Posted on 01/12/2010 7:29:01 PM PST by grand wazoo
Picking Apart Washington’s Scum
by Paul Gottfried on January 12, 2010
As everyone and his cousin know, the neocons are my least favorite “Washington insiders” and they divide generally into two categories, the ill-mannered, touchy Jews and their groveling or adulatory Christian assistants. David Frum, the Kagan boys, Norman and John Podhoretz, and Michael Ledeen are the house-owners; while Bill Bennett, Fred Barnes, Michael Novak, Cal Thomas, Linda Chavez, and Rich Lowry all live in the servants’ quarters.
Although I’ve suffered more at the hands of the Podhoretz-types than from the machinations of their servants, I’ve always felt a grudging admiration for my most vicious enemies. The Jewish neocons leave their finger-marks on whatever they do to bring down their critics on the right; and they don’t seem to care that others notice. Most of their hits on members of the Old Right, such as getting Sam Francis removed from an editorial post at the Washington Times and Joe Sobran from one at National Review, have been done in a strikingly open fashion.
It’s as if the neocons wish to be caught in flagrante delicto, perhaps to demonstrate what they can get away with. At Catholic University in 1987, the neocon capifamiglia first got their underlings to call the appropriate deans in order to keep me out of a graduate professorship. But then Norman made a direct call to the university administration, so that he could personally warn the administrators against my allegedly anti-Zionist views. (As far as I can recall, I never held such views.) Neocons enjoy inflicting PAIN on those “anti-Semites” who dare to defy them. And they show a kind of Stalinist exuberance when they pounce on those they want to crush. Even when they’ve unloaded on me and my friends, I can appreciate their hate-filled energies and the thoroughness with which they destroy reputations. At least the Jewish neocons are nasty but not sneaky; and they feel entitled to crush those whom they don’t fancy.
“It is the neocons’ servants who turn my stomach. At the lower level these helpers engage in character assassination from behind the scenes, and some of them have done so at the expense of such badly battered victims as Sam Francis, M.E. Bradford, and Joe Sobran. They combine servility with dishonesty—and a willingness to defame in order to curry favor.”
Here I have to differ from my friend Taki, who seems excessively hard on the Jewish neocons. He accuses them of being hypocrites who avoid fighting in the wars they foment. He also charges them with smearing their opponents (almost always on the right) by denouncing them as Jew-haters and Nazi-sympathizers. But Taki may be overlooking the more endearing or at least more interesting side of his adversaries. They act with an emotional intensity that we should be able to admire on the aesthetic level. This of course would not keep me from doing to these sleazebags what they’ve done to me over the last twenty-five years. But I can appreciate their straightforward approach to ruining others. In a nutshell they are truly worthy absolute foes. Here I’m inclined to cite the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt who observed that one should respect people who deal with powerful, determined enemies.
It is the neocons’ servants who turn my stomach. These include not only those who bow and scrape before their masters but also those who help eliminate neocon targets. At the lower level these helpers engage in character assassination from behind the scenes, and some of them have done so at the expense of such badly battered victims as Sam Francis, M.E. Bradford, and Joe Sobran. For me those who take the orders are more contemptible than those who give them. They combine servility with dishonesty—and a willingness to defame in order to curry favor. The worst such case of kissing-up by a neocon houseboy involved the head of a “conservative think-tank,” who went to President Reagan in order to trash the Southern scholar Mel Bradford. This enabler undertook his task as a favor to “Irving and Bea,” who were then greasing the skids for their protégé, that dumpy mediocrity and gambler extraordinaire Bill Bennett. Bradford, who had the inside track, had to be eliminated for the dark horse candidate Bennett, so that the neocons could get their fill of NEH grants.
And I’ve also no use for those fetch-and-takers who spend all their time trying to anticipate and express the latest neocon concern. When these types are not cheering on the Red team against the Blue, calling for wars to spread democracy, rediscovering the “Christian conservative” Martin Luther King, and howling against Islamo-fascism, they turn to even viler things. For example, they work around the clock to keep the agitprop publications and organizations they “manage” free of politically undesirable influence. On those very few occasions when I got to place my comments in neocon-run publications, I did so after I had spoken to the Jewish master class, and bypassed their Christian subordinates. Having dealt with this nomenklatura for years, I’ve become convinced that the servant class submits the name of every would-be contributor to some censoring office, located in Midtown Manhattan. Without the necessary stamp of approval the gentile editor is not allowed to accept any article or commentary.
The slave class has also featured certain charges that have been given heavy-duty use against those who are marked out for marginalization. One member of this class has besmirched me as an “intellectual who wants to return to the eighteenth century” and as someone who has “no understanding of today’s politics.” Equally familiar is the charge raised by some of the house servants that we have not moved with the times. But since the neocons and neoliberals help shape these times and determine what we’re allowed to say, it all comes down to the same: We’re bad for not saying what they want us to say. One aging neocon client, who has grown rich in the service of his masters, turned his back on me at an Aspen Institute Conference where both of us were invited to speak five years ago. More recently, the same person has wondered aloud “why paleos are so bitter.” The answer is simple: His friends have smashed our heads into the wall often enough to remove the grins from our faces.
Unlike the master class, which glories in destructive acts, the slave class pretends that such acts have never taken place. The opponents of the neocons are simply “bitter” and this may be ascribed to our sour dispositions. Otherwise we would sit down with the rest of the “movement’ and iron out our differences. But no invitation to parley has been extended to our side or to anyone whom the neocons have decided they don’t want around.
That is the way the neocons have organized the soft or kept opposition to the center-left. One can take one’s pick in this case about which are worse, the deciders of agendas or their servants. I’ve already chosen.
The writer is clearly mentally ill and a very dangerous person.
No barf alert?
...Although I do agree Frum should be taken out to the woodshed (along with the New York Times' David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, and Kathleen Parker).
These folks have long since lost their way.
Whether you agree with him or not, you have to admit this is a great article that pulls no punches and takes many of the neocons to the woodshed.
That may be the reason he can detect other SCUM so easily.
Never heard of Mr. Gottfried, and he is a lively writer
who manages to find some pungent ways to express his resentment, but what floats above this whole piece is the feeling that his animosity against the Neo-Cons is that they took over the places that should have rightfully gone to him and his friends.It’s the marketplace of ideas, Paul.
Pat Buchanan still seems to hold onto his place, why couldn’t you?
I do suspect this Gottfried is not any relative of Rabbi Gottfried.
He's certainly not someone to be respected.
Point one—I don’t. Point two—he’ll fit right in with the rest of the boys over at Stormfront.
“holding and grooming Taki’s gerbil”
-—a mental image I hope leaves me before I go to bed tonight!
Yeah, what comes across like gangbusters in that piece
was the classic self-loathing Jewish anti-Semitism, perhaps derailed from its usual targets, turned inward, and
intellectually curdling right off the page. From the advert for his book on the right side of the page his piece is on, I see he had an ‘encounter’ with my adolescent idol, Herbert Marcuse. Now it all makes sense; he’s as ideologically mixed up as Lew Rockwell, yet he still wants to be boldly, non-denominationally assertive and “shocking”.
Is this an article from The Onion? Somewhere in that mass of words I expected to see rabbis with hook noses and beady eyes smelling of matzoh balls using the blood of Christian babies on the Passover.
You know, all my life I’ve heard crazy people scream and yell about how the Jews control this and the Jews control that, and how the Jews are engaged in control behind the scenes, or in front the scenes, and the question I always ask myself is, “Why didn’t they invite me?”
So here’s an open letter to the World Zionist Conspiracy and their gentile slaves, as the author so delicately puts it. I’m Jewish enough, but I’m never asked to join anything, no one shares any conspriracies with me, not even a few shekels passed down to this poor suffering Chosen Person out here in the Alaskan wilderness. I’m like the kid picked last for the team. What am I doing wrong? Just give me an interview, you’ll like what you see, then give me a position somewhere in the vast world takeover business - I mean, I know that business is down a little now, what with that schvarzte in the White House and the housing bubble and so on, but since we’re really running the show, there’s no doubt a good reason for the economic problems, and the Jews will be back in the controller’s seat again. How about it? I got a good suit, nice tie, my mother will vouch for me. C’mon. Let me join the conspiracy. You won’t regret it.
There are Communist Jews who join against their fellow Jews and now we have a Paleocon Jew joining in hatred of his fellow Jews.
Creeps. Maybe the anti-Semite Taki can lend Gottfried some of his cocaine to make him feel better.
If you're a neocon then he has a grudging respect for you.
What a bucket of bile. Next time it shouldnt have to take 10 paragraphs to say that he hates the Jews. One sentence should be enough.
Rather unlikely as Paul Gottfried is Jewish.
If thats respect, my god, what's disrespect like ?
If thats respect, my god, what's disrespect like ?
Albeit self hating.
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