Nice Shakespearean touch there.
And I meant my agreement. Those who live and die by that term are looney-tunes.
Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
Posted on 03/16/2009 7:48:46 AM PDT by Liz
EXCERPT Though neocons formed a kind of Praetorian Guard around John McCain during his campaign, their truculent approach to foreign affairs sabotaged rather than strengthened McCain’s appeal. The best that Sarah Palin, a foreign-policy neocon on training wheels, could do was to offer platitudes about standing by Israel. It seems safe to say, then, that the neocon credo is ready to be put out to pasture.
Or is it? One problem with this line of argument is that it’s been heard before—sometimes from the neoconservatives themselves. In 1988, after George H.W. Bush replaced Ronald Reagan, neocon lioness Midge Decter fretted, “are we a long, sour marriage held together for the kids and now facing an empty nest?”
Then in the late 1990s, Norman Podhoretz delivered a valedictory for neoconservatism at the American Enterprise Institute. Neoconservatism, he announced, was a victim of its success. It no longer represented anything unique because the GOP had so thoroughly assimilated its doctrines.
In 2004, a variety of commentators scrambled to pronounce a fresh obituary for neoconservatism. The disastrous course of the Iraq War, Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím said, showed that the neoconservative dream had expired in the sands of Araby.
Yet the neocons show few signs of going away. The Iraq surge was devised by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and spearheaded by William Luti, a protégé of Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney who is currently at the National Security Council.
Its success has prompted some neocons to claim vindication for the Iraq War overall. Nor has the network of institutions that the neocons rely upon melted away, from the Hudson Institute, where Scooter Libby and Douglas J. Feith are now ensconced, to the Weekly Standard and Fox News.
It’s also the case that the realists inside the GOP feel more embattled than ever. Sen. Chuck Hagel has pretty much resigned from the GOP itself as well as from his Senate seat, denouncing Rush Limbaugh and others as retrograde conservatives.
They have undeniably suffered a number of setbacks. The sun has set on the flagship neocon newspaper, the New York Sun, a victim of the financial crash.
The citadel of neoconservatism, AEI, has ousted Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, and Reuel Marc Gerecht. Meanwhile, Robert Kagan has incorporated realist tenets into his writings, while David Frum, who co-wrote with Richard Perle the standard neocon foreign-policy text, An End to Evil, and who previously demanded the expulsion of allegedly unpatriotic conservatives from the conservative pantheon (a move Russell Baker called reminiscent of the Moscow purges), now seems to be hinting at, among other things, a reassessment of neocon foreign policy. “I cannot be blind,” he conceded in a farewell address to National Review Online last month, “to the evidence … that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see.”
Looking ahead, the neocons do not have an obvious horse. In the past they have glommed on to everyone from Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson to Colin Powell, whom William Kristol briefly touted for president. Another problem is that George W. Bush himself has increasingly deviated from neoconservatism.
With the fall of Donald Rumsfeld, on whom the neocons tried to blame the mismanaged Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney has lost out to the combination of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Even Kristol seems to have shed some of his habitual fervor, musing about the shortcomings of capitalism in his New York Times column and expressing the hope that Obama will put aright what has gone wrong.
The result has been something of an identity crisis in the ranks of the neocons. Like not a few revolutionary movements that have fallen on hard times, neoconservatism is experiencing a schism. Two camps are starting to face off over the question of the true faith, with the first embracing orthodoxy and the second heresy. The question they face is simple: Should the neocons continue to move right, serving as the advance guard of an embattled GOP? Or should neoconservatism become true to itself by returning to the center?
Will the movement, in fact, morph back into what it was at its inception in the late 1960s when it belonged firmly to the Democratic Party—moderate on domestic issues and mildly hawkish on foreign policy? --SNIP--
As far as I can tell, traditional GOP values have included social conservatism. It is only of late that some have attempted to remove social conservatism from the 'list' of GOP values. If you have some documentation that says otherwise, I'd be interested.
Good points. I would suggest that there was almost no difference between the U.S. foreign policy agenda under Clinton and under George W. Bush. Their approaches may have been different, but the end result — and the underlying agenda — was nearly identical.
So, Pat Buchanan is our savior?
I didn’t write the wikipedia article. If you feel the definition is inaccurate, you can edit the entry.
Nice Shakespearean touch there.
And I meant my agreement. Those who live and die by that term are looney-tunes.
Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
Before that it was not a particular "GOP pillar", with foreign and fiscal issues being far more characteristic of the GOP. The reason not at least being that the US society as a whole was more traditional/religious. When in the 1960's, 1970's the Dems drifted increasingly leftwards and social "liberalism" became stronger in the US, there emerged a political "social conservative" force in the GOP. However even the "arch-Conservative" Goldwater, was not "socially Conservative" by 1980's or current standards.
I’d highlight the deciding difference that GWB was going after islamist terrorists, while Clinton was not.
Keep in mind that senior neocons were Trotskyites who departed the Reds when Stalin executed their hero.
Many oldtime Pubbies saw punkneos surveiling victorious Republicans (then-enjoying a generation of wins allover the US and DC, thanks to so/cons).
Savvy Pubbies predicted the punks would kick conservatives to the curb, and squat in our party, as the way to pursue their hidden agenda.
This piece and the comments that follow are ridiculous and sad. William Kristol is the reason Sarah Pallin was chosen to run as VP, but now suddenly she's a "neo-con"?
We're doomed and not because every GOP member fails to check every box on the Conservative list.
Very tolerant. Do you have similar objections to the folks who want to read Ron Paul and his followers out of the party?
Someone would have to define what a purist Republican was. Nailing jello to the wall comes to mind.
Phew! Glad I am not the only one in this boat! My liberal friends call me one, and when i ask them what it means, I get a far different definition (each time) than what i read here.
HELP! I'm sooooo confused!
Maybe you're the only one here who doesn't realize that the meaning of words change over time. You know, whomever controls the language controls politics.
A learned man such as yourself should certainly be aware of this. Instead of reading what others have written here that explains how the term "neoconservative" has been bastardized by the left, you're busy ranting about your own superiority regarding a term that was coined more than thirty five years ago. The popular understanding/meaning of that term has changed dramatically over time and it's unfortunate you're still clinging to a definition no one uses any longer. Instead of admonishing others to learn from you perhaps it is you who should be doing the learning. Looks like you have a little homework of your own.
Back in 2004 pukeneo Billy Kristol calculatedly attacked Rummy----as a thinly-disguised, back-door attack on then-President Bush------just more of the anti-America rhetoric neocons regularly engage in.
It did not escape conservatives' notice that Bill Kristol's gleeful attack on Sec Rumsfield was a carefully constructed attack on Mr Bush............ and on conservative thought.
Kristol's backhanded hectoring of Mr Bush and his administration was unconscionable.
Such undermining of a president (from one who claimed to be a Republican) did not exist even in the flawed Clinton administration and certainly not to the degree approaching that neocons visited on Pres Bush by a group that purports to be in its corner-----the neocon cabal.
====================================
WISHFUL THINKING Kristol recently announced "conservatisn is dead." Citing an extremist like Kristol as if he speaks for conservatives is silly and will not be tolerated. Course, it's always difficult to determine which country Bill Kristol is defending, and what motivation drives his elliptical thinking, and convoluted thoughts.
What Americans wanted to know---and what President Bush should have found out----exactly who was "tasking" Kristol to attack Sec Don Rumsfeld.
For a president who values loyalty, Mr Bush must have been pained that neocons showed their true stripes........and demonstrated that they cannot be trusted.
Neocons were the ones manufacturing forged Niger documents, and other legerdemain, to goad the US into toppling the Iraq regime. Then neocons came out against the Iraq conflict altogether and gleefully lacerated Rummy and Bush.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Already done............months ago.
The people who want Republican purity are the same ones who want us to lose to teach America a lesson...or they’re Demiocrats, it’s impssible to tell the difference.
I like that definition.
Okay, thats nuts
. Whereas I would highlight the differences as being 180 degrees opposite.
Clinton allowed multiple repeated attacks by rabid muslim islamic fundamentalists - and then ran away and supported...rabid muslims by attacking Christians with overwhelming military force in Serbia.
Bush attacked the Taliban 1st thing and wiped them off the board as major players in Afghanistan, allowing a more modern and more civilized government to take hold, attacked and invaded Iraq in order to stabilize an entire region from a pan Arab militant Nationalist who had dropped poison gas on his own people, who had started 2 major wars by invasion, and who had very close ties with terrorist organizations while paying suicide murderers cash rewards to blew woman and children in Israel to bloody pieces.
That's the difference.
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