Please excuse my naivete, but just what is a neocon? Literally a new conservative, I know, but does that mean he/she was something else before, like an, ugh, liberal? It can't apply to me because I voted for Goldwater. By the way, my question was serious.
I'm going to guess that "neoconservative" means "new conservative." And what has made new conservatives of liberals? They're people who believe lies about foreign policy and refuse to subscribe to the Truth, who misunderstand the good intentions of communist terrorist totalitarian dictator Kim Jong-il and find him repugnant for serving his people by starving them and sentencing them to an eternity in a national gulag.
They're the idiots who irrationally despise Ba'athism and condemn perfectly noble political expression like the destruction of the World Trace Center in New York City as Islamofascist terrorism rather than exalting it as a rational response to the unjust regime of the United States. We neoconservatives believe in the Lies that Saddam Hussein was a terrorist totalitarian dictator and the embodiment of evil when we see the bodies of the Traitor children extracted from mass graves in the once-great Republic of Iraq rather than subscribing to the Truth that Saddam Hussein is somehow innocent of those deaths, or that those pictured bodies simply don't exist.
Understand? Neoconservatives are pathological Liars who irrationally despise communistic governance that has excised the world of the curse of only a few hundred million non-person humans in the past century. Neoconservatives turn away from the Truth that Israel causes all the problems of the Islamic world and inspires so-called Islamo-fascism and that never have Arab Muslims committed any act of terror disproportionate to their numbers.
First, the dictionary definition, a former liberal espousing political conservativism.
If you want to know the full story, no better source than the man considered the 'godfather' of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, expounds on it in this article:
The Neoconservative Persuasion: What it was, and what it is.
The Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003:
by Irving Kristol
"[President Bush is] an engaging person, but I think for some reason he's been captured by the neoconservatives around him."
--Howard Dean, U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003
WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is "neoconservative," and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as "neocons" are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any "there" there?
Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.
Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public ... icles/000/000/003/000tzmlw.asp
Kristol does seem to suffer from some delusions of grandeur, and his original vision of neoconservatism is not todays version.