Posted on 07/11/2002 10:33:36 PM PDT by areafiftyone
A new magazine, The American Conservative, featuring Pat Buchanan and backed by Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell former editorial-page editor of the New York Post is due to launch in September, and before a single issue has been published it is already attracting fire from the left.
The bi-weekly magazine which will be based in Washington, will hew to the traditional conservative line as opposed to the neo-conservative philosophy now represented by The Weekly Standard and National Review.
"Our motto for the magazine is that we are traditional conservatives mugged by the neocons," wrote Taki, globetrotting heir to a Greek Shipping fortune and acid tongued columnist for the New York Press
Described as a magazine for traditional conservatives, the founders say The American Conservative will be "written especially for those who have begun to question whether 'conservatism' means - as many Beltway conservatives now would have it - that the United States should have bombed Serbia and should now embark on countless other wars that have little to do with America's own vital interests."
According to the magazine's website, the magazine will be "written for those who question whether we ought to completely remake our wonderful country through continued mass immigration from all corners of the globe." It will also be aimed at a readership "which understands what George Washington meant when he warned Americans of the dangers of passionate attachment to foreign nations.
"Our aim is to rekindle within the conservative movement and the Republican Party the necessary debates on the key questions of patriotism versus globalism, prudent realism versus promiscuous interventionism. We take to heart the idea that the United States should be - A Republic, Not an Empire; - we believe the United States should slow down its rate of immigration; we are skeptical about many of the benefits promised by the new gods of the global economy."
That kind of stern patriotic rhetoric drives the left up the nearest wall, as illustrated by a snide tirade in the liberal New Republic written by one of the magazine's associate editors, one Franklin Foer, which he called "Buchanan's surefire flop."
The new magazine, Foer informs us, is doomed. The Buchanan, Taki, McConnell triumvirate is "an odd match," he writes, noting that "While Buchanan venerates the working class, Taki is an unabashed yacht-owning, nightclub-going social snob with homes in the Swiss Alps, London, and Manhattan's Upper East Side." Foer describes McConnell as an heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune.
All of which, of course, casts the three into the outer darkness inhabited solely by political and social troglodytes presumably left over from the robber baron era and well past their prime. It is Foer's contention that traditional conservatives have been forced out of the political right wing and replaced by the neoconservatives (neocons) who he describes as "the largely Jewish group of former leftists who migrated right after the Vietnam War."
The neocons, Foer proclaims, are no longer a wing of the conservative movement; they are the conservative movement." Obviously, a magazine to be published for Buchanan conservatives published by such wrinkled old relics of the past will have no readership.
"There's no constituency on the right--not evangelicals, not gun nuts, not libertarians--who wants to send the neocons back to City College or who even remembers they came from there," Foer wrote.
"Buchanan and his rich friends [there he goes again, invoking the left's favorite class warfare tactic] couldn't have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right,"
Undaunted by such liberal wishful thinking, the three will forge ahead, pledging they "will cover politics inside and outside the Beltway and the world of books and culture and will appear - beginning in the second half of September-- twenty-four times a year.
Whether Mr. Foer and his friends on the hoary old left like it or not.
The story was that Murdoch wanted tax credits etc., to build a new plant in the boro and McConnell's rant got all the project's potential political patrons offside. But for the short period he was in charge of the Post's Edit pages, they were a terrific read.
He was replaced by Norman Podhoretz's little boy, John, who loves show tunes and has written (I kid you not) about the joys of being an effeminate heterosexual conservative. He proves that while this fruit may not have falled far from the tree, it certainly landed hard enough to inflict brain damage.
As I recall the story, he was canned after writing a column in which the Devil tells old Joe Kennedy that the clan has been cursed forever and a day because he had sex with Gloria Swanson or some such rubbish. Anyway, they were still trawling for the bodies of John F. Kennedy and his two passengers at the time, so there was a huge outcry and Pod got the chop, too.
He must make his father very proud -- I don't think.
LOL! Great quote!
The American Conservative Magazine
http://www.amconmag.com/
Boy, if this article is the Lefts reaction 3 months before their first issue , then I can hardly wait to give out subscriptions as "Christmas Gifts"!
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