Pictures don't lie.
Posted on 05/26/2003 9:25:23 PM PDT by quidnunc
Hitting at what may be a new low in the "neocon" code-word game, Business Week magazine recently ran a "news" story that practically screamed "Jew" — without saying the word at all.
In an article titled "Where do the neocons go from here?" Richard Dunham attempts to explain to a lay audience what a neocon is and where the "movement" is headed. As anyone who's participated in various political and policy struggles inside the Beltway over the past few years can attest, this is no small feat, as the word neocon has meant many things to many people at many different times. It wasn't too long ago, lest we forget, that to be a neocon meant supporting John McCain for president in 2000, which could have led a casual observer to conclude that the "neo" part meant "moderate."
But in the current era, there seems to be a strong tendency to use neocon as a label for someone who strongly supported the war in Iraq or to describe someone who is, well, Jewish. Mr. Dunham's Business Week piece at first only seems to be doing the former. Using neocon interchangeably with "superhawk," he further writes, "The close-knit intellectuals who make up the neoconservative movement have been called extremists, warmongers, American imperialists — and even a Zionist cabal." Eschewing the traditional news reporting practice of countering criticism with praise, Mr. Dunham allows those shockingly harsh adjectives to go unchallenged.
After laying the groundwork of neocons as superhawks, the Business Week piece informs readers that the key members of the movement who advise President Bush are "Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith and Defense Policy Board member Richard N. Perle." Fair enough. All three have, at various times, been labeled neocons. But then, Mr. Dunham draws an interesting distinction. He describes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney as "key allies," but not as "neocons." In the remainder of the article, former Reagan administration official Ken Adelman and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol are identified as other "neocons."
What's the difference between members of a supposedly ideological movement and their allies? After all, to agree with someone's ideology — and in the case of Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Perle, that's almost all the time in the foreign policy realm — would seem to make someone not just an ally but an actual subscriber to that ideology. Someone who supports lower taxes, smaller government and market-based solutions on the domestic front, for example, is not an ally of conservatives — he is a conservative.
So how do Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney not make the "neocon" cut in Mr. Dunham's mind, when the two Bush officials hold the very same worldview as the people labeled neocons? The only difference between the two categories is not one of ideology, but religion. Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Mr. Perle, Mr. Adelman and Mr. Kristol — the "neocons" (or "superhawks") — are Jewish. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney — the key allies (who interestingly were given no "super" in front of their "hawk" designation) — are not. Why did Mr. Dunham not list fellow ideological travelers such as Gary Schmitt, Max Boot or even Newt Gingrich? None is Jewish.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
To anyone who has taken the time to fully understand the worldview of so-called "neocons" like Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Perle, however, the word superhawk is silly. These two men in particular — regarded as visionaries by many, and who have inspired gentiles and Jews alike to follow in their ideological footsteps — believe freedom is a God-given right that cannot legitimately be denied by any government, just as our Founding Fathers believed. They don't believe in coddling dictators and they believe that the United States should engage freedom movements, not the dictatorships repressing them. What anyone, including Mr. Dunham, has failed to explain is what's so "superhawk"-ish about that.
In the case of liberals the beef is that we're not feeling the bad guys' pain and in the case of the paleo-cons it's that were not resignuing from the world and constructing Festung Amerika.
Thrilling. I don't suppose you'd bother to provide a link.
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/focus/f-news/906802/posts
How quaint - I'm a Neo-con from the first batch. People sick and tired of the likes of LBJ and the New left.
Which is the Liberal smear "Jewish" or "Republican"?
Personally, as an old-line Neo-con I have always supported Israel. Welcome Jewish brothers, the Neo-con "World Domination" meeting begins at 8:00 - you know where.
Sounds good to me.
The term neocon has been misused and abused by many of the obnoxious, howling crowd. A neoconservative, is a former liberal espousing political conservatism. Period.
If the GOP can get significant numbers of conservative Jews into positions of power within Congress, we will finally have enough success to turn the tide even further away from the leftwing establishment.
I'm just a guy that came over from the "Dark Side".
The term neocon has been misused and abused by many of the obnoxious, howling crowd.
You think. It does usually mean Jew or a real lazy definition of a War on Terror supporter when used by the peace in our whine, hate America, hate Bush, and the Saddam sycophant crowd.
A neoconservative, is a former liberal espousing political conservatism.
In today's use, it's used by the left and their useful idiots to divide the Conservative movement. It has lost its original meaning.
Not in my book, Sparta.
2. The lefties took the cue from Pat Buchanan's use of the word in a few articles about three months ago.
3. They are resitant to understanding events and policies on their own merits since such would not buttress support anti-American viewpoints.
4. Some American lefties later went out of their way to identify non-Jews as "neocons," for example Condi Rice - again, without asking them if they are "neocons."
5. A new tack has been floated to frame them - the title "Straussians." Strauss was a jew and I think that's a jewish sounding name.
6. Still, still, to date not one article shows me any time when any person was asked whether they are "neocons."
But I definitely agree with this:
".....freedom is a God-given right that cannot legitimately be denied by any government, just as our Founding Fathers believed...[I] don't believe in coddling dictators and...[I] believe that the United States should engage freedom movements, not the dictatorships repressing them."
If that, and an absolute support for the nation of Israel, makes me a 'neocon' so be it.
I think this is an important point. Neo-cons are very much concerned about "respectability" vis-a-vis the DC/NY axis. They want to get booked on "Meet the Press" and they want contracts from Simon and Schuster, and you're not going to get that kind of mainstream acceptance if you're espousing raw, undistilled populist conservatism.
A neocon does not want to be identified with Middle American rednecks -- you know, the unenlightened white folks who drive trucks and listen to country music. A neocon identifies with college-educated suburbanites.
Litmus test for neoconservatism: Call him a racist. He will react just like a circa-1965 liberal. He will vow that he is entirely colorblind. He will invoke the name and ideals of Martin Luther King. He will go into some version of the "some of my best friends are black" shtick. And he will hotly denounce the real racists who he says are the real problem.
The original neocons were Northern urban ethnics -- mainly Jews and Irish Catholics -- who resented the radicalism of the New Left and the McGovern wing of the party, and were also tired of the inept liberalism of LBJ/Humphrey Democrats. Kristol, Podhoretz, Moynihan: all supported Kennedy in '60; all supported Nixon in 1972.
You can judge a tree by its fruit, and it is important to note the difference between "movement" conservatives -- who supported Goldwater in 1964 -- and neoconservatives, who were all on the original LBJ bandwagon. The neocons had, in 1964, viewed Goldwater as a primitive lunatic. Also note that none of the neocons supported Wallace in 1968. It was the "Wallace vote," as it was then known, that gave Nixon his historic 1972 landslide. Carter got the "Wallace vote" in 1976, but Reagan got it in both 1980 and 1984. The "Wallace vote" was a term that was really interchangeable with "Reagan Democrats" -- working middle-class whites who felt they were ignored by Democrats' focus on minority interests in the 1960s.
Times change. The original Wallace voters/Reagan Democrats are all now either dead or on Social Security. The issues that motivated them -- dope-smoking, draft-dodging hippies and school busing, for example -- are obsolete. A new generation of voters, who don't really remember or care about the issues of the Sixties, now dominate American politics. The partisan alliances have completely shifted. White working-class Democrats (like the white working-class itself) are a dying breed. The modern Democratic Party is a coalition of blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, feminists, environmentalists and idiots like Michael Moore. There is no longer anything for Republicans to gain by appealing to the New Deal sentiments of old FDR voters -- they're all in the nursing home or the grave.
The Republican Party, in trying to re-position itself as the New Establishment, has essentially surrendered all the ground that "movement" conservatives contested in 1964. There is no longer any serious talk of Reagan's "New Federalism" or the idea of abolishing the federal Department of Education, as the "Contract With America" revolutionaries promised.
The revolution is over, and liberalism won. "Neocons" are the people whose job it is to convince ignorant Americans that yesterday's liberalism is really conservatism. I am not so easily fooled.
Flight 847? His body lay on the tarmac for two hours before the Shiite hijackers would let anyone come get him. I remember that.
That really is the most ridiculous statement I've ever read. There are tons of columns written by such as NRO writers to disprove that. It sounds like you have a beef with intellectuals, period. Conservative intellectuals, and that includes former liberals as well as never-liberals, greatly value the intelligent common sense of Americans, whatever their academic or economic standing.
Try as the might, but they will never divide us neo paleo macro poly meta archeo pluri pan mono multi myria meso medio mani oligo hypo veteri plaid seni iso syn ultra ceno uni novi ideo intimi omni nema staunch paro idio mega ortho para peri pachy proto pseudo sym tauto hypno teleo duct-tape syl real auto hyper holo RINO exo endo dys caco amphi allo acro ambi ante apo sover contra de intus super broken-glass circum narco extra conto ento infra intra trans post con retro sub ecto supra inter meth per socio conservatives. We are united.
Pictures don't lie.
Yeah, just so long as none of those "average Americans" move into their neighborhoods -- drives down property values, you know.
Look, David Frum -- who kicked up this whole mess last month -- is a Canadian who graduated from Harvard and Yale. I don't doubt he might hypothetically "value the intelligent common sense of Americans," if he actually were ever to meet any of them. As it is, his entire experience with "America" involves Cambridge, Mass., New Haven, Conn., New York, N.Y., and Washington, D.C. Not exactly red-state America, if you get my drift. Frum loves Americans in the abstract, but I don't know that he loves any Americans in the particular.
Frum is, in the words of a Great American, a pointy-headed intellectual who can't park his bicycle straight. And the same pretty much goes for that whole crowd. None of them gives a good g*dd@mn about the interests of ordinary Americans. They don't even know what the interests of ordinary Americans are, because they don't know any ordinary Americans! The last time any of them spoke to a person without a college degree, they said something like: "Could I get the au jus on the side, please?" or "Don't forget to trim the hedges, Jose."
Regardless of their actual policies, it cannot be denied that the neoconservative Establishment is far, far removed from mainstream America. Take, for instance, the silly little dribble in National Review a few months ago about "crunch cons"? Remember that ridiculous bit of nonsense? We got boys dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, unemployment and gas prices are up, and National Review -- the Cadillac of conservative journals -- is wasting precious ink on the values of conservatives who eat organic food and are concerned about old-growth forests.
Yeah, Rich Lowry and NRO, vox populi -- make me laugh!
Actually, Jaffaite (after Harry V. Jaffa) might be a more specific term.
"Excellent" in what sense? It was shallow, deceptive and self-serving -- like just about everything Jonah's every written.
That was the goal of PC, and it's the drive behind demonizing 'neocons', or 'Straussians.' It's all targeted toward making conservatives fearful of speaking out.
What we have to keep in mind is that it is our conservatism.....not our religion, or our ethnicity, or our race, or our sex, or our jobs, or our economic status, or, or anything other than our conservatism......that draws the Left's hate. And their fear of us.
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