[luckydevi]

FDR a republican hero, scary

[cricket]

"He means to purge all dissenters, Stalin style."

Character assasination, Stalin style?

Will have to read this again.

Think I missed the MO on some of the 'leaps and bounds' of thought here.

[JohnGalt]

DiLorenzo bump.

[reelfoot]

Anyone who admires the socialist/statist FDR cannot be a "neo"con; they're a "noncon".

[.cnI redruM]

Howard Dean would fix all our problems tommorow! Join the Dean Team! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Seriously, I think Bush has screwed things about 33% of the time. He spends money we don't have on panderation schemes like the proscription drug benefit. He's trying to fight too big a war with too small a military and he's failed to adequately support US allies such as Israel and Taiwan. However, he screws up far less often than his opposition. Both within the GOP and without. Bush has reduced our taxes, his opponents would raise them. Bush has fought back against Islamic terrorists. His opponents would probably sit around naval gazing and ask Osauma "Why do you hate us?" Bush has finally seemed to realize that most of the international agreements being pumped out of the UN are aimed at reducing America's prosperity. He ditched The Kyoto Travesty and laughed at the latest communist manifesto from the IPCC. He also got us out of the ABM Treaty so that we could continue with NMD. On balance, he'll go down as an average President. Not as good as Reagan or FDR, nowhere near as bad as Jimmy Carter or Warren Harding. He is a man truely blessed by his enemies. I can't even imagine one of the 9 dwarves, Al Gore, Wesley Clark, or Hillary Clinton doing a better job of handling the problems that have been placed on Geaorge Bush's desk.

[quebecois]

To be a conservative, above all else, is to believe in the founding ideals of America. It is more of a way of life than an ideology. It is based on the idea that America's purpose is to provide an evironment for the american people to live their lives, raise their children, worship God, and practice their culture....with as little interference from distant centers of authority as is possible.

Neoconservativism, which is not really conservative at all, sees every bit of this as antisocial and immoral. They harbor a megalomaniacal ideology that demands that individual americans sacrifice themselves on the altar of world empire. Who cares about the constitutional limitations on our federal govt? Who cares about fiscal responsibility? Who cares about the warnings of our founders that we avoid foreign entanglements?

The peasants job is to pay outrageous taxes, give away our freedom, and fight their wars....they are the philosopher kings of Plato's cave, and we are ignorant peasants.

These neocons are not really that different from the marxists from which they so recently sprang. We are now entering a conflict for the very soul of our nation.

[1rudeboy]

WFA^®

[u-89]

The original Kristol admission of how liberal neocon veiws really was posted twice on FR, here and here.

It can not be emphasized enough that Neocons ideology is the very antithesis of conservatism and they say it in their own words. They reject the wisdom of the founding fathers. They reject conservative icons like Hayek, Coolidge and Goldwater. Their heroes are TR and FDR i.e. presidents who forged a strong activist federal government. They are all for liberal social programs i.e. the Welfare State.

On foreign policy it is clear that this old communist and supporter of Trotsky and world socialist revolution, Kristol, sees the USA today as he saw the USSR in the glory days of his youth i.e. a state with an ideology that needs to forcibly spread it around the world.

To sum up - neocons are socialist revolutionaries who would use the force of government to remake the country and the entire world into their version of utopia.

[Huck]

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is hilarious.

[Restorer]

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.

Sheer nonsense. When the Spanish-American War broke out, TR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Although a proponent of the war, he was hardly in any kind of position to "launch a military intervention."

He resigned to become a volunteer colonel in the Army. He did not become President till September of 1901, several months after military rule (and almost all of the fighting) in the Phillippines was over.

For most of the period of the Filipino War, he was governor of New York.

It takes a character assassin, someone ignorant of history or with an enormous axe to grind, to blame what happened in the Phillipines on TR.

As far as I can see, this goes right along with just about everything else he writes.

[u-89]

Here's more Kristol quotes:

Irving Kristol writes in Reflections of a Neo-Conservative: "a conservative welfare state... is perfectly consistent with the neo-conservative perspective."

and: "[We] are conservative, but different in certain respects from the conservatism of the Republican Party. We accepted the New Deal in principle, and had little affection for the kind of isolationism that then permeated American conservatism."

[Maccabee]

What can this movement do other than perpetuate the myth of fascism being consevative? Or of conservatives being neofascists?

[ninenot]

Somewhat strong/flaming worded--but interesting.

[Restorer]

lying us into war, TR style

Number of wars the US got into while TR was President = 0.

Much to his disappointment. :)

[EagleMamaMT]

Read later.

[Deb]

I like Irving Kristol. Both he and Norman Podhoretz have made amazing journeys from Communism to reality.

Has Lew Rockwell ever published a piece condemning radical islam, radical islamics, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or anyone besides Bush, Republicans, the dreaded neo-cons or Dick Cheney?

I seem to remember that just a day or so after 9/11 he blamed those murders on American policies.

Lew, and all of his apologists, are true enemies of the people.

[liberallarry]

Read the last paragraph of "Theodore Rex" and its book jacket. You'll find that Edmund Morris adored TR - and that Dilorenzo is a lying, distorting, viscious piece of foul excrement.

[liberallarry]

Southerners were also killed by the hundreds of thousands for their own good, according to TR’s logic.

Is this guy still refighting the Civil War? And if he wants to make a sarcastic statement like that then for whose good were all those slaves brought to the Americas? For whose good did millions die in the Middle passage? What a crock.

The fact is "Manifest Destiny" was the wisdom of the time - a justification for European conquest and expansion. And - whether voiced or denied - it's a justification for all conquests by all peoples at all times.

[x]

Here's hoping most Americans, Republicans and conservatives, being neither imperialists or libertarian anarcho-capitalists will shun both Kristol and DiLorenzo. Sanity and sensible views ought to prevail over both statist/imperialist zeal, and anarcho-libertarian nonsense.

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.

Typical hyperbole and provinicialism to identify one's own specific views with Christianity and the Western tradition. That tradition accomodates many strands and contains much more than one narrow ideology. Surely one can oppose other people's views without writing them out of Western civilization.

"Erasmus and Montaigne, ... Cicero and Tacitus" were no more Miseans or Rockwellites than anyone else, and it's doubtful that they'd find much to praise in Rockwell or DiLorenzo or anything else in the modern world. The apoliticality of Montaigne can't be identified with dogmatic anti-statism, nor would the fanaticism of Rockwellites sit well with Erasmus. As for Athenian Democrat-Imperialist Pericles, a neocon hero, the less said the better ...

Nor would you get any inkling that TR's fighting spirit came from his mother's (Georgia) side of the family, which included two uncles in the Confederate Navy who stayed in England after 1865. TR was uneasy about his father's draft avoidance and his New York family's pacific and mercantile tradition. He is a good indication of how North and South have merged and mingled in making today's America. Roosevelt's transcending petty animosities, of the sort that DiLorenzo revels in, is one major point in his favor.

[RaginCajunTrad]

Kristol hasn't a clue as to what conservatism is all about.
I will quote from Kristoher Tefft. He knows what conservatism really is and could tell Kristol a thing or two.

"A conservative is a person who believes the fundamental purpose of human existence is to lead a happy life and that it is the responsibility of the individual, with his or her family, and through his or her voluntary associations -- churches, service organizations, trade associations -- to cultivate the fruits of his or her happiness, and to help others in need.

...it is not the role of government to define the good life for us and attempt to equalize its realization by the redistribution of wealth, excessive regulation of enterprise, social engineering and far-ranging efforts to fulfill as many desires as possible for as many people as possible.

Rather, the purpose of government is to provide the basic conditions necessary for the common good --...

Government should do so according to what is called the principle of subsidiarity."

Maybe I should post the entire article and get a thread going on it.