"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow conservative"
--Regans Law
Posted on 05/03/2003 8:44:59 AM PDT by quidnunc
Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label.
The word neocon, for example (short for neoconservative), was born of such a shifting of the ground. Coined in the 1970s, the label stuck to Democrats who had watched the Scoop Jackson anti-Communist wing of the Democratic party evaporate before their very eyes. They saw the War on Poverty become a losing battle. On the domestic front, they observed the death of morality as it had been defined for thousands of years in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These Democrats finally concluded that liberalism, as they had known it, was dead.
Irving Kristol, father of the neocons, defined his band of brothers and sisters as "liberals mugged by reality." That reality was the "evil empire" as defined by Ronald Reagan, the leader they championed. The reality extended to a concern for crime and education and what came to be called "family values." A subdivision of the neocons, the "cultural conservatives," were wryly defined as liberals with daughters in junior high.
Jews were prominently identified with the neocons, largely because Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, made the magazine a sounding board for neocon criticism. But Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Baptist, and William Bennett, a Roman Catholic, were prominent neocon voices from the beginning. So were other Christians. "What are we," they might ask, "chopped liver?"
The Jewish neocons understood what the majority of Jews who vote Democratic didn't — that Jews and Evangelical Christians held many things in common, among them an admiration and affection for Israel.
Such definitions and ideological attitudes are amply documented in the political history of the second half of the 20th century, but the neocon label resurfaces today as many journalists and pundits identify the neocons as a new generation driving the foreign policy of George W. Bush.
It's a label that doesn't quite fit, since those credited with influence are hardly "neo" anything. For the most part, the label is attributed to second-generation conservatives. Some are sons of the Scoop Jackson Democrats whose fathers have the last name of Podhoretz and Kristol, but the label as accurately understood has a much more inclusive intellectual base, including, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney; his wife, Lynne; Condoleezza Rice; Don Rumsfeld; and Paul Wolfowitz, the hugely influential deputy defense secretary.
The term, however, is disingenuously bandied about at dinner tables and policy meetings in London and Paris and elsewhere, where it is colorfully coded to suggest a Jewish conspiracy working on the White House.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at tallahassee.com ...
"I have been amazed by the label of conspiracy-mongering around neocons," David Brooks, an editor at the Weekly Standard, tells the Observer. "I get it every day — the 'evil Jewish conspiracy.' The only distinction between 'neoconservative' and 'conservative' this way is circumcision. We actually started to call it the Axis of Circumcision."
Blame the cranks bottom-feeding in the fever swamps of paleo-conservatism.
If not for conspiracy-theory nitwittery they would have no purpose in life.
May this truth be called out for exactly what it is = anti-semitism.
Neo-con - A liberal one-world chickenhawk posing as a conservative.
The exact point Walker Percy made in his last novel, "The Thanatos Syndrome." Percy also made the point that it was just unlucky to persecute Jews. Look at what happened to the Nazis. Jews are God's chosen people (but as Teviav (sp?) said, "why can't You choose someone else occasionally?")
As for the rest of your comments, they are spot on. Those who hate Christians and Jews are tools in the hands of Satan - just as much as those who do evil in the name of Judaism or Christianity.
The Crusades weren't "perpetrated", they were Europe's reaction to Islamic expansionism.
Don't forget, until it was overrun by the Muslims the Holy Land was in large part Christian.
Furthermore, Europe itself was in danger of being overrun.
When it comes to the Crusades, the West has no need to apologize.
Per the chosen people: some wag once penned this bit of doggerel:
How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews
Presently an even more economical bit of doggerel replied
Goyim
Annoy 'im
:-)
Agreed.
Paleo-con - A former KKK and current anti-semite posing as a super patriot.
Too late...
Neocons: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol
Paleocons: Buchanan, Ron Paul, Taki Theocrap, David Duke
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