EXACTLY!
Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
Posted on 03/16/2009 7:48:46 AM PDT by Liz
EXCERPT Though neocons formed a kind of Praetorian Guard around John McCain during his campaign, their truculent approach to foreign affairs sabotaged rather than strengthened McCain’s appeal. The best that Sarah Palin, a foreign-policy neocon on training wheels, could do was to offer platitudes about standing by Israel. It seems safe to say, then, that the neocon credo is ready to be put out to pasture.
Or is it? One problem with this line of argument is that it’s been heard before—sometimes from the neoconservatives themselves. In 1988, after George H.W. Bush replaced Ronald Reagan, neocon lioness Midge Decter fretted, “are we a long, sour marriage held together for the kids and now facing an empty nest?”
Then in the late 1990s, Norman Podhoretz delivered a valedictory for neoconservatism at the American Enterprise Institute. Neoconservatism, he announced, was a victim of its success. It no longer represented anything unique because the GOP had so thoroughly assimilated its doctrines.
In 2004, a variety of commentators scrambled to pronounce a fresh obituary for neoconservatism. The disastrous course of the Iraq War, Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím said, showed that the neoconservative dream had expired in the sands of Araby.
Yet the neocons show few signs of going away. The Iraq surge was devised by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and spearheaded by William Luti, a protégé of Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney who is currently at the National Security Council.
Its success has prompted some neocons to claim vindication for the Iraq War overall. Nor has the network of institutions that the neocons rely upon melted away, from the Hudson Institute, where Scooter Libby and Douglas J. Feith are now ensconced, to the Weekly Standard and Fox News.
It’s also the case that the realists inside the GOP feel more embattled than ever. Sen. Chuck Hagel has pretty much resigned from the GOP itself as well as from his Senate seat, denouncing Rush Limbaugh and others as retrograde conservatives.
They have undeniably suffered a number of setbacks. The sun has set on the flagship neocon newspaper, the New York Sun, a victim of the financial crash.
The citadel of neoconservatism, AEI, has ousted Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, and Reuel Marc Gerecht. Meanwhile, Robert Kagan has incorporated realist tenets into his writings, while David Frum, who co-wrote with Richard Perle the standard neocon foreign-policy text, An End to Evil, and who previously demanded the expulsion of allegedly unpatriotic conservatives from the conservative pantheon (a move Russell Baker called reminiscent of the Moscow purges), now seems to be hinting at, among other things, a reassessment of neocon foreign policy. “I cannot be blind,” he conceded in a farewell address to National Review Online last month, “to the evidence … that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see.”
Looking ahead, the neocons do not have an obvious horse. In the past they have glommed on to everyone from Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson to Colin Powell, whom William Kristol briefly touted for president. Another problem is that George W. Bush himself has increasingly deviated from neoconservatism.
With the fall of Donald Rumsfeld, on whom the neocons tried to blame the mismanaged Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney has lost out to the combination of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Even Kristol seems to have shed some of his habitual fervor, musing about the shortcomings of capitalism in his New York Times column and expressing the hope that Obama will put aright what has gone wrong.
The result has been something of an identity crisis in the ranks of the neocons. Like not a few revolutionary movements that have fallen on hard times, neoconservatism is experiencing a schism. Two camps are starting to face off over the question of the true faith, with the first embracing orthodoxy and the second heresy. The question they face is simple: Should the neocons continue to move right, serving as the advance guard of an embattled GOP? Or should neoconservatism become true to itself by returning to the center?
Will the movement, in fact, morph back into what it was at its inception in the late 1960s when it belonged firmly to the Democratic Party—moderate on domestic issues and mildly hawkish on foreign policy? --SNIP--
Neocon is a term used by limp-wristed purse-swingers to attempt and drive a wedge between those who are willing to use military power and those who don't.
What happens when two or more people hold truths to be self-evident, but contradictory? Which self-evident truth, is real?
I think you may have expressed one of the most simple-yet-profound ideas I have read here in a very long time.
We use the term RINO, when what we usually mean is "CONSERVATIVE in name only". "Republican" has only loose correlation to "conservative" much of the time.
Amen, brother.
“Neo-con” is used here like it would be on the Daily KOmmunistS website. They use it like little kids...it sounds like “neo-nazi” so just stick it on anything you don’t like.
What is a neo-con?
Well, kick them twice and beat 'em with a stick.
That, and the fact that "con" is shorthand for "con-man". The implication of fraud, dishonesty, swindling, etc. is obviously not an accident either.
"Neo-con" = (by implication/association) "Neo-nazi con-man"?
In fact, you are making stuff up without any proof or even any evidence.
There has never been a poll taken that showed that Gun Control, abortion rights, higher taxes or a weak foreign policy had a majority of Republican support.
All of our Presidential nominees that you mentioned CAMPAIGNED as “conservatives” (Heck, even Obama campaigned as a “conservative”)
Most people are not political junkies, and once you get passed the “litmus test” issues, voters decide if they like the candidate or not.
We need to do a better job of recruiting conservative candidates, and those candidates will then WIN most of the primaries, if those candidates do a better job of communicating with the voters.
The idea that we need a “3rd party” is insane, we will give the country over to the left, if we do that.
The idea that we can win elections by REDUCING our ranks is also insane.
We are all neo cons unless we can prove otherwise....Lets get ourselves out of our party!Neo con apologist?
Speak for yourself. I'm not a neo con and I don't have to prove anything to anyone...
There goes Petronski spewing his profound "wisdom" all over the place.
Now who's going to clean that up?
You people who do not even know the definition of neo-con are sure quick to throw us into the tank with all the "KOOKS".
May I suggest you actually take a minute (or all day, in your case) to finally get a handle on who the neo-cons are, and what they are doing.
Otherwise, you will continue to look foolish.
The surest way to detect mental midgetry is to see the term “neocon” used.
Huh? To rage against neo-cons and at the same time to support the central idea of the neo-conservative foreign policy??????
“neo-con”....new conservative...aka former liberal...
To the liberal mind...a neo-con is WORSE than a nazi...
You have to understand...to liberals this is heresy...neo-cons are apostates from the “church of humanity”...
Neo-cons have drank from the well of liberalism and found it wanting...
It’s a dirty invective uttered to pass muster of profanity...but never mistake it’s meaning when spashed upon the stoning alter of the press...
To liberal ...Every conservative is a neo-con....
While to conservatives....we understand the variables in the party...
I’m a former liberal...one of the few on the boards....I AM a neo-con....But I dont consider Frum to be a neo-con...he’s just a liberal republican...he’s a powell, a Buckley Jr,spector, collins, snowe, gramnesty, McCainiac.....etc etc ...
I’m much farther to the right than these any of these smacktards...
The danger a former liberal represents to liberals...the source of the hatred...is the fact that true neo-con can see through there bullshit instantly...as they were once of that same mindset and world view...
That's a good point. I would contend that anyone who favors a strong foreign policy as an element of a big-government, globalist world view would fit the bill as a true "neo-conservative."
It amazes me sometimes how quickly the insults fly. It’s a sure sign that one has nothing better to say.
That’s right, everyone is a kook, but people like you are pure genius. That works real well. That’s what your buddy Medved does. Ron Paul brings up points you don’t want public so you call him a kook and make him a Nazi. Brilliant. So, let me ask you, who should go to war with Iran before they get a nuke?
True, but when a true, articlulate conservative comes along, he/she is popular. Look at Palin, whom is very, very ordinary American.
Liberal Republicans run as conservatives( Mitt ), because that is how you win the GOP. Then, they stab them in the face, because that’s what liberals do.
We need however a strong, if neccessary pro-active foreign policy for America's strength and security (which will benefit the free world too), while vastly shrinking government domestically.
We neither can afford Giuliani-Frum liberalism, nor Buchanan-Paul isolationism.
The above article is ridiculous from the onset for attacking Palin. It may have escaped the authors attention that Frum was viciously bashing Palin. The folks that are worrisome within the GOP are not the hawks, but the domestically liberal hawks.
EXACTLY!
Amazing << Hear this. Feel this, and tell me that this isn't music.
Oh, dear...
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