Posted on 05/03/2003 8:44:59 AM PDT by quidnunc
Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label.
The word neocon, for example (short for neoconservative), was born of such a shifting of the ground. Coined in the 1970s, the label stuck to Democrats who had watched the Scoop Jackson anti-Communist wing of the Democratic party evaporate before their very eyes. They saw the War on Poverty become a losing battle. On the domestic front, they observed the death of morality as it had been defined for thousands of years in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These Democrats finally concluded that liberalism, as they had known it, was dead.
Irving Kristol, father of the neocons, defined his band of brothers and sisters as "liberals mugged by reality." That reality was the "evil empire" as defined by Ronald Reagan, the leader they championed. The reality extended to a concern for crime and education and what came to be called "family values." A subdivision of the neocons, the "cultural conservatives," were wryly defined as liberals with daughters in junior high.
Jews were prominently identified with the neocons, largely because Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, made the magazine a sounding board for neocon criticism. But Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Baptist, and William Bennett, a Roman Catholic, were prominent neocon voices from the beginning. So were other Christians. "What are we," they might ask, "chopped liver?"
The Jewish neocons understood what the majority of Jews who vote Democratic didn't — that Jews and Evangelical Christians held many things in common, among them an admiration and affection for Israel.
Such definitions and ideological attitudes are amply documented in the political history of the second half of the 20th century, but the neocon label resurfaces today as many journalists and pundits identify the neocons as a new generation driving the foreign policy of George W. Bush.
It's a label that doesn't quite fit, since those credited with influence are hardly "neo" anything. For the most part, the label is attributed to second-generation conservatives. Some are sons of the Scoop Jackson Democrats whose fathers have the last name of Podhoretz and Kristol, but the label as accurately understood has a much more inclusive intellectual base, including, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney; his wife, Lynne; Condoleezza Rice; Don Rumsfeld; and Paul Wolfowitz, the hugely influential deputy defense secretary.
The term, however, is disingenuously bandied about at dinner tables and policy meetings in London and Paris and elsewhere, where it is colorfully coded to suggest a Jewish conspiracy working on the White House.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at tallahassee.com ...
If you have a problem with American involvement in World War II at this late date, you are not ideologically related to Charles Lindbergh or John Flynn. Stop suggesting otherwise. Both Lindbergh and Flynn folded the isolationist tent immediately upon the Pearl Harbor attack and Lindbergh begged and obtained the opportunity to serve in the war. I also think Chesterton would find your position unsupportable and your political bearing alien to his own.
I don't think you want to pursue the position that I am clueless. I am very patient and willing to defend.
Hey good for you, good for them. Let's all be for Bush in war and in peace. Of course the critical issue is upcoming. Will the neo-cons be for President Bush's American proposal on the 'road map'? BTW are you?
And you're right. Bill Buckley and the ex-communists of the 50s and 60s did transform the ideal of conservatism. They translated it into a feel good version of liberalism. One that the weaker parts of the Old Right could swallow. To espouse conservative views but don't act on those views. Rather use those views to get elected and then continue the move of the 'conservative' party to the left, as has been evidenced over the last twenty+ years
2003: "The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged."
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"Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group."
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"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity."
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"A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and 'militant Islam.'
"Cui bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
"Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."
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"What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it."
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"The principal draftsman is Richard Perle....In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," for Prime Minister Netanyahu....In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel's enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish 'the principle of preemption,' has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States."
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"President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservative allies inside his own Big Tent."
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"Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives' agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect."
-- "Whose War? The Loudest Clique Behind the President's Policy," The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
2003: "Sharon was first elected on a pledge to ditch the Camp David and Barak plans. His new cabinet contains militant Zionists who consider the West Bank sacred Jewish land. They will not give it up. They will not permit Jerusalem to become the capital of a Palestinian state even if Bush, triumphant in Iraq, tells them it must be done. They will fight him as they fought his father. And they will have the War Party in their corner....
"Where will...President Bush go after Baghdad? If he seeks to pressure Israel into what the Israeli Right and the War Party think are premature and foolish negotiations, he will court a savage backlash in an election year, and fail. If he embraces the Sharon Doctrine and puts military pressure on Syria and Iran, he will do so without Tony Blair, without NATO and without U.N. backing, and he will be seen world wide as the leader of a rogue superpower."
--"After Baghdad, where do we go?" townhall.com, March 3, 2003.
2003: "Israel, recipient of $100 billion in U.S. aid, is demanding another $15 billion to hold our coat as we fight her war against Iraq."
--"With friends like these," townhall.com, February 24, 2003.
1999: "After World War II, Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders."
- A Republic, Not an Empire. P. 336.
1999: "I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first."
- Meet the Press Interview. September 12, 1999.
1991: "Even if his veto of the (loan) guarantees is overridden, he will have won high marks for his courage, and exposed congress for what it has become, a Parliament of Whores incapable of standing up for U.S. national interests, if AIPAC is on the other end of the line."
- Syndicated column, December 18, 1991
1990: In an August 25,1990, column, Buchanan criticized commentators urging military intervention in Iraq, naming Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthamer and Henry Kissinger. On August 29th, he wrote the following:
"’The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the ‘civilized world’ humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown."
- Washington Times, August 29, 1990
1990: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."
- The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990
1990: "Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory."
- McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990
1990: "That the United States would sit still for anything was brought home to the Israelis, long ago, on the third day of the Six-Day War, when Lyndon Johnson ordered a coverup of an Israeli rocket-and-machine gun attack on the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai, an attack costing the lives of 37 brave American soldiers.
When it suits them, our Israeli allies launch air strikes on Tunis, Baghdad or Beirut; they invade Lebanon; they even enlist U.S. traitors, like the Pollards, to loot the secrets of a nation that has manifested toward them an extraordinary indulgence."
- January, 1990
1999: "Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his career fighting communists, did nothing to their collaborators, sympathizers, and defenders to compare with what was done to the patriots of America First. But the acolytes of FDR won the great debate as decisively as America won the war. To this day, any who oppose U.S. commitments to fight wars in Europe or Asia, or new global entanglements, must first answer to the intimidating charge that they are nothing but ‘isolationists.’"
- A Republic, Not an Empire, P. 250
1990: "The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."
- NY Post, March 17, 1990 (from a column about the trial of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk)
1990: "Whatever Rudolph did during World War II, his quarter century of service to the United States entitles the old man to a public hearing before he goes to his grave."
- NY Post, July 14, 1990, on Arthur Rudolph, Nazi rocket scientist investigated by OSI who aided the American space program
1983: "Perhaps this endless search for Nazi war criminals, these endless re-enactments, on stage and screen, of Hitler’s concentration camps are good for the soul. To what end, however, all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime when there is scarcely a peep of protest over the prison camps, the labor camps, the concentration camps operating now in China and Siberia, in Cuba and Vietnam."
- Washington Times, August 24, 1983
1977: "Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as a caricature…Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."
- St. Louis Globe – Democrat, Aug 25, 1977
1990: "In the late 1940’s and 1950’s…race was never a preoccupation with us, we rarely thought about it….There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘Negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
- Right From the Beginning
1983: "Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism…The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is."
- Washington Times. November 18, 1983
1991: "David Duke is busy stealing from me. I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft."
- Manchester, NH Union Leader, December 15, 1991
1990: "Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country? Because that is our destiny if we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration rolling over our shores…..
"The Negroes of the ‘50s became the blacks of the ‘60’s; now, the ‘African-Americans’ of the 90’s demand racial quotas and set-asides, as the Democrats eagerly assent and a pandering GOP prepares to go along.
"Who speaks for the Euro-Americans, who founded the U.S.A.? …Is it not time to take America back?"
- NY Post, June 20, 1990
1991: "I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"
- This Week With David Brinkley, December 8, 1991
Let me guess, you vote for the Zulus?
Guess you didn't get any answer on this. Theory is just theory. I expect to ask all who smear about Buchanan's America first positions just a simple question. Are they for or against Bush's American road map.
As a well-read chap, I'm sure you know about all the congress criters who 'warned Bush' about not pressuring Sharon on Bush's road map to peace. Are you for or against Bush's American road map?
Give me a third world guy who knows the value of work any day over a white guy with a sense of entitlement.
In my locality, we get good value out of third world labor.
If those correct things are good for Israel as well, I'm happy for them.
Well then I gather you are for the two-state solution. Did I get that right are you counting on Bush doing some kind of backing out routine as the right thing? Your answer seems too cute. Why?
Because you're a paranoid delusional who insists on seeing an evil Jew or some related conspiracy under every rock? How the hell should I know (or even want to know) how the four brain cells in your cranial cavity decipher clear information?
Silly me, I thought we were talking politics. I have no idea what you mean by being "socially" comfortable with FDR, nor do I suspect that you have any way of backing up such a random insult.
Both Lindbergh and Flynn folded the isolationist tent immediately upon the Pearl Harbor attack and Lindbergh begged and obtained the opportunity to serve in the war.
They didn't change their political views after Pearl Harbor. They understood that in the absence of a provocation like Pearl Harbor, it was inadvisable of us to try to get involved in the war. And they were absolutely right.
And, Flynn continued his "isolationist" writings throughout and well after the war.
You may also count on Hamas and Hezbollah and the other homicide bombers to see to it that there will never be an agreement or a peace settlement. You can also count on the Palestinian leaders to do nothing effective as to HAmas and as to Hezbollah. One need not do much reading. A glance at TV news with body parts flying all over Israel from the scum who are regarded as Palestinian "freedom fighters" will suffice. We are not the big dog on the block for nothing. Enough of restraining Sharon. It is time for him to do what comes naturally. As a general, he understands that a military response is to kill those who need killing and destroy their property. For how many decades more should these Palestinian maniacs be tolerated? Why should they be rewarded.
American "road maps" to peace are pantywaist diploschemes to postpone the inevitable. Bush has never shown the slightest inclination to pressure Sharon while the Palestinians continue their pattern of violence against the innocent. Lord willing, he never will.
"I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs." – Thomas Fleming, "Hard Right," March 13, 2003
Fleming has said that he no longer considers himself to be a conservative.
This is due in part to the afinity which paleo-cons have for the nihilist/anarchist anti-globalist movement.
Looks to me like you're arguing against yourself. If he's no longer a conservative, by his own reckoning, then it seems highly unlikely he'd consider himself a paleoconservative.
Shows how far you're willing to bend logic to smear your opponents.
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