Wolf Howling hosted this week. The winners were: 1st place Council post: Bookworm Room – McCainiacs thinking outside of the box. 1st place non-Council post: Daniel Pipes – The West’s Islamist Infiltrators. Congratulations to all participants on thei…

Wolf Howling hosted this week. The winners were … 1st place Council post: Bookworm Room – McCainiacs thinking outside of the box. 1st place non-Council post: Daniel Pipes – The West’s Islamist Infiltrators…….

The council has spoken; the full results this week are at Wolf Howling’s. The winning council entry was McCainiacs thinking outside of the box by Bookworm Room. The runner up was my own Reuters Rooters. Yesterday I saw that NGO Monitor has weighed in …

The Watcher’s council nominations are UP at Wolf Howling. Finding the Anti-U. S. Angle – The Glittering Eye observes an unfortunate tendency among those in the know to blame the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Georgia. I was especially bothered to see …

Read this article.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j061303.html

Worst of all – from the War Party’s perspective – is that the neocon meme is really getting out there. Every day, it seems, there is a new article in some periodical not only pointing to them as the driving force behind the rush to war, but also detailing their ideological odyssey from left to right – and this is driving the neocons craaaazy. The result is that, within less than 24 hours, no less than four major polemics appeared denouncing this level of scrutiny as evidence of (what else?) “anti-Semitism.”

Given that conspiracies about Jews always concentrated them on controlling American foreign policy in a secret Cabal against the Arabs, why wouldn’t adherents to the Protocols of Zion be giving American Leftists support in this arena?

1) As anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of how to use Google could discover in a moment, the neocons’ enemies have long been aware of Strauss’s cult and its baleful influence. Libertarians are naturally horrified by the Straussian devotion to the benevolent dictatorship of a self-appointed elite, and we at antiwar.com have not spared Strauss and his followers their fair share of abuse. While Shadia B. Drury’s 1999 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, provided a critique of Strauss’s influence from the left, paleoconservatives such as Paul Gottfried were among the first to raise the alarm. But I’ll leave it to my old friend Burt Blumert to capture the essence of the antagonism that has long existed between the followers of Strauss and the Old Right gang centered around LewRockwell.com:

“Neocons, as ex-Trotskyites, are bad enough, but those who follow the pro-pagan Leo Strauss are deadly. He advocated the Big Lie. Forgive me for all the gory details, but these people – with their other leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and the help of the CIA – perverted the American right into loving the welfare-warfare state.”

This is essentially the charge that America went to war for oil because the Military Industrial Complex is inseparable from the neo-conservative intent on big government or spending.

Thus, the Left thinks the neo-cons have made war pay for itself and thus they are against that. The Left would rather prefer that war eat up small nations like Somalia while the Left are drinking their chai tee and starbucks coffee. That way, eventually the wars will stop, if only because there won’t be anybody around alive to fight it, i.e. Darfur.

This is also a reaction to the True Classical Liberal belief which started going into high gear after 9/11. The Left could never tolerate people who actually believed in liberty and security. Thoes people had to be eliminated. One reason why Book has good reason to fear the response from her community if they knew the truth.

Afghanistan and Iraq purged so many true liberals out that the only people left in the Democrat party are either ignorant people or fake liberals.

Joe Lieberman is just one guy, but he is probably the one with the best name recognition. Larry Summers was kicked out for talking about how women could think differently. As if we don’t already recognize that individuals think differently and have different tastes and preferences, but suddenly it’s Summers being totalitarian for daring to challenge the status quo belief about women and men and how they may think differently.

The idea that the major media have been taken over by neo-Nazis, and that the campaign to identify who and/or what got us involved in an unnecessary and ultimately futile war is all part of “the new anti-Semitism,” is the rather implausible theme of the neocons’ defense. In a polemic that has all the hallmarks of having been written by an awful drunk – i.e., not only entirely lacking in logic, but also relentlessly subjective and anecdotal – Christopher Hitchens reveals the ultimate evidence for this worldwide anti-Semitic plot in all its sinister “undertones.” Once again, the use of certain words – or, in this case, their correct pronunciation – is the issue at hand:

People who know my studies on how the Left views media manipulation, in order to best comprehend how to best manipulate the Left with propaganda, may remeber that I said that the Left views the MSM as biased for us.

When you study true Leftist Marxist literature and ideology, you will see that Marxist Revolutionaries always needed to challenge a “status quo”. And what better status quo to challenge than their very own totalitarian biased Main Sewer Media, who fights to end the lives of America’s allies and usher in Leftist utopia and totalitarian systems unto the world?

It doesn’t need to make sense. Humans have doublethink and self-delusion for a reason, you know.

In the end, as you are reading the article, if you get the sense that there’s something irrelevant about all this to your personal values or the Iraq war or the war in Georgia, you are right.

This schism is essentially a Leftist internal issue, projected unto the rest of us, without any justice or warrant, because the Left likes to project their problems unto other people.

It’s like when gays attack a Marine corporal honorably discharged, Matt Sanchez, for being gay, appearing with that… woman I can’t remember her name right now, and for supporting the war and Republicans. It’s an internal issue because the hate and fury is an internal issue, Brian. They hate themselves, so they must hate Sanchez for turning coat on their hate or something.

They post porn images of Sanchez and what not, thinking this will make him weaker or make the Republicans attack him or something.

They talk about the neo-con’s Leftist “roots” and talk about how paleoconservatives recognized this and are fighting the “hijacking” of the Right. What do you think they are doing or benefiting politically from such? It’s obvious.

Those are the four political schools of thought from America derived.

Neo-conservatism, when it was before the Iraq war, contained several elements from all four.

But with the Iraq War, too many people like me were bunched along with the older neo-cons, because the Left is lazy like that.

Book may be termed a neo con. A new conservative. So can Neo-Neocon be classified as a … well, you know.

But I’m mostly a Jacksonian. I believe in Hamiltonian views on economic liberty and prosperity leading to individual liberties and what not, but I do not place it in a higher priority than force and power. I believe in idealism and working together, like Wilson did with his League of Nations, but I believe that it is force, power, charisma, and mutual interests which bind nations together in alliances of blood, not talking around fracking tables in a “League”.

I believe there is merit to the Jeffersonian school of thought that says good ideas only come from an adversarial exchange where people duke it out via free speech and what not, thus producing the most solid and strongest of all ideas or positions.

But I believe it is the force, the Jacksonian Second Amendment, that ensures the First Amendment is around.

The Left and the Democrats understands nothing about this particular details and differences, Brian. Thus their view of neo-conservatives are flawed. They view them as a mass, an ideological group mind like the Mass Sepsis Media which the Left likes to use, rather than a group of individuals.

We are individuals, first and foremost. We are only part of a hierarchy or a mass mind by choice or by happenstance, but all of those happen after the part of the individual.

This explains why the Left hates neo-cons so much, cause they see them as an off branch of their own ideology, Marxist-Leninism.

As for what Neo-cons are, typically they are classical liberals who have seen the light and have defected from the Left.

A neo-con that was never a Leftist or someone who believed in classical values of liberty and what not, isn’t a neo con. Francis Fukuyama wasn’t a neo-con, even though people said he was. And a bunch of other people, like Pat Buchanan, aren’t neocos and neither is people like ALan Greenspan.

They just have economically liberal beliefs, one might say. But if they weren’t previously fake liberals or Leftists, then they aren’t neo-cons. They’re just people with conservative values which are non-traditional, one might say.

The Left likes to come up with enemy ideologies in the same fashion Iran likes to say that their counter-revolutionary corps is out to preserve and sustain their “Islamic Revolution”.

Such ideologies always need an external or internal enemy to quiet the masses.

The Left doesn’t like the military because the military is a competitor. Just like neo-cons. They are a competitor for the beliefs and hearts of the same people, the people who can potentially become classical liberals. The bleeding hearts, the people who care and invest time and energy in the Left because Republicans are thugs and want to exploit people.

Over the last half century neoconservatism has grown to become a major foreign policy school of thought in the United States along side the Cold War liberalism of Kennedy, Johnson and Carter administrations and the amoral Realism of the Nixon-Kissinger and Ford-Kissinger administrations. Neo-conservatism emerged as an important school of thought during the Reagan administration and the again more powerfully in the second Bush admisnitration.
Neoconservatism has proven difficult to define as a political ideology in the normal sense. The problem is that it’s elite adherents, perhaps practitioners is a more accurate description, are disinclined to share its core idea set with others, including the American public. Despite plentiful evidence of their compulsive secrecy and contempt for popular democracy, neoconservatives claim to believe in a foreign policy of moral clarity and idealistic goals such as promting transperancy and democracy. The reality is that neo-conservatives talk a highly moralistic political game but lack the moral certainties that they regularly deploy for political effect among the uninitiated. Theirs is an Orwellian world in which they form the inner party controlling an outer party of bovine Republican true believers.

Irving Kristol, called the godfather of neoconservatism, had this to say about the “persuasion” in an article “The Neoconservative Persuasion: What it was, and What it is”.

The article is reprinted here:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001679.html
with comments by the blogger.

It appears to be a movment adhering to a philosophy centered around economic growth to neutralize the classic class warfare argument of socialists, promoting growth even at the expense of deficits; a social conservatism aligned closer to traditional social values than liberatian; and promoting democracy abroad to counter totalitarianism—whether secular or religious.
From the article:

The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy–because it seems to be in the nature of human nature–that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.
This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

I guess I would call Bush a neoconservative based on the policies of the last 8 years.

That’s the way the Moderates still view the “Grand Old Party.” When the Democrats went too far Left, they left the middle up for grabs. And Regean and Newt grabbed it. There is much in common with the Blacks in the Dem Party and the Conservatives in the Repub Party: both group of votes are coveted, as long as they know their place. The vote of both is taken for granted because “where are they going to go?” The problem in the Repub Party is that the Conservatives
have this tendency to put principle above Party, and that’s a problem.

“Fighting Bob LaFollette” proved that a third party who controls only 20% of the votes can have a huge influence on the Congress. That may be the only way to fix Washington.

I don’t know. I’ve heard the term thrown around a lot, but I’m not sure I know what or who it includes. Do you know what would define them?