The Senate on the Brink [The NYT blatantly shills for the obstructionist Democrats]

The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.

President Bush likes to complain about the divisive atmosphere in Washington. But he has contributed to it mightily by choosing federal judges from the far right of the ideological spectrum. He started his second term with a particularly aggressive move: resubmitting seven nominees whom the Democrats blocked last year by filibuster.

The Senate has confirmed the vast majority of President Bush's choices. But Democrats have rightly balked at a handful. One of the seven renominated judges is William Myers, a former lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries who demonstrated at his hearing last week that he is an antienvironmental extremist who lacks the evenhandedness necessary to be a federal judge. Another is Janice Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as "our socialist revolution."

To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. Republican leaders now claim that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote. This is rank hypocrisy. When the tables were turned, Republicans filibustered President Bill Clinton's choice for surgeon general, forcing him to choose another. And Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who now finds judicial filibusters so offensive, himself joined one against Richard Paez, a Clinton appeals court nominee.

Yet these very same Republicans are threatening to have Vice President Dick Cheney rule from the chair that a simple majority can confirm a judicial nominee rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. This is known as the "nuclear option" because in all likelihood it would blow up the Senate's operations. The Senate does much of its work by unanimous consent, which keeps things moving along and prevents ordinary day-to-day business from drowning in procedural votes. But if Republicans change the filibuster rules, Democrats could respond by ignoring the tradition of unanimous consent and making it difficult if not impossible to get anything done. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has warned that "the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell."

Despite his party's Senate majority, however, Mr. Frist may not have the votes to go nuclear. A sizable number of Republicans - including John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee and John Warner - could break away. For them, the value of confirming a few extreme nominees may be outweighed by the lasting damage to the Senate. Besides, majorities are temporary, and they may want to filibuster one day.

There is one way to avert a showdown. The White House should meet with Senate leaders of both parties and come up with a list of nominees who will not be filibustered. This means that Mr. Bush - like Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before him - would agree to submit nominees from the broad mainstream of legal thought, with a commitment to judging cases, not promoting a political agenda.

The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.

Agrarian: What rank baloney! The term neo-conservative was invented by liberals as a way of attacking certain elderly and New York City resident and mostly Jewish refugees from the Demonratic Party. They included Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Walter Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

They were or are intelectuals previously involved in Democrat policymaking when Democrats still though communism a bad thing. When George McGovern's comrades took control of the Democrat Party in 1972 and moved it in unacceptably radical directions, Lyndon Johnson gave private advice to Richard Nixon which helped crush McGovern at the polls. LBJ died of a heart attack at his ranch on the afternoon of 1/23/73 (Roe vs. Wade decision day). He scarcely lived to enjoy the results of his advice to Nixon. He did, undoubtedly, enjoy the election of 1972 immensely.

No one ever heard of what are now called "paleo-conservatives" until they suddenly discovered their own existence in about 1986 when it finally dawned on the paleowhatevers that Ronaldus Maximus wanted nothing whatsoever to do with most of them because they were policy eccentrics and social embarassments. They exploded in rage and rediscovered old pre-Pearl Harbor obsessive isolationism and an embarassing "blood and soil" dogma that sounds an awful lot like some other discredited crusades of the 1930s (central European style). The paleos claim an allegiance to the Constitution and to small government. There is no danger that they will ever be able to implement those ideas, assuming that they actually believe in them.

The conservative movement was NEVER "paleo." On foreign policy, the conservative movement was aggressively interventionist ever since Pearl Harbor made America grow up. Arts and crafts do not play a very large role in the conservative movement which leaves such matters to the taste of individuals so long as the arts and crafts are not abominations like Serrano's "P___ Christ" or the elephant-spattered Mary at the Brooklyn "Art" Museum. Conservatives are nationalists in foreign policy and unapologetically so. Conservatives fondly wish for free market success for ethnic minrities because nothing would be better for those minoriies' income or better for our nation's politics. Conservatives are quite conservative on social issues: babies, marriage and guns and place little confidence in gummint skewels. Conservatives favor cutting off the gummint's allowance by lowering taxes. While there are some conservatives who may dissent on an issue or two, the so-called paleoconservatives, like the leftist activists whose foreign policy and military views the paleos so emulate, have forfeited any legitimate claim to conservatism because they are reflexively cowardly in matters of military and foreign policy.

Because the conservative movement was reliably anti-communist, interventionist and pro-military, the actual neo-conservatives crossed the aisle and became Republicans to ally with us against the mush-spined moderates in the GOP. Most mush-spined moderates have long since defected to the Demonrats because they are joined at the hip with Demonrats on social issues (and good riddance to them), a handful of "paleo" publications, institutes and websites survive to disrupt the GOP and give aid and comfort to the enemies of the GOP and the enemies of the USA.

You will find most uses of the term "neo-conservative" as a substitute for "conservative" in left-wing publications, speeches and calls from C-SPAN commies in the morning, from so-called "paleo" sources and from people who wax nostalgic for the "good old days" when Democrats outnumbered Republicans by massive margins in FDR's heyday, from the enemies of the conservative movement (enemies of Reaganism) and of our country and from the usual gang of racist and anti-Semite clowns. One who uses the "neo-conservative" slur may emerge from any of such backgrounds without being in sympathy with any or all of the others. The users of the term "neo-con" are essentially a coalition of losers anxious for the USA to lose.

Of course, even the paleos are right once in a while. Conservatives ARE a LOT smarter than paleowhatevers. Being a lot smarter is why the conservatives have carried the day politically and particularly on foreign policy and military matters.

Well, you are reading a whole lot of things into my post that I didn't say. Take your anti-paleo rants elsewhere, and have the intelligence to respond to the points people actually make in their posts. Paleos are so out of the pale that even if I were one, you wouldn't have to worry about my having any policy impact, and you could save your bile.

Regarding how the term "neoconservative" came about, sorry, but I was following the conservative movement closely during those years, and I was a Commentary subscriber for many years. Neoconservatives named themselves. If someone else did initially coin the term as a slur, the neos chose to embrace the term and at the very least were the ones who promulgated the term and the idea. You wouldn't find the word neoconservative outside of conservative publications back in those days.

I'm guessing that you're not a day over 30, or that you were a Democrat in those days, or you would know these things.

The word paleoconservative was derivative, and did indeed not arise until the mid 80s, and was coined by those who wanted to make a point out of differentiating themselves from neoconservatives. Self-styled paleoconservatives are not exactly the same breed as old-fashioned Republicans, by a long shot -- old-fashioned conservatives didn't walk around with chips on their shoulders. The Republican party has always been fairly diverse -- country club reputation notwithstanding, and a major strain throughout most of the 20th century has contained a strong dislike for war.

My family has been hard-core Republicans for generations, and they have always been pretty skeptical when it comes to war and foreign interventions the whole time. I used to get frustrated with my dad over this all the time, back when I was a young warhawk. It wasn't until I read Robert Taft that I realized that my family was just an old-fashioned Republican family, and that most of my Republican neighbors were the same. They didn't like any big government programs, especially wars.

As a matter of fact, I am pushing 60 and was in the 1960s and 1970s very active in the conservative movement, serving as a state chairman at various times of College Republicans, Young Republicans and, most importantly, Young Americans for Freedom. Barry Goldwater's nomination made me a Republican. Later, learning that he was a pro-abort after Roe vs. Wade, I would not have voted for him but by then the GOP had Reagan (whom Goldwater despised since Reagan was the better man). I also served for about ten years on the Young Republican National Federation Executive Committee. I also was the Republican nominee for Congress against a senior Democrat and did better than other non-incumbent Republican Congressional nominees in my state in the Watergate year of 1974 when Nixon resigned in August.

As to taking anti-paleo rants elsewhere, this is a conservative website and paleos may be many things but "conservative" is not one of them. The Robert Taft emphasis in the GOP changed sharply immediately after Pearl Harbor. Taft himself advocated by the late 1940s that the US should have a foreign policy of letting Europe go to hell in a handbasket because it had experienced freedom and rejected it, but that the US should concentrate on emerging nations which looked forward to opportunities for freedom. In other words, Taft rejected the socialist Old Europe in favor of seeking markets and allies in the undeveloped world. He was right in the late 1940s as he and the pre-WWII isolationists were wrong all along as was effectively and finally proven at Pearl Harbor. The difference between taft and today's paleowhatevers is the Taft was smart enough to know when history had punched the ticket on his pre-war and anti-war errors. He was a very fine man as proven by his personal care of his dying wife while he was himself suffering the lung cancer that would kill him. His policies and the post-1964 GOP policies are very different EXCEPT on foreign policy.

The "neoconservatives" who named themselves such were the elderly former Democrats who saw their old party increasingly captured by those obviously anti-American and pro-communist. They opposed racial and ethnic quotas and had academic integrity and believed that street criminals should be rounded up and punished whether they were muggers or property-wrecking antiwar clowns. Some are still with us. Some are not. Nonetheless, "conservatives" are what constituted the post-WW II, Korean War, Vietnam War Cold War era conservative movement, the one that elected Ronaldus Maximus.

We were joined in that effort by the actual "neos." The rest of us never believed in the policies of FDR, HST, JFK (except his posturing in foreign policy which we hoped would be the platform for necessary attacks on the likes of Castro), LBJ or HHH on domestic policies much less the insanity of the George McGovern moonbats.

Neither YAF nor CRs nor YRs ever called their groups "neo." Nor did Phyllis Schlafly. Nor did Moral Majority. Nor did Right to Life. And so on. Nonetheless, liberals and paleos insist on using the term "neo" in describing actual conservatives because the liberals want to divide conservative forces by the use of the term and because the paleos use the term to claim some part of conservatism and then make arguments from nonexistent moral equivalency.

The paleos are a batch of social eccentrics defined by their personal idiosyncracies. Anyone who accepts the likes of Justin Lavender Raimondo (sometime columnist for Pravda) as any kind of conservative is not in touch with reality. See Justine the Lavender Queen's antiwar.com. Don't take my word for what Raimondo is on foreign policy. Read his/her/its disgusting website for yourself. During the Vietnam War era, I had an extreme and permanent bellyful of anything calling itself "antiwar." I am not going to change attitudes and I sometimes do not play well with others.

If you did not remain hawkish but gave in to the notion of peace at any price, that is too bad but the GOP is not your great grandfather's GOP and it won't be again. Few of us will be giving up our foreign and military policy principles voluntarily.

In the old days, the GOP also contained major groups of eugenics folks (Planned Barrenhood/Margaret Sanger) including Peggy Goldwater, wife of you know who, and she served as a national director of Planned Barrenhood from the purge of Sanger and of Lothrop Stoddard and their pals for ties with the Nazis in about 1940 until Peggy Goldwater's death in the mid-1970s. This reflects no credit upon the GOP. Read any of Sanger's books. Read Lothrop Stoddard's little gem: The Rising Tide of Color.

The New Right changed the GOP rather permanently (ask Christie Todd Whitman, a Demonrat in most respects except for her gilded ancestry, who is GOP for the time being to protect her stock portfolio and because Republicans sometimes throw parties down at the polo club that include only people like her).

Like most in the New Right, I did not come from an ancestral Republican Party family. I came from a family of Democratic labor folks. AFL-CIO President George Meany knew more about and did more in the way of anticommunism and national defense than the ancestrally GOP likes of John Vliet Lindsay, Charles Upchuck Percy, Charles Mathias, John Sherman Cooper, et al., (good riddance to them all) would ever know. Meany did not allow the AFL-CIO to endorse McGovern. Likewise Jean Kirkpatrick. We need no Blame America Firsters. Let them be Demonrats. We need no pro-abortionists or lavender canoodlers playing make believe marriage. What we need is a large influx of socially conservative folks who work with their hands for a living at something more substantive than antireligious sculpture and art.

Like Ronaldus Maximus, most New Right folks were coming in from the Democrat Party which had left us rather than vice versa. Without them, the GOP would not have been able to be elected or to govern. Main Street bank boardroom bean counters had failed politically 70 years ago. If it were not for military veterans, social conservatives, gun folks, tax rebels (Taft advocated a MUNICIPAL income tax in Cincinnati as a councilman or state representative in the 1930s) and other populist rightwingers including a healthy dose of previously Democrat Catholics, the GOP would be dead as the proverbial doornail.

Grown-up nations have grown-up responsibilities, including wars. I never imagined that I would be as delighted with Dubya as I am. Money counting and coupon clipping are the birthright of Americans but they are insufficient as a political platform. Ebenezer Scrooge before Jacob Marley's ghost showed up is no one's idea of a political icon or example, then or now. Neither was Lowell Weicker. Nor is Lincoln Chaffee. Nor was James Jeffords.

If you'll notice, the article I linked you to was written by the old grand poo-bah himself -- Irving Kristol, not by his obnoxious son or the other second generation neos. Now in your last post, you admit that neoconservatives named themselves, which is what you jumped on me for saying in the first place. Please decide.

Opposing most foreign military interventions is not the same as "peace at any price," and it is dishonest and disingenuous to say so. I served a decade and a half as an officer in the military, which is a whole lot more than any of the neo's you have listed -- combined. One of the things that I agree with the paleos on is that the neos are a whole lot better at sending people to war than they are at going to war themselves. I call that the mark of cowards, and whether you agree with me or not on that, I have earned the right to say it.

I am proud of my service, and I am proud of having served in RR's military when the Cold War was being won, even if I contest the idea that it was a foregone conclusion that we needed to be fighting it in the first place. The bottom line is that it needed to be ended, and Reagan ended it.

Prior to GHWB, no GOP president in the 20th century had gotten us into a war -- they all happened on Dem watches. Reluctance to spill American blood on foreign soil runs deeper in the traditional Republican mindset than you give it credit for, or at least it did prior to the Bushes. I think that Junior even had a bit of that streak at one point (remember "I want a more humble foreign policy?)

Part of what sealed my decision to exit the military was Somalia -- that effort proved that the new generation was going to go to war over virtually anything, even things that hadn't the remotest relationship to national security.

I voted and worked for W. We're lucky to have someone as good as him in this gawdawful age, and we won't see anyone as good as him in my lifetime. We still have hell to pay for all of this war stuff, but as you say, drum-beating is carrying the day in the GOP for any number of reasons. I'll mind my own business, work in my local community and in my garden, and recommend to my sons that they not join the military for as long as we're in the old European/French Foreign Legion mode -- not that I listened to my old man on that score!

We still have hell to pay for all of this war stuff, but as you say, drum-beating is carrying the day in the GOP for any number of reasons.

Agrarian, initially I supported the invasion, and I still do in that I want to see a better Iraq prevail, and our boys to come home safe and sound.

I'm the daughter of WW II kids. My Mom was 11, my Father 17, when the US was straifing the Italian suolo with firepower. The Germans came into my parents village, forced them to leave their homes so they could garrison their soldiers, and as a consequence my parents lived pretty much in abandoned buildings and lean tos for about a year.

After the war with Iraq began and when the WMD weren't found I began to reflect on how easy it was to convince me of war, and that bothered me. Next time up, I hope to be a little more circumspect.

I do think President Bush has accomplished the herculean task of beginning to sow a little democracy in an area where nobody believed it could flourish. And, while admittedly it's a little too soon to be hollering mission accomplished, mission accomplished, I fervently hope that President Bush's strategy pays off. And finally, I want to say thanks for your service to our Country.

My Mom and Dad even to this day can recount their experience of war in such detail as to make me feel I'm seeing it along with them. But the victims of war are far too easily forgotten or assigned the task of shutting up and taking it.

Well, AG, you caught me -- I occasionally talk politics, too!

I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, I opposed the Balkans war, and I opposed Somalia.

It was the first Iraq war that woke me up, to tell the truth. Being in the military at the time, one saw how many lies and half-truths were being told to the public to whip up public support. Anyone who is familiar with the situation of Orthodox Christians in the Balkans knew how many lies were told by the Clinton administration to justify that one. I still shudder at the thought that we bombed Christians into the stone age in support of Muslims in the Balkans.

I say that I opposed the Iraq war, but I have been quiet in my opposition -- more of a refusal to support or defend it. Our rulers have been given the responsibility to decide these things, and the responsibility is on their shoulders. They have far more information at their disposal, and have agendas we never know about. What is put out for public consumption is designed to do what happened to you -- convince you that the war was necessary, and convince you that you were knowledgable enough to debate with friends and neighbors over it. Politics.

I pray that W., who I do basically like and support (the thought of having Gore or Kerry as President still makes a chill run down my spine), made a good decision for the US in getting us into Iraq this time. Time will tell.

There are lots of horrible things that go on in the world. We don't have the ability to fix them all at gunpoint -- even if gunpoint and bombs could fix them all. I believe that the Constitution means what it says: "Provide for the common defense." One can always defend that before both God and man. Pursuing more ethereal goals of peace and democracy at the point of a bayonet is much trickier to defend, at least for me.

I appreciate the thanks. I never had a bullet fly past my head, but I did serve, and was prepared for it if necessary. What I gained from my military service was incalculable, and has served me well in multiple spheres of my life ever since. Multiple things have changed in the military, especially during the Clinton years, that make it less of a place for a young man to grow. But maybe all old soldiers say that!

I decided about forty years ago and have not looked back since. You did not notice. I do not object to "neoconservatives" being called "neoconservatives" by themselves or anyone else. I DO OBJECT To conservatives other than "neoconservatives" (that tiny group of formerly Democrat NYC intellectuals) being called "neoconservatives" since they are not neo anything. I also object to the paleowhatevers being called any form of conservative whatsoever. They are fruits, nuts and vegetables with no visible connection to the post-WW II conservative movement and they would be regarded as shameful by a Robert Taft once the bombs had fallen on Pearl Harbor. The paleos get their undies in a bunch whenever anyone suggests the possibility of military action to vindicate the values and interests of the United States and of Western Civilization.

Therefore, your first paragraph entirely missed the point of that to which you purport to be responding. The point is that there are a tiny handful of people who are legitimately known as "neoconservatives." They are refugees from the Democratic Party as it fell under increasingly communist influence as McGovern's forces seized control. They joined up politically with the New Right and other mainstream conservatives. The "neoconservative" contributions of intellect and articulate defense of cold warriorism against totalitarianism were welcome additions which were entirely in tune with pre-existing conservative policy.

What no one ever heard of until about 1986 were those who dishonestly call themselves paleo"conservatives." Their pantywaist foreign policy agrees with the crippled United States of the pro-communist New Left and of Osama bin Laden. Their "blood and soil" fantasies blandly mimic Mein Kampf or the local fatwas of neighborhood self-appointed Muhammed el Rootie Kazootie tyrants throughout Islamoland.

With all due respect, if you question the necessity of American resistance to communism (the Cold War), are you sure you belong on a conservative website? George McGovern piloted a bomber over Trieste in WW II. That did not make him a conservative. Hanoi John found himself in combat in Vietnam for a few weeks but the Swift Boat Vets for Truth had his number anyway. The Cold War needed to be fought and, if it needed to be ended, it needed to be ended in victory. Douglas MacArthur reportedly served in the military to the tune of three Congressional Medals of Honor starting with the pre-WW I Mexican Border campaign. He said: "In war, there is no substitute for victory." Ask Korean people or Filipino people what they think of MacArthur. They feel privileged to have been defended by him.

Sticking our heads in the sand while hoping that the bad men will go away is not a foreign policy or a military policy for free people. Neville Chamberlain is no role model for Americans. General McPeake has disgraced his uniform by supporting Kerry. So has Wesley Clark.

If paleo-ostrichism is not "peace at any price", outline the visible differences: facts, not editorials. Should we prefer that American civilians be killed on our own soil rather than our soldiers, sailors and airmen dying in foreign lands bringing the war to the enemy? Why?

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