[pierrem15]

How is anything in the neocon playbook conservative? More government, interfering in world situations that have nothing to do with the safety of this nation, spending on the level that would make FDR and LBJ balk?

How are "more government" or "spending" part of the neo-conservative playbook?

interfering in world situations that have nothing to do with the safety of this nationSo you prefer to wait until the mushroom cloud appears?

What is the fetish with Leo Strauss???

[Torie]

Leo was a very secular man who thought religion was useful in the public square. He was a believer in a robust government (without which man would return to the jungle, where life was at once brutish and short), but cyncial that it was so subject to corruption, and thus sought palliatives, which while he was cryptic, in the end he thought would fail. His favorite philosopher, or if not his favorite, was way up there, was Machiavelli, whom he profoundly understood, in a way that entirely escapes the popular impression. But Leo was ultimately more pessimistic than Neo's are today, and considerably more conflicted and ambivalent. Events have turned out better than Leo anticipated. Maybe we have been lucky.

[Torie]

By the way, Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War is very, very readable (perhaps on of the most readable texts of the ancients), and reads like it was written yesterday. It is timeless. Self destructive civil war due to a failure of the public square and failed diplomacy, hubris, courage, ideolism, alliances, the failure of alliances, the momentum of war such that it becomes an end in itself, such that all perspective is lost, it is all there. Pick it up.