Redstate

I agree with Pat Buchanan. The US should never have entered WW1 or WW2. I'm with the old-school Conservative isolationists.

FDR, that big lefty, broke neutrality by shipping supplies to Europe. Nazis, evil as they were, were not in the wrong sinking the supply ships with their U-boats. There's a large tinfoil brigade, that includes many prominent historians, who believe there was prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor that was ignored. In that regard I wear my tin hat proudly.

Afghanistan was necessary, but the mission there was never accomplished. Instead of doing the job right we outsourced the mission of finding Bin Laden to Afghani warlords. In a perfect world Osama's head would be slowly rotting, pegged to the White House fence. There's some slim evidence that even at that time Rumsfeld and his chums were focusing more on an eventual invasion of Iraq. I'm inclined to believe that too.

You guys strike me as genuine Conservatives, with which I can respectfully disagree. Right now though your party's run by Neoconservatives. These guys aren't really Conservative and they're not really Liberal. They just combine the worst of both worlds in an attempt to secure as much cash for them and their cronies.

If you haven't yet read Rebuilding America's Defenses I suggest you do. It's long and tedious but very important. The playbook that's been run by the Bush administration was devised long before he came to power. In September 2000 the Project for a New American Century was publically calling for an invasion of Iraq, but they said it would probably take "a new Pearl Harbor" to get the political will to do it. Makes you think, huh?

Your Conservative party has been hi-jacked. Please look into Neoconservatism. A good place to start is with Leo Strauss, the founder of the Neocon movement. He was Donald Rumsfeld's professor back at the University of Chicago. There's a long murky history to dig through, but once you look into it you can see how the Republican Party changed from Eisenhower to Bush.

You guys need to make Conservatism mean what it used to mean. I can respect the old Conservatism. Eisenhower is one of my favorite presidents. This new brand of Conservatism with its pointless war in Iraq is not the direction the country should be heading.

At least from the standards of a good number of posters here.  Don't make much of a secret of it, either.  Certainly the Directors know... and they gave me superuser status here*, which suggests that they find the prospect of us hiding amongst good Republicans a good deal less disgusting than either you or Pat Buchanan apparently do.

You know, I remember a time when being compared to Pat Buchanan was a killing insult amongst the Left.  Then again, I also remember a time when I was not ashamed to be a Democrat, so there you go.

Moe

*Which includes the ability to ban; and I find your comments to be personally insulting.  Retract them, please.

every race and creed of people deserves to live in freedom. I don't apologize for this belief and I don't think it's very far from a JFK ideal. However anyone else here on in the "neocon" movement defines what they believe, it always sounds to me like the opponents of the Iraq effort just don't care about a bunch of (insert slur here). I think that's wrong, in addition to being symptomatic of the larger problem that produced Islamic terrorism in the first place.

is just a convenient codeword for "Israel lobby" which is a codeword for "Jewish conspiracy." At least, that is the only conherent thought I've found running through this elevaation of PNAC to the level of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and Opus Dei.

What the "neocons" believe in, so far as I can identify a unifying element other than the ominous Jewish connection, is that they believe in the foreign policy pushed by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was just a little too ready to rely on magic pieces of paper as an inherent solution to problems (as opposed to them being tools by which a solution could be crafted).

I've never understood the word to be anything but a catch-all label to describe anyone who didn't condemn the war in Iraq and also by association anyone who was too Jewish.  I used to live downstairs from a graduate student from the University of Illinois who once called me a "neocon" in the same breath that she called David Horowitz a "fascist."  It was an amazing moment, considering that at the time I was working for a law school dean who had just converted to Judaism but who, like almost all of the Jewish faculty at the law school where I worked, was a bona-fide 60's lefty-liberal who, at least in private, hated the Bush administration and everything it stood for.  I never was able to determine how she learned to associate "neocon" with Jews, except that perhaps she'd been reading too much Edward Said or Gore Vidal or other people listening to the Divesters at Harvard and elsewhere.  When I pointed out to her that most of the intellectual, academic Jews I knew were Democrats and opposed to the war and the Bush administration by about 10:1, she had nothing much to say.  Maybe she thought the "ski" at the end of my name meant that I was a Jewish "neocon" too -- except that it actually means that I'm Polish, and was raised a Roman Catholic.  I just think it's a catch-all term for anyone who supported the war, with a particularly anti-Semitic undertone.

but most people ignore Wilson's interventions in the Caribbean and Mexico (Vera Cruz, the Villa expedition).

So while I agree that the Bush43 Administration isn't "Wilsonian" and is much more in tune with the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, the Administration is carrying out a foreign policy that anyone alive before the Cold War (not me, BTW) would instantly recognize.

these people never learn the very basic and fundamental difference between fascism and conservatism. Fascists hold the state to be supreme. Conservatives hold the people to be supreme. Isn't it usually the left that wants more state supremacy in most matters?

I just had a thought: the idea of price controls on gasoline and health care kind of reminds me of "running the trains on time."

...where the antiwar Left got the term from the hardcore isolationist/nativist Right and halfway adapted it to their own purposes: ie, switching if from meaning 'Jewish' to meaning 'Democratic apostate'.

I meant every word I said. If you feel what I said is banneable than it's your right to ban me.

I will not bring this up again here, obviously it's a sore spot. I think all these responses are overreacting though, especially those below you labeling me anti-semetic for mentioning the roots of Neoconservatism.

I'm far from an anti-semite. Some of the best lays I've ever had were Jewish girls.

Bye now.

Blam.

Moe

Here's a free hint to anybody wondering how to actually get through the minefield of a warning from a Contributor: try apologizing and correcting the behavior that got you warned.

Of course, that would require that you actually have enough of a basic respect for the forum and people that you're dealing with to make such an apology believable, but them's the breaks.  :)

Interesting phenomena in the neighborhood I used to live in were the opinions of the liquor and convenience store owners of Middle-Eastern descent.  One guy, who used to have Al-Jazeera on his satellite television behind the counter tuned in 24/7, was convinced that Dick Cheney was a Jew.  We had a long argument over it, and I wasn't able to change his mind.  This is the "greater Israel" myth which at work, which was concocted deliberately to counteract the very real "Pan-Arab" truth..."From the River to the Sea."  

Dubya is truely on of the greatest leaders we have had. Neo-Con, Big Governemnt Conservative, Compassionate Conservative, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, or whatever else you wanna call him, he is great. The reason is simple. He, more than any other President it seems, just doesn't give a flying f**k about polls and pundits. He simply does what he feels is right and that makes him a LEADER, not a FOLLOWER like the poll-driven politicos. He may very well be wrong on many issues, but at least he is sincere, which is more than I can say for other prominent politicians of our time. On that point however, I think that in the long term, history will show that he was right more often than not.

Ideas of high gasoline prices and global warming are pushing the liberals into ideas like nationalizing the automobile industry in America.  The basic theory is that if they can get people into a high enough state of panic over gas prices and global warming, they can precipitate a "public bailout" of American auto manufacturers like GM and force them to produce the kinds of cars they want to see, saving them from going out of business, but along with that will come a lot of other controls, to make sure that Americans drive those cars the way Liberals want them to.  See my post, here.  To people like Al Gore, the way to continue the onward march from 200,000 hybrid cars to forcing every manufacturer to produce them by 2012 is to scare the bejeezus out of Americans and make them view it as a salvation to the planet.  They'll nationalize the American automobile industry and they'll put GPS in every car and fine you if you speed.  That's the plan, AFAIK.

I want to try to tie this back into the subject of the original thread, which is that free people when faced with the facts can decide prudently, objectively, and in their own interest without the government forcing them to do so or taking control of their lives.  I believe very deeply that they can.  I believe that Americans who buy automobiles can -- and have in the past -- recognized the danger of foreign oil monopolies and have voluntarily sought to lead the way.  

In the 1970's, Americans adopted fuel-efficient Japanese automobiles not because the government told them to, but because their own self-interest informed them that it was the right thing to do.  Otherwise the Japanese auto industry would never have been able to produce such wonderful cars as the Honda Civic and the Honda Accord.  Today, Americans face a similar choice and I think they'll recognize that and support the American manufacturers who offer cars with more fuel efficient engines, without sacrificing safety and longevity, to the customer.

Right now, Volkswagen is the only company that makes TDI diesels and successfully sells them worldwide.  The price of gasoline (and diesel) is still lower here in America than it is in most European countries.  With a relatively small shift in people's driving habits, and a little encouragement for people to look at alternatives like the TDI diesel as a second car, we can help solve the problem without draconian government interference.

We should also invest more heavily in refining here at home.  We need to update the old refineries in this country and modernize them, and increase their capacity.  What we should not do is threaten our allies in the Middle East with "punishment" for their alleged support of terrorism and turning away from them their products just because Al Gore says we should.  

And really it seems to me that it's basically a highly academic argument.  If you believe that the conservative revolution was betrayed you must have been a neocon because of a presumed Trotskyist sympathy.  But that's interpreting history from an almost exclusively Marxist point of view, and I seriously doubt that Francis Fukuyama was ever a Trotskyist.  Neither was Paul Wolfowitz.

As a fairly new registrant, I find it helpful to learn the local rules and customs.

So . . .

You banned him for a reasonable, intelligent critique of current "conservative" principles?

As a con myself, I both saw his point, and disagreed, which are not contradictory theses.

I guess I'm just surprised.

of that argument here, although I don't know enough about the personalities and history to be able to evaluate it. I was under the impression that it meant sorta-apostate Leftist (i.e., not far enough right to be acceptable to "paleocons"), and that the "neocon = Zionist (Jew)" was a later slur, but it seems that some thread of that identification may go back earlier than I realized.

Have a look at the author of "Eastern Standard Tribe" -- darling of the EFF and intellectual property law professors from liberal universities across the fruited plain.  His old "craphound" website used to feature the stories about how both his parents were Trotskyist teachers and featured a very campy picture of him in Cuba.

There are plenty of open liberals here (Ghengis Khan, Arkie Liberal, to name a couple) who have been around and earned respect, and therefore, some latitude when it comes to the tone that is taken in "our" house. A person who comes in with a username like "A Proud Moonbat" is obviously looking to get banned. And the tone of his argument, along with the allegations of greed and corruption among neocons were plenty insulting, along with the overall nasty tone

Personally, I won't have banned him for his first comment (and he did just receive a warning), but that's the Directors and superusers' perogative (since this is a private forum), but look down at his reply, particulary the last line:

I'm far from an anti-semite. Some of the best lays I've ever had were Jewish girls.

If that isn't a bannable offense, I don't know what is.

Of course, he had a "road to Damscus" experience, (his words, not mine), and he became a pure libertarian who argues that a "common defense" could be provided by private means without the need for a government.  (We should privatize the court system too.)  Quite different from a neo-conservative.

He confirmed that the original Neo-conservatives (with the exception of Pat Moynihan) were ex-Trotsky Jews.  (The Jewishness being the reason for the Marxism, and for the subsequent disillusionment with the rise of Stalin).  But then he said something about how that was they way most people saw it.  Leaving me with the immpression that there was some disagreement that I couldn't understand.

I would fit in that scheme of things, which may be the reason I've never understood when the label "neoconservative" was applied to me.  I've never been a radical libertarian to the extent that your econ professor pushed it.  I believe in limited government, but not nonexistant government, and I believe in limited government primarily because in my mind limited = flexible and adaptable.  The larger government grows, the more impossible it is to change: the more inertia it has in terms of people, money, and influence.  Not to mention the very modern tendency to view itself as the ultimate final arbiter of everything under the sun.  If Congress only had to hold session for 75 days a year, I would count that as a positive development.

I'm a capitalist but I do have some wariness of large-scale corporatization:  I'd prefer to see Americans help themselves through small businesses whenever possible.  Being part of a vast, sprawling apparatus can only appeal to certain kinds of personalities.  It shouldn't be the only choice you have to make a living in this world.  I've never had the impulse to be a tycoon or a Captain of Industry.  I think the government should allow private enterprise to have the first crack at solving problems and generally speaking leave the free market to itself.  I believe in the power of the individual's inventive and productive spirit, concomitant with a strong work ethic, because I believe that human dignity comes in part from being able to earn your own wealth and achieve your own prosperity through your own inventiveness and insight.  

I think that traditional, nuclear families are the foundation of a stable society, even if that conflicts with avant-garde thinking on gender roles and "alternative family structures."  In general I think that the more government tries to "help people" the worse things become, especially when the government purports to have niche-marketed solutions to every one of your problems.  I'm very skeptical that social workers and bureaucrats know how to solve problems better than the people they purport to serve.  I'm profoundly anti-racist and anti-sexist.  I think that women and men should be allowed to choose their roles and generally speaking that social engineers should leave them alone.  If you want to be a housewife and take care of the children while your husband works, I think that's great.  I don't believe people who choose traditional marriage and family arrangements are outdated or dysfunctional in any way.  I think that every race of people on this planet contains people with roughly equal abilities to achieve and prosper.  I'm a gigantic opponent of people who try to claim that male-female pair-bonded lifelong relationships that nurture children and families are somehow an artifact of recent thinking and shouldn't be accorded any special status.  I believe that active, participatory fathers are essential to the well-being of their children.

Economically, I believe that big-corp. CEOs should take heed when they demand and recieve salaries that are so disproportionate to what average people receive that reasonable people would consider them to be obscene.  Ditto film stars, rock stars, and sports stars.  And I'll tell you why:  because employees then tend to lump everyone who owns a business into the same category, and think that the owner of a small business is also carting away money to the bank in semiarticulated trailer trucks.  All bosses become equally culpable, even though most small businesses struggle to keep going and most small business owners are not rich people.  

The big problem I have with people who describe themselves as "pure libertarians" who think they can provide for the "common defense" is that it strikes me as an oxymoron.  How can you ever convince a big group of "pure libertarians" that they should ever form an army against an enemy?  Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't think you'll ever persuade them to do it, much less be able to agree on who that enemy really is.  Kind of simplistic, I admit, but I just don't see how you're going to get pure libertarians to agree on anything that important.

I see nothing wrong with law-abiding people owning firearms, even if they're not directly a part of a "well-regulated militia."  I've met very few people who own guns legally that I would construe as dangerous, and quite a few who don't that I would.  Personal responsibility and being part of an actively safe group of fellow gun-owners is a big part of that.

I honestly believe that the Constitution of the United States is an almost holy document in that it is accessible to everyone, and that the Founders were extraordinarily wise in their conception of Federalism and separation of powers.  I don't believe the courts should be privatised...the first question that comes to mind is:  "Who would own them?"

OK that's a very rambling, off-the-top-of-my-head response.  There's a lot more in there, but I'll save you the read for tonight.  I suppose that one of the reasons I've resisted the label "neoconservative" is that first of all, I really don't know what it (is supposed to) means, and secondly until relatively recently the best way to describe my politics was by reference to Noam Chomsky.  That's about the best I can do for tonight.

I agree, the "lay" comment was just cheap and crude (but, I can see characterizing it merely as a cheap and crude put-off by someone accused of anti-semetism who thinks it unwarranted but not worth the fight.)

But his first reply was comprised of what I see as perhaps the most valid complaint about the New Republicanism - it ain't conservatism.  Or, at least it ain't your father's conservatism.**

We've flipped positions.  What were historically liberal positions - interventionism abroad, spending to promote an ideology - are now ours, and it's libs who want isolation, who can turn a blind eye to injustice overseas, and who can now, with accuracy, decry waste.  

It's all a bit disquieting, especially since I'm all for the interventionism (but not for the spending part.)  But I wonder if we haven't merely shown that neither libs nor cons hold positions so much as we hold notions of justice, and the historical positions were merely the vehicles, tuned for the particular times in which we wielded them, with which we tried to promote the just.

Leaving aside the nonsense about Wolfy, Moonbat nearly said what I just said.  

Well, at least half of it, plus I neglected the sneering.  But it remains a valid point of definition.

and he had been poking the pointy sticks around just ever so slightly to see where the boundary was.  Then he crossed it.  And then he got blammed.  And we all knew it would happen sooner or later.  It is a pity, we really should start taking a pool on how long these guys last.  Too bad pay pal isn't set up to handle it for us.  ;>)

would only work if it were surrounded by non-libertarians.

if you want to flog PNAC and the neocon cabal around, you'll inevitably meet the same fate.

The fact is neocon is simply a pejorative that really means nothing more than the person on the receiving end disagrees.

The PNAC thing is just whacky, and I find it incredible that people with enough neurons to discount Lyndon LaRouche believe this story.

of my problems with the PNAC thing. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bill Kristol are all called neocons but I'd defy anyone to classify them as Trotskyites, ex- or otherwise.

of real neocons, they are former liberal intellectuals and foreign policy advocates who then moved toward the right.  As it happens, most of them were Jewish, thus the anti-semitism.

  Neocons are influenced by Leo Strauss and most recently the work of Natan Sharansky, they believe in a pro-active foreign policy by the worlds democracies.

  I do not agree with all aspects of their view, but it has become a pejorative word on the left because the left do not understand, nor care to understand what they are talking about.

Leaving aside the nonsense about Wolfy, Moonbat nearly said what I just said.  

Well, at least half of it, plus I neglected the sneering.  But it remains a valid point of definition.

...that nothing at all has happened to you.  I will note also that you avoided the conspiracy theorizing, callous disregard for the lives of non-Americans (including those of our closest ally), the aforementioned sexist slur and - this is probably what got up my nose most - the arrogant assumption that the only reason we didn't know of (and were fighting) the evil, evil neocon threat was because nobody has told us about it.  

IOW, we don't mind disagreement; what bugs us is stupid and obnoxious disagreement, particularly when it comes in the form of an edifying lecture from people whose moral authority we don't recognize.

Re: The US should never have entered WW1 or WW2.

I am willing to hear arguments as to WWI. But WWII? We were attacked by one axis power and had the other two declare war on us. What were we supposed to do. Surrender to them?