Unpatriotic Conservatives

National Review Online ^ | 4/7/03 (advance) | David Frum

[Willie Green]

They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world

The trouble with Frum is that he thinks Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were conservatives.

[iranger]

"The problem with Buchanan is that he has always put America first, which makes him a prime target for beltway konservatives....."

Michael Savage doesn't? They seem to have opposing view regarding our "empire building." So, the questions is, which one is really putting America first?

[Dog Gone]

What a fabulous article. Thanks for posting it.

[Bella_Bru]

I misplaced mine too. But, as a full member of the International Zionist Conspiracy, I'll have my broadcast networks run the memo on the 6 o'clock news. ;-)

[Sangamon Kid]

I'm a bad neocon, I missed my fax this week from Ariel Sharon, as head of the scary Joos we do as he says.

Where did I mention anything about Sharon or Jews, or are you trying to discredit me by using the broad brush of anti-semitism. Nothing original here, just a cheap and tired trick...you can't find anything to stand on so out comes the Jew card. The topic is American Empire, or is your brain maxed out for having strung together a thought or two?

[Joe Hadenuf]

I'll let you decide that. My comments were in response to comments that Buchanan is a Nazi, Anti-American and other hysterical, funny comments.... I am sure Savage and Buchanan's opinions differ somewhat. It would be rather strange if they didn't. LOL! Besides, I could care less if Savages comments or opinions differ from Buchanan's. I mean, so what if they do? Hehehe....

And you need to realize that we have been intentionally, secretly destabilizing nations for many years, supplied bad guys with mean weapons etc etc etc....Why do you think we did things like this? LOL!

[NeoCaveman]

Must have confused you with PBJ. If I was wrong then you answer your own question "You couldn't possibly be uninformed about what influences the policy making at the highest levels in the Bush administration, now could you? "

Who is your boogey man, this influencer you allude to, if it is not Sharon, who?

[NeoCaveman]

I'll have my broadcast networks run the memo on the 6 o'clock news. ;-)

Thanks. I'll have my secret decoder ring out so that I can translate it ;-)

[eskimo]

And for the love of everything decent and holy please stock up on TIN FOIL.

Seems to me the, so called, new conservatives are trying desperately to build themselves their own house with a tin roof and expel anyone who even resembles their liberal mothers or conservative fathers.

How can any group survive when its members so despise their own heritage that they refuse to accept even the good aspects it has presented them?

[1rudeboy]

If 'American Empire' is the topic, can we start by naming the countries that comprise the Empire?

[american spirit]

Ok, show me where Buchanan wrote anything resembling your allegation that we got what we deserved on 9/11. Seems like some folks just can't stand the fact he won't get meekly in line and grovel in front of the powers that be like other alleged objective journalists. To lump a patriot like him with those other dimbulbs just shows true ignorance.

[dirtboy]

From the article:

On September 30, 2002, Pat Buchanan offered this explanation of 9/11 during a debate on Chris Matthews's Hardball: "9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we're supporting Israel and all the rest of it."

[ohioman]

""Hey, I'm against Empire building. Does that make me an "America-Hater"?""

Well, if you truly knew what an Empire was, you would not be making those kinds of statements.

[dirtboy]

this column does picture the old right as racists.

Actually, the column does nothing but cite specific utterances of a few members of the old right. I'm curious how quoting someone paints them as racist.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

My favorite part is this one, ilustrating that they really are just a bunch of antisemitic, racist whiners - and that the theorists of the movement are the biggest failures of the lot:

A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.

Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, "Misfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults — ah! There is the sting of life." Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford's friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.

Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, "in what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying." Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class "unprepared or with little thought as to what he would say" and that his students found his classes "unfocused, with often rambling discussions," he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a "neocon attack."

"[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, 'totalitarian.' But that's liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country."
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL

[janis]

Thank you David Frum for getting this all together.
It unmuddled my thinking about the paleos that I had come to distrust. For a long time I had enjoyed Pat B. as a gadfly. And I liked reading Taki's High Life. The others mentioned I had dismissed for various reasons but I had to boot Pat and Taki primarily for their anti-Isreali sentiments.

[sinkspur]

Ole Mel Bradford taught me sophomore English at the University of Dallas in 1971. At the time, I had no idea he was such a Confederate.

[hchutch]

George W. Bush is correct to treat the paleo-cons and their policy demands as the poison they are.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Just heard on KFI AM radio, they are removing American flags from all of our tanks. Anyone know the reason for this strange move? They said something like "for reasons of liberation, not dominataion"?? Did I hear this right?