our own lesser classes, don'tcha know! AND, their fellow elites running North Viet Nam might have suffered harm. Can't very well have that either! Not only that but it would have ACCOMPLISHED SOMETHING for a change other than our military casualties.
The Neutrality Act of 1939??? Call it what it was: The US Self-Castration Act of 1939.
If it suited OUR purposes to assist Churchill's England, and Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist China through Lend Lease or in any other way in which we were in complete control of our own involvement, no problem. We should NEVER have assisted Stalin or the soviet union.
As to the Phillipines, again to defend or not was entirely up to the US. We decided to defend. No problem. So long as we were not ordered to do so by a League of Nations or United Nations or other diployakker "treaty obligations."
During the 1930s, a politician from Ohio like Taft had a different perspective than people in coastal New England where I lived most of my life. After World War II, there is a Nazi U-boat sunk in the mouth of Long Island Sound and believed to have a cargo of gold bullion but no one can figure out how to bring her up since she teeters on the edge of the Atlantic abyss (not a formal name) in her immediate vicinity. The U-Boat has been teetering for 70+ years now. When I was growing up in New Haven, factories still had their windows covered with black tar paper lest they be targeted. Connecticut was then known as the Arsenal of the Democracy: Winchester, Remington, Colt, Sturm Ruger, Electric Boat, New London Submarine Base, Pratt & Whitney (times about 20 plants), Avco Lycoming, United Technologies, Hamilton Standard, Sikorsky and many, many more. No enemy was trying to bomb the NFL Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio.
Your major problem in this discussion is that you seem utterly incapable of distinguishing interventionism from internationalism. Patriotism and NATIONALISM are a necessary component of Interventionist policy. Internationalism is a weak policy of limp-wristed diployakkers and commercial opportunists who care not a feather or a fig for our nation.
Germany's, Italy's and Japan's diployakkers entered into a treaty (what else?) to form the Axis: When Japan attacked us and wedeclared war on Japan, Germany and Italy were sure to declare war on us as well and, because they did, we declared war on them. The differences: Japan acted because it decided to act but knew that Germany and Italy would join in. Germany and Italy joined in by treaty obligation. We declared war on all three in retaliation while being perfectly free to do as we deemed wise. A mere four years later, Japan and Germany were in ruins and japan had suffered the incendiary firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When the "America First" dreamers and schemers folded their tent on December 8, 1941, it was because they had been thoroughly discredited and humiliated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They probably also understood that unless they immediately folded their tent, no one could assure their physical safety from an outraged and very angry public.
"Realism" is just another synonym for cowardly, indecisive policy. "Realism" gave us a forty year cold war as the soviets were allowed to build their strength. Reagan's military buildup and credible proposal of High Frontier was derided as "unrealistic" but ended the soviet union which could not afford to compete. He called Gorbachev's bluff. Gorbachev and the Politburo folded their cards permanently. So much for isolationist weenyism, internationalism and "realism."
You have not met my dare. You have merely dug deeper into your fantasy that manly foreign policy of interventionism (on our own terms) is some how wimpy internationalism and diployakkery.
We could have had D-Day without Germans being tied up by Stalin although it would have been better to push the Nazis into Gotterdammerung with Stalin, the surviving tyranny to be crushed by us.
The alternative was to put Army Air Corps General Curtis (Bombs Away with Curt) LeMay in charge of death from the sky to demoralize and destroy any German defenders of the French coast or interior. Get Ike and the bureaucrats out of the way. Give LeMay all the authority needed, incinerate all German troop concentrations near the coast (say within 100 miles) and send in the body bags for the freed French to bury the German corpses and ashes. No machine guns in bunkers at Normandy to cut up our troops. The US troops could land at leisure, hold beach parties, try out the surfing, get acquainted with the local French bon bons, rest up and allow LeMay to clear another 100 miles and another and another, herd German military survivors together using Patton and Bradley and others to be the lead collies herding the German military sheep back to Germany, through German and on to Mother Russia. If Monty could not keep up, toooooo bad, soooooo sad!
We could even allow the fighting generals (no diployakkers and no politician generals) to make a deal wherein the German General staff deposed Hitler and the Nazi bosses, arrested them and turned them over for trial at leisure, and then, under their own and American generals surviving German troops swept into Russia from the west as a similar deal would be cut with the Japanese generals and admirals would do the same honors of arresting Tojo in deference to MacArthur who would lead Japanese and American troops to invade Russia from the east, meet in Moscow and hang Stalin and his thugs after appropriate "show trials" of course.
No Korean War. No Kim Jong (fill in the blank). No Vietnam War. No Cambodian Holocaust. No Warsaw Pact. No East Germany. No Berlin Wall. No Communist China. No Castro. No Sandanistas. The post-WW II world would have been soooooo darn peaceful that even the isolationists and other pacifists would have been bored silly.
Our military should also have contacted Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa and recruited him to turn. He was no Nazi and apparently despised Hitler and is believed to have conspired to overthrow. Rommel was brought back to Berlin and required to suicide lest he and his entire family be executed by Hitler. His son Manfred Rommel later was elected a Christian Democrat (conservative) Mayor of West Berlin. We could have recruited the Desert Fox.
As to your final complaint, when the US is nuked by Iran due to the surrender monkey policies of anything named Bush, Clinton, and particularly Obama, it is a matter of simple justice not belligerence that the first places to be nuked will be Manhattan and DC both of which have long been infested with various breeds of anti-Americans: isolationists, pacifists, "realists," internationalists and others of their respective ilks. If you want a cowardly foreign policy, you should be eager to suffer the consequences of what you hallucinate is your "wisdom." I also think that Sean Penn and the Code Pink witches should move to Teheran to share its fate since they so love the mullahs.
If you are just tooooooo fastidious to approve nuking Teheran and every one of its nuke facilities, how about a non-violent alternative? Sprinkle pig blood from the sky on each and every Muslim city and shrine and watch the fun that results as they consult their Korans to see if they can ever set foot in such places again. Blood all of Syria. Blood any place where Islamolooneytunes threaten to invade. Sprinkle pig blood all over Europe and the United States and that will put a stop to the immigration problem and cause those servants of the Arabic child molester who have already immigrated to go back to their refugee camps in Islamostan. Put a ring of pig blood around every Islamic nation or population center and trap them in place permanently. Any Muslim found in any civilized (non-Muslim) location to be rounded up and put within the pig blood border of any Islamostan.
How's THAT for belligerent and not a shot fired?
Study the Koran for other useful absolute and irrational taboos and employ them without mercy. Taunt them and tell them that Allah MUST approve of our actions or Allah would surely have struck us down.
Again, thank you!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.