I would’ve preferred that Irving Kristol stayed on the Left. Perhaps his son Bill can go back. They can be called “Conservative Democrats” or whatever they want to call themselves. Hopefully they fight as hard to take over the Democratic Party foreign policy as they did to take over the Republican Party foreign policy.
I like that choice, a Kristol/Trotsky foreign policy vs a Taft Conservative foreign policy - instead of a Kristol/Trotsky foreign policy vs a Democrat policy.
All I can say is I support Michele Bachmann and I would vote for Palin. They are the closets people to my ideology and stances. But, while I like parts of the economic polices of Ron Paul. I can not agree with him on much else. And neither can anybody else that is conservative. Ron is libertarian. He has his followers, but they do not agree with the conservative voters and the tea party on foreign policy. I’m afraid if Rand Paul is forced to straddle both groups then he won’t last long in congress. Each one will find things to dislike. Conservatives want a mix between Michele Bachmann, Marco Rubio, Allen West, Sarah Palin and the best parts of Rick Perry and Peter King, not the worst parts, mind you.
All I can say is I support Michele Bachmann and I would vote for Palin. They are the closets people to my ideology and stances. But, while I like parts of the economic polices of Ron Paul. I can not agree with him on much else. And neither can anybody else that is conservative. Ron is libertarian. He has his followers, but they do not agree with the conservative voters and the tea party on foreign policy. I’m afraid if Rand Paul is forced to straddle both groups then he won’t last long in congress. Each one will find things to dislike. Conservatives want a mix between Michele Bachmann, Marco Rubio, Allen West, Sarah Palin and the best parts of Rick Perry and Peter King, not the worst parts, mind you.
Therefore, before that inevitable state of zombification sets in, I will alert you to the existence of a book by the late Senate Majority Leader Robert A. Taft. The name of the book is A Foreign Policy for Americans (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1951). It lays out his ideas (not what you may have been told by Paulistinian liars or by Alex Jones or by the other Trufers) and not those attributed to him long after his death by those who cherish a surrendermonkey foreign policy for the USA. Further down in this post, I will quote extensively from the book. If you think I am taking Taft out of context, get a copy and read it for yourself. Even if you don't think I am quoting him out of context, get a copy anyway. When someone makes false claims as to Taft's foreign policy views, the best answer is, ummmm, Taft's own book on the subject, published a couple of years before he died.
Now, if you nonetheless, continue to falsely portray Taft as a paleopacifist, it will only be by willful invincible (as we Catholics call it) ignorance or intentional dishonesty. "I really had no way of knowing" ceases to be available as a potential defense.
Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Sidney Hook, Henry Jackson (who lifted the lamp as a Democrat) , Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who also lifted his lamp as a Democrat in service to Nixon and Ford but then became a Democrat senator), Donald Kagan, Walt Whitman Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and a host of their colleagues who were also distinguished intellectual and political leaders emerged from the left of their youth to become the intellectual backbone of the Republican Party and of the genuine Right on foreign policy. As you may recall, Ronald Reagan followed that path. So apparently did Michelle Bachman, Zell Miller, George Murphy, Robert Bork, etc.
The raison d'etre for the very existence of the Republican Party was said to be the advancement of human freedom. That was the public excuse for the unpleasantries and massive casualties of the late War Between the States. Ron Paul would like to be the Republican nominee so that he can castrate our nation militarily and render us incapable of fighting the many evils that abound in this world, often because of the spineless indifference of many American presidents and because of the amazing level of treasonweaselness of the current regime. Let us not confuse Robert Taft with the refusal of Eisenhower to assist the Hungarian rebellion of 1956 or of Tricky Dick to assist the Czechoslovakians in the Prague Spring of 1968 or with Comrade Peanut's general coma in the face of the seizure of the embassy in Teheran in 1978, or with Comrade Peanut's craven transfer of our Panama Canal to the unstable serial dictator gummint of Panama or the rank failure of John all Profile and Rhetoric and no Courage Kennedy (see also his willingness to allow Castro and the soviets to place and retain missiles at Cuba and to retain control of Cuba for that matter), LBJ, Richard (Let's make a deal with Chairman Mao and with Comrade Brezhnev) Nixon and Gerald Feckless Ford to competently wield American power to destroy Ho Chi Minh. The soldiers did their job. Too bad that the two-faced politicians never tried.
United States Senator ROBERT A. TAFT (from his introduction to that 1951 book, pages 6-8):
"Today we face threats to our liberty and moral foundation from abroad and from our foreign and domestic programs. Distance has been so diminished by the airplane and weapons have become so destructive, that this threat must be met on a world scale. If we are foolish in the use of our strength, we shall not survive; and with our freedom will disappear the little that remains in the rest of the world.
"Power without foresight leads to disaster. Our international relations have been conducted with so little foresight since 1941 that six years after vast military victories in Europe and Asia we face a more dangerous threat than any that has menaced us before. Our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen have not failed us. Our political leaders have. By 1941 anyone who was not bamboozled by Soviet psychological warfare knew that the Soviet Government was a predatory totalitarian tyranny intent on establishing Communist dictatorship throughout the world. But our leaders failed to foresee that the Soviet Union would turn against us after the defeat of Germany and Japan. They made no attempt to insure our future against that eventuality. They brought forth no positive policy for the creation of a free and united Europe or for the preservation of the independence of China. They preferred wishful thinking to facts, and convinced themselves that Stalin would co-operate with them to create a free world of permanent peace. So at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam hey handed Stalin the freedom of eastern Europe and Manchuria, and prepared our present peril...."
"What is the record?
"In 1945, when Mr. Truman became President, the Soviet Union was exhausted. Much of its industry was destroyed. It had no atomic bomb, no long range bombing planes, no serious navy. Its hold on Eastern Europe was shaky. China was our ally and the Chinese Communists were hemmed into a small area.
"President Truman held such power as no man had ever held before. Our air force was incomparably superior to any other. Our navy was more powerful than the combined navies of the rest of the world. Our army was a superb fighting force at the peak of efficiency. Our industrial plant, by far the greatest in the world, was intact. We alone had the atomic bomb which guaranteed the speedy destruction of any nation that might dare to risk war with us. We could have seized and held the initiative for the creation of a free and peaceful world. Our leaders did not know how or where to lead.
"Today Stalin has atomic bombs and long-range bombers capable of delivering them on the United States. He has 175 Soviet divisions, and 60 satellite divisions in Europe, and a Chinese Communist army of about 3,000,000 in Asia. He has some 50,000 tanks and more than 15,000 tactical aircraft. His Indo-Chinese accomplices are dra9ning the strength of the French Army. His guerrillas are withstanding the British Army in Malaya. He has riveted an iron control over Eastern Europe. China is his ally. To face Stalin's 225 (sic) divisions the Western democracies and ourselves are scheduled to have thirty divisions in Europe--perhaps--by the end of 1951. Moreover Soviet psychological warfare has been so successful in Western Europe that one fourth of the French and one third of the Italians vote communist.
"In 1941 Stalin ruled 180 million subjects and was not sure that he or his empire would survive. In 1951 Stalin directs 800 million people. Unless our foreign policy is directed more competently than it has been during the last ten years, our very survival is in doubt. There may be infinite arguments as to the wisdom of many steps in our foreign policy since 1943 (sic). But there can be little argument as to its results.
"There is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Our national administration has good intentions.
"We do not need to seek further than the Sermon on the Mount to know the first step that we must take if freedom under God is to survive in our country and in the rest of the world:
"'A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
"'Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
"'Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them.'" The very notion that the paleosurrenderman reflects the actual foreign policy of Robert Taft is a grave insult to the memory of Taft. People earn reputations for good or for ill. PaleoPaulie's foreign policy reputation is on a par with Charlie Manson's reputation for respecting the rights of Sharon Tate and her friends. You take the name of Taft into the mud unjustly by suggesting that he would have shared paleoPaulie's cowardly passion for Kumbayaing our enemies and cynically ignoring their victims.
If further proof is needed as to Taft's post-Pearl Harbor foreign policy, we can also review his own words in chapters with such titles as: "4. The Russian Menace. How It was Created; 5. The Russian Menace. How Do We Meet It Throughout the World? 6. The Russian Menace. How Do We Meet It in Europe; 7. The Russian Menace. How Do We Meet It in the Far East? 8. The Battle Against Communist Ideology Throughout the World." Hopefully for my typing fingers, that additional trauma to the fantasies of the advocates of sissified foreign policy will not be necessary.
Finally, it is not at all surprising that you would send the actual (octogenarian and nonogenarian) actual "NeoCons" back to the Demonratic Party because paleosurrenderman wants to advance the cause of a sleeve-gartered, green eye-shaded counting house, money-obsessive, amoral, libertoonian cult of third-rate losers. If the dominant actually conservative interventionist force in the GOP can be divided, it makes paleopeacecreepism (the foreign policy of George McGovern and Code Pink) marginally more possible (don't get your hopes up). Bill Kristol and the Podhoretz and Bork offspring never were Demonrats and they cannot therefore "go back" any more than paleoPaulie can go back to the Alzheimer's ward on Planet Dementia. You also have a serious misunderstanding of Lev Trotsky if you imagine that he was merely about interventionist military policies. He was probably to the left of Lenin and Stalin.
The paleopipsqueak is the classic case of the cropped tail trying in vain to wag the big dog.
As one of the Rostows said memorably of the Vietnam War effort by spineless and gullible presidents and speaking of the claim that we must be mere politicians begging the permission of persecuted populace of Vietnam to slaughter Ho and his minions and free the Vietnamese by "winning their hearts and minds." : "Grab 'em by the short hairs and their hearts and minds will follow."