Posted on 08/20/2003 1:36:11 PM PDT by Korth
Irving Kristol, who identifies himself as the "Godfather" of neoconservativism, is finally beginning to come clean and admit what neoconservatism stands for: statism at home and imperialism abroad. He makes this candid admission in an August 25 article in The Weekly Standard entitled "The Neoconservative Persuasion."
Congratulating himself for becoming an "historic" figure (at least in his own mind) he declares:
[T]he historical task and political purpose of neoconservativism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy (emphasis added).
Like all neocons, Kristol claims to be a champion of democracy, but his words and actions often contradict this claim. Consider the language in the above quotation, "against their respective wills." According to the traditional theory of democracy, the role of competing ideas in politics is supposedly a matter of persuasion. Political debates are supposedly aimed at persuading voters that you are right and your rival is wrong. But Kristol will have none of this. He is the "Godfather," after all. What he apparently means by transforming traditiona l conservatives against their will is not to attempt to persuade them to become statists and imperialists like himself, but to intimidate and censor them by conducting campaigns of character assassination against anyone who disagrees with the neocon agenda. He means to purge all dissenters, Stalin style.
This decidedly un-democratic tactic was on display in David Frum’s National Review attack ("Unpatriotic Conservatives") on any and all conservatives who disagree with the neocon agenda of endless warfare around the globe. Indeed, the neocons are well known for resorting to personal smears rather than intellectual debate, beginning with their vicious campaign of character assassination against the late Mel Bradford when he was nominated by President Reagan to head the National Endowment for the Humanities in the early 1980s. That smear campaign established their political modus operandi.
Kristol claims that the three biggest neocon idols are Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Ronald Reagan; all other Republican party worthies are "politely ignored." Teddy Roosevelt, whom the neocons affectionately call "TR," was simply nuts. Mark Twain, who met him twice, called him "clearly insane." In any number of "TR" biographies we learn that after an argument with his girlfriend as a young man he went home and shot his neighbor’s dog. When he killed his first buffalo – and his first Spaniard – he "abandoned himself to complete hysteria," as biographer Edmund Morris recounts.
While president, TR would take morning horseback rides through Rock Creek Park wildly shooting a pistol at tree branches, oblivious to the harm he might do to residents or houses in the area. He once strung a wire across the Potomac River so that he could hang on it while crossing the river because, he said, his wrists needed strengthening. The TR biographies are filled with similar stories of his asinine antics.
Like the neocons, TR was a Lincoln idolater. (His secretary of state was John Hay, Lincoln’s personal White House secretary). After being lambasted in the US Senate over the fact that he had launched a military intervention in the Philippines that costs thousands of American lives and resulted in an incredible 200,000 Philippine deaths, Edmund Morris recounts in his latest biography of TR, Theodore Rex, how he responded to his senate critics during a Memorial Day address to aged Union army veterans. The criticisms against him were invalid, he told the white-bearded veterans of Lincoln’s army, because the mass killing of Philipinos was for their own good – its purpose was to spread democracy. Besides, he said, it was the exact same policy of the sainted Lincoln, so how could anyone object? Southerners were also killed by the hundreds of thousands for their own good, according to TR’s logic.
Like the neocon Lincoln idolaters, TR was a consolidationist who had no respect for states’ rights – or for constitutional restraints on government in general. He loathed Jefferson but idolized Lincoln, naturally. He nationalized millions of acres of land, initiated numerous antitrust witch hunts that were enormously harmful to the economy, imposed onerous regulations on railroads that led many of them into bankruptcy, and responded to the socialist Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle by regulating food and drugs. (FDA drug lag has been proven to have caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths due to the inaccessibility of life-saving drugs available in other countries).
His fellow Republicans accused him of trying to concentrate all governmental power in Washington, abolishing state lines, and creating a stifling bureaucracy to control the population. They were right, of course, which is why the neocons love TR so much. (Bill Clinton also said that Teddy Roosevelt was his favorite Republican in all of American history).
Like Kristol, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, and many other neocons, TR was infatuated with war and killing. A college friend of his wrote in 1885 that "he would like above all things to go to war with some one. He wants to be killing something all the time" (See Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, p. 36). As president, he constantly announced that America "needed a war," which is exactly what the neocons of today believe. War – any war – the neocons tell us, gives us "national unity."
TR was a statist in domestic policy, a foreign policy imperialist, and an inveterate warmonger. He was, in other words, the real "Godfather" of neoconservatism.
As for FDR, the neocons idolize him as well because the older ones like Kristol are all former leftists – like FDR – and they have never abandoned their statist beliefs. Further evidence of this lies in the one reason Kristol gives for why neocons idolize Ronald Reagan: Although they had nothing to do with initiating the "Reagan tax cuts," neocons supported them because they believed they would spur economic growth, which in turn would enable them to fully fund the welfare state. (In this regard California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is a neocon: In his initial press conference announcing his candidacy he said he wanted to "bring business back to California" so that the Golden state’s massive welfare entitlement bureaucracy could be fully funded).
Kristol claims that democracy used to mean "an inherently turbulent political regime," but not so once a country becomes prosperous. This is a breathtakingly absurd proposition. The very existence of the neocon cabal, at a time of the greatest world prosperity in history, contradicts it. If the neocons are about anything they are about political bullying to impose their will on others – turbulent democracy, in other words. Moreover, in The Birth of the Transfer Society Terry Anderson and P.J. Hill discuss how, as the idea of democracy replaced individual liberty as the reason for government in the post-1865 era, politics inevitably became more and more "turbulent" with one rent-seeking group after another cropping up to use the powers of the state to plunder its neighbors. The transfer state has continued to grow virtually unabated over the last century, making American democracy ever more turbulent and divisive. There has been a relentless shift away from the traditional constitutional functions of government and toward an ever-expanding transfer society. Kristol’s notion that twentieth century prosperity brought an end to "political turbulence" is preposterous and absurd.
Equally preposterous and ahistorical is his further claim that, with prosperity, Americans will become less susceptible to "egalitarian illusions." But the U.S. today is as prosperous as it has ever been, and mindless egalitarianism reigns. Just a few weeks ago one of Kristol’s favorite Supreme Court justices, Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor, wrote a majority opinion that said racial discrimination against whites in college admissions was desirable because, in her opinion, the mixing of skin colors on college campuses – to supposedly promote egalitarianism – trumped the constitution she once swore to uphold. A thousand other examples could readily be used to disprove Kristol’s thesis.
Kristol further admits that neocons do not in any way favor limited government. He mocks the idea of limited constitutional government by calling it "the Hayekian notion that we are on the road to serfdom." He is not just mocking Hayek, but the entire classical liberal tradition, as well as the Enlightenment ideas that informed the founding fathers in their limited government philosophy. In chapter 1 of The Road to Serfdom Hayek lamented the abandonment of classical liberal ideas in countries that had been adopting fascism and socialism (and its close cousin, New Dealism) during the 1930s and '40s by saying:
We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.
This is what Kristol and his fellow neocons are so opposed to: the same philosophy of individualism that early and mid twentieth century tyrants from Mussolini to Hitler to Stalin understood as being their biggest philosophical roadblock. "Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm of anxiety about the growth of the state," Kristol smugly pronounces, repudiating the ideology of the American founders.
And it is not an exaggeration to say that the neocons repudiate the basic political philosophy of the founders, even if they hypocritically invoke the founders’ words from time to time in their political speeches and writings. Just recall some of the harsh anti-government rhetoric of the founders. To Jefferson, "on the tree of liberty must spill the blood of patriots and tyrants." And, "a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."
Patrick Henry urged his fellow Virginians to take up arms against the British government "in the holy cause of liberty" and warned that it is the tendency of all centralized governmental powers to "destroy the state government[s], and swallow the liberties of the people." This of course finally happened in April of 1865, a month the neocon "Civil War" historian Jay Winik says "saved America."
In his Farewell Address George Washington warned that special interest groups in a democracy "are likely, in the course of time . . . to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reigns of Government." Sounds like a perfect description of the neocon cabal.
James Madison pronounced that "it is in vain" to expect that politicians in a democracy would ever render clashing political interests "subservient to the public good." And Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense that "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, and in its worst state an intolerable one."
Kristol repeats his old refrain that "libertarian conservatives" are different from neocons because they are supposedly "unmindful of the culture." He is either oblivious to or willfully ignores the fact that it has been libertarian scholars who have done more than anyone to research and write about the damage to the American culture inflicted by the welfare state (family breakup, rampant illegitimacy, loss of work incentives, short-sightedness, slothfulness, etc.). Neocons ignore all of this vast libertarian literature and continue to champion an expanded welfare state while pretending to be protectors of "the culture."
Nor does Kristol acknowledge that it is libertarians who have done more than anyone to expose how the government’s war on drugs has created a criminal culture, a bloody and violent culture, a culture that traps young children into short crime-ridden lives, and a culture that corrupts the police and the judicial system. Neocons all support an even more vigorous war on drugs while pretending to be ever so concerned about "the culture."
I can’t help but point out that the self-appointed neocon culture and morality czar, "Blackjack" Bill Bennett, recently revealed to the world what his idea of "culture" is: Sitting on a vinyl stool at a Las Vegas casino at 3 A.M. pouring thousands of dollars into one-armed bandits while being served free drinks by cocktail waitresses barely out of their teens and dressed like hookers. (Bennett admitted to having blown some $8 million at Vegas casinos in recent years).
In foreign policy Kristol says neocons are, well, imperialists. For a "great power" there are no boundaries to its pursuit of "national interest." He says we have an "ideological interest" to defend, and that means endless warfare all around the globe to ostensibly "defend" that ideology. (And Mark Twain thought TR was insane.) Of course, someone has to decide for us what that "ideological interest" is, and then force the population, with the threat of imprisonment or worse (for nonpayment of taxes, for instance) to support it.
In Kristol’s case, his primary ideological rationale for military intervention is: "We feel it necessary to defend Israel today" in the name of democracy. Well, no we don’t. If Irving Kristol wants to grab a shotgun and take the next flight to Tel Aviv "to defend Israel" then Godspeed, and I will offer to buy him a first-class plane ticket. But leave me and my family out of it.
Translating "we feel it necessary to defend Israel" from neoconese, we get this: "Young American soldiers must die in defense of Israel." Like hell they must. Young Americans who join the military for patriotic reasons do so because they believe they are defending their country. It is a fraud and an abomination to compel them to risk their lives for any other country, whether it is Israel, Canada, Somalia, or wherever.
The Godfather concludes his essay by gloating over how neoconservatism is "enjoying a second life" in the current Bush administration, with its massive expansion of domestic spending, record budget deficits, lying us into war, TR style, and of course killing. Lots of killing. That he used the word "enjoyed" to describe all of this speaks volumes about "Godfather" Kristol and his neo-comrades.
Sobran consorts with an extremely disreputable crowd like Sam Francis, the Rockford Institute, and the plain old garden variety anti-Jewish crackpot elements whom he encourages with his incessant Jew-bashing. I am acquainted with him and have been on a religious retreat with him. I admire his writing talent and wish he would get the well-chewed old slippers out of his mouth and start using his writing talent for things other than anti-Semitism and paleo-irrelevancy and offensive antiwar nonsense in time of war and his evident disappointment in not living in 1793 or something when the Federalists were in flower.
I assume, BTW, that you are not suggesting by the quotation marks that I have been critical of Keyes and that you were merely planting a customary false axiom as a member of paleopoliticalfarmers of America.
Sarcasm and condescension are not conducive to civil debate.
>BE: You parrot the Iraqi line. Hence: Baghdad Bob.
I had hoped for a more substantive answer. You know the facts about the Gulf War so what is your answer to the question "how do you define our actions?" If you don't think we cynically manipulated a regional dispute for our corporate interests and empire what do you think it was all about?
>BE: neo-Neville Chamberlainism is EVER going to be acceptable again as any kind of "conservatism."
So peaceful trade with all nations and not seeking monsters to destroy is now Chamberlainism is it? I reject your characterization as wrong and malicious but I guarantee that after several foreign policy failures that are costly in blood and treasure intervention for corporate benefits under the guise of do-gooderism and democracy will not be so palatable to any kind of conservatism.
>BE: Your ranting that assumes that actual conservatives have any use for the CIA
Bill Buckly was in the CIA as were a number of early NR members. What do you make of this little tidbit?-
"In 1952, a young "conservative" serving a one-year tour of duty with the CIA wrote an article for The Commonweal, a Catholic weekly. This man wrote:
"… we have got to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores....
"And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington — even with Truman at the reins of it all.
"That was 1952, and the writer of this article was calling for "Big Government for the duration" and "the attendant centralization of power in Washington" in order to oppose Communism. He wanted to fight Communism by adopting Marxism....Who do you suppose wrote those words? It was none other than William F. Buckley Jr."
Buckly and NR came as a wolf in sheep's clothing. It fractured and purged the right and reshaped the remainder to accept the establishment i.e. liberal world view of intervention, global wealth transfers, continuous war and domestic socialism all under the guise of national defense.
>BE:Ranting about US corporations and oil or the evil CIA does not suggest your conservatism.
I base my policy critiques on my core beliefs in maximum personal liberty, limited and localized government, the constitution - particularly that quaint little bit "to...establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our prosperity."
Does engaging in non-essential military action secure the liberty of military personnel or the nation as a whole? Losing one's life frivolously is not having your liberty secured now is it? To have one's life lost or body maimed or income confiscated purely for private businesses profits, for personal grandeur of a particular politician, to get votes in the next election or to get Moncia off the front page is a sin of the highest order and betrays the original purpose for the government.
Eisenhower warned us against the military-industiral complex (the speech originally included congress in the equation but that bit was dropped because informing the people that their representatives were tools of big business was too impolitic). Funny how Ike served that complex all his life but upon retirement saw fit to issue a warning. Seems he knew something. Like the less eloquent USMC General Smedly Butler who after retiring declared "war is a racket." He said he did not defend the US once in his career, he killed people to advance the interests of Wall Street.
>BE: Internationalism is another diplo-weenie scheme to tie the US down an restrict its freedom of intervention.
The difference between the "dipo-weenie" crowd and the "US free to intervene crowd" is like sects of Christians who disagree over baptism - should it be done as an infant or an adult - they are both Christians, they just differ on details. Likewise the intervention crowd both believe in intervention they simply disagree on who is top dog in the global government scenario.
>BE: In the last analysis, the air power, naval power and infantry power o the US accomplishes far more than a lot more useless diplomatic yak-yak.
Sounds like old fashioned gunboat diplomacy. Churchill, no paragon of virtue himself, did at least say "jaw, jaw is better than war, war." Your advice sounds like the callous and murderous "kill 'em all. Let God sort them out" mentality. Whoever does not agree with you is to be subjugated by force of arms? Real nice outlook on life, that.
No- In fact I would wager that his income and lifestyle have undergone transitions for the worse since the 1992 purging from NR. And the Left is always "anti war" no matter what (though they seemed to be very quite while Clinton was murdering people in Serbia and Kosovo for 78 days with dumb bombs at 15'000 feet.)
For those who fancy themselves Burkean, remember his statement that: All that it takes for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
As to von Hayek, on the one hand, no one distributed more "free" copies of Road to Serfdom that Young Americans for reedom which, trust me, was an organization with hardly a paleowhatever in sight and one that you would denounce as thouroughly neo, but, of course, YAF was simply conservative. On the other hand, time marches on and issues wax and wane. Road to Serfdom is timeless but von Hayek's agnosticism or atheism would not resonate well in conservatism as presently constituted any more than Irving Kristol's does. It was more often an attribute of, well, marxists and nazis. Nonetheless von Hayek saw very clearly through the central planning smog and is permanently in a place of high honor among genuine conservatives. So is Kristol for other reasons. I know of no movement (i.e., actual) conservative who does not honor and admire Coolidge for his wit, for his backbone and for his common sense.
Whatever their flaws and the were many in both cases, both TR and FDR were great presidents. Not conservative presidents as to domestic policy, but great presidents nonetheless. No one had to wonder whether FDR would wimp out in WWII. You can imagine how much he and MacArthur must have disagreed earlier on but he put no restraints on the war-making efforts of MacArthur. He made the unfortunate choice of Eisenhower to command SHAEF in Europe with resulting diplo-backside kissing placing Ike's shackles on Patton. FDR also made the mistake of recognizing the soviets and regarding them as more than temporary allies and Yalta, well, Yalta!!! He also employed Alger Hiss and godfathered the UN. FDR, however, did everything possible to prove Admiral Yamamoto's thesis and warning to his superiors: You have awakened a fearful giant! Battlefield results speak for themselves.
TR built the Great White Fleet and sent it around the world to show the colors. He engaged in gunboat diplomacy. He responded to the lovable Berber terrorist, The Raisuli, who demanded X dollars ransom or Perdicaris dead with the appropriate response as to Perdicaris alive in short order or The Raisuli dead. He even had the class not to track The Raisuli down after Perdcaris was recovered. He was a relentless patriot and one of the most remarkable men ever to hold the office. Hmmmm, Tommy Tancredo or Ron Paul OR TR. I'm going with TR.
Both TR and FDR are admired DESPITE their domestic policies and not because of them. On the other hand, what should FDR have done? Watch Americans starve in the streets? Crush the unions as criminal syndicalists? Kept prohibition? Told Americans that it was their own d. fault and their suffering was only justice? Start a relief program for bankers having difficulty handling the fees of their foreclosure lawyers?
Is Phyllis Schlafly a socialist? Dan Quayle? Bill Buckley? Jim Buckley? Bill Rusher? Jack Kemp? The Club for Growth? Grover Norquist? Ronald Reagan?
Conservatism is the antithesis of the cramped, unimaginative, neo-isolationist, antiwar, antidefense, beaujolais guzzling, white wine and brie consuming, self-annointed culterati who admire quaint little cultures like Serbia whose spasms of local atrocities have produced so much more in the way of history than could be consumed locally as George Will has written. Colorful little "cultures" to be sure but not very conducive to the well-being of families.
What you broadly reference as neo-cons are social revolutionaries????? Even the actual neo-conservatives (the aging New York intellectuals who rejected the left) are not that and have not been for a very long time.
Your first link also included Dwight Eisenhower and Herbert Hoover as Republicans rendered obsolete by history and reality. Why did you only mention Goldwater, von Hayek and Coolidge? Kristol did group Ronald Reagan (lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!) with TR and FDR but you overlooked that.
Your post is an uncommonly silly post except among the paleowhatevers. Whatever that ideology of yours may be, it died several decades ago and is not likely to resurrect.
You keep on omitting Kristol's reference to Ronald Reagan as a "neo-conservative" 20th Century hero, according to Kristol. Why? And why no ellipsis to tip people off to the omission?
If the United States engages in evil in foreign policy (See the regime of the Arkansas Antichrist) like reducing American sovereignty, agreeing to Global Warming Treaties, agreeing to the jurisdiction of ANY foreign or "international" court ANYWHERE over American officials or military policy, if we fail to act against China if it invades Taiwan, etc., you can count on me to aggrssively dissent but NOT in league with the enemies of Western Civilization such as Justin Raimondo or the usual gang of foreign policy malcontents who ran the recent anti-war efforts. Many paleos like Fleming and Raimondo seem to subscribe to the theory that: America is always wrong. In that, they are like those labeled San Franciscio Democrats by the brilliant Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Those who act like San Francisco Democrats can expect to be labeled unpatriotic whether they like it or not because IT IS TRUE. Fleming started selling Dixie Tricks CD's and organizing pro-French (Pro-Axis of Weasel) stuff on the Chronicles website as soon as Chirac and Villepin began their despicable two-faced anti-American charade.
Western Civilization ought not to be identified with today's socialist and squeamish imitation of long-dead Europe. Robert Taft the Elder warned right after WWII that Europe was dead, had had its chance at freedom and spit the bit and that the US should make its future friends in the Third World. No one ever accused him of being a neo.
Henry's rhetoric never suggested that it issued from a man cowering in the corner reading poetry while guzzling wine and getting all weepy over the possiblity that there might actually be, well, WAR, with people getting hurt and all and profits being interrupted and, gee, its better to be nice than not nice and can't we all just get alooooong?????
Self-government has to do with rejecting international restraints on sovereignty, national restraints on state limited sovereignty of the Tenth Amendment kind and government that meets its responsibilities against domestic criminals and foreign threats, pre-emptively rather than waiting to be whacked first, particular after we have been whacked before. I do not care for democracy when it elects the Arkansas Antichrist or if it were to elect Mrs. Antichist. I love democracy when it elects Ronaldus Maximus. I prefer democracy to oligarchy because democracy's errors are more easily correctable. Read Ortega y Gassett's Revolt of the Masses but be SURE to also read the far more recent Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites.
Sound instututions include the United States Army, the United States Navy the United States Marine Corps, the United States Air Force. We could use something like a State Department operated by patriots for a change. Maybe a patriotic spy agency that works for the United States and does so efficiently. The Roman Catholic Church, for all its flaws in this country under leftist stooges, is a sound institution as guaranteed on the Highest Authority. Many other churches are sound institutions as well. Homeschooling is a sound institution. A handful of schools are as well. There is a grave distinction between liberty and libertinism and more so with Randian self-indulgence. The Knights of Columbus are a sound institution.
If you fail to recognize the contribution of people like Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, the late Sidney Hook, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and, yes, Irving Kristol, the late George Meany, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whatever their flaws and omissions, to many aspects of liberty, you are simply wrong.
You said that you did not understand plain English. I suggested the obvious remedy.
I define our actions as useful and ovedue even if the immediate beneficiary was the less than admirable leadership of Kuwait. Also as insuffiecient under Daddy Bush since we did not squash Saddam once and for all when we could easily have done so. If that meant fewer platoons of Arabs on our side, so what? Also Iraqi oil can pay for the invasion of Iraq over time and for rebuilding now.
You may have misssed it, unlike most o the world and akll of the conservatives but Neville Chambderlain was a cowardly cretin whose obsessions with trade and pacifism over morality enhanced the damage of WWII. Churchhill was a politician in a more liberal England. Jaw, jaw is most certainly NOT preferable to war, war, if the result is the oportunity for the enhancement of the armament of the enemies of our way of life.
Seeking monsters????? The monsters seek us. 9/11/01 was not the first time for this particular set of pus pockets. Gunboat diplomacy is the only kind that works for those with the gunboats.
"Peaceful trade with all nations" aka GATT and WTO violates an essential social compact here and is the treason of economic elites against the working people of this country. When enough are unemployed and impoverished to scrape the last nickel out of 3rd World slave labor, those elites will be the first to complain of the political backlash.
Bill Buckley was indeed in the CIA. So was William Sloane Coffin, Jr. and many Coffin-like weasels who much better characterize that agency's performance than does Buckley's brief service. Many family oil wells of Bill's father were confiscaed. The suggestion that Bill is a socialist is beneath contempt, looney tune libertarian notions notwithstanding. <> Instead of a string military, you would have preferred that, if Stalin's successors should ever reach Peotria with armies, a good lecture from the Libertarian Party or the noble resistance of the Peoria Chamber of Commerce would be an effective substitute for military force whacking the Russkies where they live first? Have I got that right?
Buckley and NR came in and purged the right? What right??? Seventeen halfwit semi-anarchists remembering the good old days before Hoover got elected? Ayn Rand????? The JBS?????
Eisenhower with the leftists favorite rant against the "military-industrial complex" was a conservative????? At a minimum we know that Robert Welch would not agree. OK, maybe Buckley was a little unfair to the JBS but they were getting a bit carried away.
Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner in Latin American interventions who went native after the fact and joined the leftist critique of what were Monroe Doctrine and TR Corollary exercises? Many things but not conservative any more than the more recent anti-American retired officers like Admiral LaRocque.
Also, since we abolished the draft hich was agross violation of liberty, we have established a professional military. Those who sign up know what they are signing up to do. Kill people and break things that respectively need killing and breaking. There are rumors that there are safer occupations. Nonetheless our military, not as well-compensated as they ought to be, do a fine job.
Personally, I see a lot more similarity between the cower in the corner sniffling crowd and the diplo-weenie crowd. Both essentially are working the peace at any price side of the street. Neither are remotely conservative. Our military is. Intervention and pre-emptive action is.
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