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While some might be undecided on who to vote for this coming Election Day, for others it’s a no-brainer. Although the news media would like us to believe otherwise, there is still an enormous political gap between the Left and the Right.

Obama campaign site’s outrage du jour: “Jewish neoconservatives” using “U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel” Contrary to the disclaimer “Content on blogs in My.BarackObama represents the opinions of community members and in no way should be interpreted as endorsed or approved by the campaign,” Barack Obama’s campaign can and does exercise editorial control over MyBO by removing content that it deems “objectionable” or “disrespectful.” The following outrage du jour pretty much speaks for itself. http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/theodoreziolkowski/gG55NG Off His Axis. (Comments by Ted-Zee-Man) Opinion Watch Joe Klein blogs for Time: “The notion that we could just waltz...

A number of friends of mine have commented on an odd phenomenon that they have observed-- conservative Republicans they know who are saying that they are going to vote for Barack Obama. It seemed at first to be an isolated fluke, perhaps signifying only that my friends know some strange conservatives. But apparently columnist Robert Novak has encountered the same phenomenon and has coined the term "Obamacons" to describe the conservatives for Senator Obama. Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a feature article, titled "Some Influential Conservatives Spurn GOP and Endorse Obama." In it they quote various conservatives on...

IN THE EVENT you haven’t noticed it’s a presidential election year. You can tell by the ever growing flurry of conspiracy theories—not just delicious new ones like Barack Obama’s being some kind of Manchurian Candidate for Jihad, Inc., but ones that, even if they’ve grown old and wormy by now, can be pulled off the shelf and re-issued as a brand-new congressional report. Like the 170-page piece of work just out of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The precarious burden of this report is that the evil crew in the White House systematically exaggerated the threat that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed...

Do you know the difference between a conservative and a neoconservative, or neocon? This is not just a question of semantics. It’s far more important than that. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the future of our country depends on understanding the crucial differences between the two philosophies – and rejecting the latter. All of this was brought home to me most forcefully when a longtime friend sent me a copy of the speech he delivered at the Constitution Party’s annual convention in Missouri last week. I’ll tell you more about John F. McManus and the organization...

So there I was, listening to a few of the major "architects" of the war in Iraq -- Paul Wolfowitz, formerly No. 2 man at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld; Douglas J. Feith, formerly No. 3 man at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld; Peter Rodman, another former senior adviser to Rumsfeld; and Dan Senor, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They had assembled at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., for a discussion of Feith's new book, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism," but what they were...

Obama's Sunday 2 24 08 speech to ~100 members of the Jewish Community in Cleveland ...It will serve as the BASIS for successful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is at the basis of the 'Neocon Wars for Israel' that BushCheney and the Israel Lobby have been having us fight. Obama has split the Likud/Neocon war criminals from Jews of Conscience everywhere and broken down the walls for ME Peace. Thank you, Barack, and Samantha - YAHOO!!! ...This is it - this is what we need - these are the conceptual underpinnings for the end of the 'war on terror'...

Rick Warren's book The Purpose-Driven Life is more than a major bestseller.  It's also the most prominent manifestation of a "seeker-sensitive" movement that's attempting, for all intents and purposes, to redefine evangelical Christianity. The seeker-sensitive movement is a close analogy to the contemporary conservative movement. In both cases, people who ought to be offering timeless truths that can save individuals and societies are instead using market research to craft a product that appeals to consumers, telling them what they want to hear rather than a truth that is initially painful but ultimately liberating.  Even if you are not a Christian,...

Vid from RidleyReport.com Is it "neoconservative" to spend ourselves into a military collapse? How will we bomb things if we can't buy the bombs? If you cherish our military adventures, take note: We're out of money and Dr. Paul's controlled drawdown may be the only way to prevent a collapse so complete it costs America her ability to project power. http://youtube.com/watch?v=nbFTicFF9eA

At some point in the very near future, the neoconservative moment will cease to exist and conservatism as we know it today will be relegated to the political fringe. The movement's ultimate demise isn't due to its inherent flaws, however (although it has many), but rather from Mother Nature's less poetic spouse, Father Time. The neoconservative moment is going to die of old age within the next quarter century. This is inevitable (and its not like Mr. Rove and Mr. Cheney are in great shape either). So the question now becomes, what takes over as the main rival to American...

In the foreign policy establishment, among progressives of all stripes, and even for significant segments of the conservative movement, "neoconservatism" has come to stand for all that has gone wrong in American foreign policy over the last seven years -- especially in Iraq. Yet much of the criticism misses the mark. For starters, it's worth noting that the president, vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state and the national security adviser all lacked neoconservative roots. And insofar as neoconservative thinkers influenced Iraq policy, the problem was not with neoconservative principles, but the failure to fully appreciate the implications of...

As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan. So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard...

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons By Jacob Heilbrunn Doubleday, 320 pages, $26 ...It is about a mindset, one that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism. . . . [H]owever much they may deny it, neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon, reflecting a subset of Jewish concerns." Some critics have questioned the predominant role played in the movement by Jews, and especially their unstinting support of Israel. Some have even suggested that the neocons' advocacy for war with Iraq was...

One current permathread on Big Orange is that Krugman and Obama are feuding or having a vendetta. Which, when you take a step back, is bizarre. That movement conservatives and Villagers like stone Bush enabler William Kristol, like David Brooks, Broderella, and Andrew Sullivan are all good with Obama isn’t even mentioned in passing by Obama’s fan base. And yet those same enthusiasts spend inordinate amounts of time vilifying Paul Krugman, a true progressive who was there for us from the earliest dark days of the Bush regime. Curious. What’s really happening? Krugman doesn’t have a problem with Obama; Krugman...

The Bush administration is no longer influenced by neocons. Instead, it's governing the way its predecessors have.Maybe 2008 will be the year when we will finally be rid of that vacuous belief that "the neocons" are in control of the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Habits are hard to break, particularly lazy ones, but if anyone bothered to look more closely, they would see that the United States has not really engaged in what we might call a neoconservative approach to the region since at least 2004, when the situation in Iraq took a sudden...

Things are so bad for Sen. Joseph Lieberman right now that in addition to suffering the endless slings and arrows of outrageous progressive politics and journalism, Al-Jazeera has taken to calling him a neocon. Now that's rich. He's called an independent, but continues to waddle and quack like a liberal Democrat, as he did recently at Torrington High School where he approvingly told students: "The government is going to affect your lives whether you decide to get in to affect it or not." And if lefties like Joe Lieberman get their way, government will affect people profoundly. He is shepherding...

More than seven months ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., claimed that Iraq was “lost.� But that was hardly the case. In fact, Sunni insurgents were just beginning to turn on al-Qaida and join us. So now, despite their noisy anti-war base, most leading Democrats quietly are backing away from their talk about bringing American troops in Iraq home on rigid timetables. Maybe they are learning that quitting Iraq now might be stupid politics since bad news — in fact, all news — from the front is making fewer and fewer headlines. Democrats know that Republicans will use clips...

Rudy Giuliani has made a "promise" not to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear capability, even if it requires U.S. military action. Though the U.S. Army is scrimping to meet recruitment goals, Rudy has pledged to add at least 10 new combat brigades. Speaking to an Atlantic Bridge conference in London, Rudy called for NATO expansion to include Japan, India, Australia, Singapore and Israel. Has Rudy thought this through? Why would Japan and Australia, each of which already has a U.S. commitment to come to its defense, commit to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia if it invaded Estonia?...

Not long ago, while visiting a friend at Oxford University, I found myself in a heated political discussion with a Scotsman. The subject of our dispute was the Iraq war, but the conversation turned toward the rise of latent anti-Semitism in once-respectable quarters of British opinion. Two years earlier, a story entitled “A Kosher Conspiracy?,” illustrated by a gold Star of David plunged into the heart of the Union Jack, graced the cover of Britain’s most prominent left-wing magazine, The New Statesman. Since then, the intellectual climate had only worsened. In response to my remark that many use the...

Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer. WE MUST bomb Iran. It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere. First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian...

Neocons can't help but slink around Washington, D.C. The Iraq War has given the neoconservatives—who favor the assertive use of American power abroad to spread American values—something of a bad name, and several of the Republican candidates seem less than eager to hire them as advisers. But Rudy Giuliani apparently never got that memo. One of the top foreign-policy consultants to the leading GOP candidate is Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the neocon movement. Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country's unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a...

One of the founding fathers of neoconservatism has privately urged President Bush to bomb Iran rather than allow it to acquire nucler weapons. Norman Podhoretz, who has joined Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser, held an unpublicized meeting with Bush last spring. "I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative," said Podhoretz. "I laid out the worst case scenario - bombing Iran - versus the worst consequences of of allowing Iranians to get the bomb." He also told Bush, "You have the awesome responsibility...

Justin Logan is a foreign policy analyst a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously remarked that the reason the White House ramped up the case for the Iraq War in September was that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." To judge from recent developments, Americans may look back on August 2007 as the month the country again turned toward war—with Iran. The same network of think-tank analysts, media outlets, and government officials who brayed for war in Iraq have set their...

It is not unreasonable to see the race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination eventually boiling down to the two men currently atop the GOP polls, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson. But if this happens, it will be a race between something more than just the men. It will be a battle between two distinctly different political philosophies. In Sunday's New York Daily News, the paper's Senior Correspondent David Saltonstall has authored a very revealing piece, Neocon hawks go all-out for Giuliani: They are officially known as Rudy Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisory board, but they also could be dubbed...

They are officially known as Rudy Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisory board, but they also could be dubbed something else: Neocons For Rudy. As in neoconservatives, the Republican faction that many see as among the most potent forces of Bush-era Washington - a well-funded, sharply analytical bunch that provided the ideological basis for invading Iraq and is now training its cross hairs on Iran. ---snip--- Giuliani's neocon roster includes Norman Podhoretz, a founding father of the movement; Charles Hill, a former foreign policy official for President Ronald Reagan and early backer of invading Iraq; Martin Kramer, an expert on Islam...

Those deep thinkers known as the neoconservatives like to make comparisons between the so-called "war on terror" and World War II. Very well then, here's a comparison. Six years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler had already been dead and gone for 2 1/2 years. By that time, the United States had raised and trained a military of 16 million. By Dec. 7, 1947, much of that force had been disbanded because the enemy had been so thoroughly defeated. But today, six years after the in cident that began the war on terror, Osama bin Laden is alive...

In looking at the Republican presidential candidates, one must ask, "Where is the A team?" Undeclared Fred Thompson is about as attractive as our Tommy; John McCain has embarrassed himself by kissing up to the demagogues on the Christian right and in so doing has traded his integrity and wide appeal for support from the lunatic fringe. (I once worried that I might vote for him. What was I thinking?) Mitt Romney? C'mon. This plane just won't fly, and serious people can't take Rudy Giuliani seriously. He won't get to second base. You can fake a resume for only so...

The most popular political slur of our time is the term "neocon." Politically engaged people of several ideologies use the term regularly and although they mean different things when they use it, the term is always intended to be an insult, like the terms "neo-Nazi," and "fascist," also favorite slurs of the same ilk using "neocon." I was first called a “neocon” by known Democratic Socialists upset by my writings in favor of America’s founding principles, Life, individual Liberty and the right to pursue Happiness in a free market society where all things are possible through individual achievement and reward....

The conservative movement that for a generation has been the source of the Republican Party's strength is in the dumps. THIRTY years ago Eric Hobsbawm, the dean of Marxist historians, chose as his subject, for the Marx memorial lecture, “The forward march of labour halted?” Things turned out even worse, for his side, than he had expected, thanks in part to the rise of a very American brand of conservatism. But are we now witnessing Mr Hobsbawm's revenge: the forward march of American conservatism halted? The right has dominated American politics since at least 1980. The Republicans' electoral successes have...

Last Friday, RealClearPolitics ran in its lead feature spot an essay by Gregory Scoblete, a free-lance writer in New Jersey. The essay had the headline “The GOP, Ron Paul & Non-Interventionism,” and was subsequently commented upon by, among others, guest-blogger Stephen Bainbridge on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Scoblete’s premise is that, just as Barry Goldwater’s failed campaign for president led the Republican party to embrace a limited-government philosophy, so too Ron Paul’s presidential campaign today, doomed though it is, will cause the GOP to embrace his philosophy of “non-interventionism.” Scoblete goes on at great lengths to “distinguish non-interventionism from isolationism.” He...

It's no wonder that sensible people just shake their heads and wonder what's wrong with the extremists of the far left when they come up with such off the wall nonsense and then try to pass it off as real political analysis. It just makes people who have even the slightest clue about what is really going on in the world double over with laughter. Such is the case with today's comedic attempt at political forecasting by nut in residence Ed Garvey of the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times. Columnist Garvey, in true nutroots fashion, thinks he has hit on the...

<p>It was inevitable: As the events of Sept. 11, 2001, fade into history, a disturbing number of conspiracy theories are gaining a toehold in our collective consciousness.</p> <p>As people who lived through that day and who now must make sense of what it means to live in a post-9/11 universe, we owe a commitment to the truth, both to those who perished and to ourselves.</p>

The neoconservatives are not riding high these days. The Iraq War--their number-one cause--is a failure, and the public has turned on the war, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, their top man in the Administration. Meanwhile, the so-called foreign policy realists appear to have the upper hand against the Administration's dwindling neocon cell in many internal policy squabbles. But the neocons are faring rather well when it comes to the presidential race. The leading GOP contenders are all die-hard fans of the war. And the newest star in the show--Fred Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee, onetime lobbyist and...

I frequently meet people who claim to have no idea of the difference between traditional conservatism and so-called "neo" conservatism. The other day I came upon an amusing song parody by a right- wing Vietnam vet named George Gould that goes a long way toward explaining the difference. It's titled "The Neocon National Anthem" and it is set to the tune of the Vietnam War-era hit "The Ballad of the Green Berets." ''Laptop warriors from the sky, "Fearless men who send others to die ''Men whose every word's a lie ''The brave men of the AEI." The AEI is the...

BILL MOYERS: The gentleman you're about to meet is someone I'm also meeting for the first time, although we started in national politics in the same year long ago. And therein lies a story. Back in 1960 Vic Gold and I were both young idealists, and we both voted for John F. Kennedy for president. Except for our awe of the Alabama football legend Bear Bryant, that's probably the last time we ever agreed on anything until now. What we have in common now is the belief that politics ain't what it used to be. I went on to serve...

~~~snip~~~ BC: Mr. Babbin, what is the central theme of In the Words of Our Enemies? Jed Babbin: The reason I wrote this book is to create a hawkish diplomacy. If that sounds like an oxymoron, it shouldn't. Churchill said of World War II that no war could more easily have been prevented by prompt action. Using the words of people such as Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and others I'm trying to get people to pay attention to potential enemies abroad and do what is necessary to either avoid war altogether or position America to win. BC: Isn't the acknowledgment...

Why has the left's poisoned love affair with it endured? Communism, like nuclear fuel, has a long afterlife. In country after country across Europe - from Russia to Albania - it has been discredited for its record in power. No government in Africa or the Americas subscribes to it except the Castro regime in Cuba. In Asia, the communist flag is waved in Vietnam and China without anyone denying that the economic future lies with capitalism; only North Korea stands by the basic precepts of Marxism-Leninism.What happened in the October 1917 revolution in Russia was an ideological bank robbery. Its...

The super-secret Bilderberg Group, an organization of powerful international elites, is set to meet this week somewhere in Turkey - but even the precise location is a mystery.

So-called "neo" conservatism has its roots in a Marxist view of the world. So it is not surprising that the neocons are trying to silence their most prominent conservative critic. That would be Texas Rep. Ron Paul. He outraged the neocons during the Republican presidential debate last week by advocating that the GOP return to the traditional conservative stance of noninterventionism. Paul invoked the ghost of Robert Taft, the GOP Senate leader who fought entry into NATO. And he also pointed out that messing around in the Mideast creates risks here at home. That prompted Rudy Giuliani to interrupt Paul...

The web is awash with conservative save-America blogs and the radio waves are saturated with "conservative" talk radio. Yet, politically, America just keeps moving further and further to the Left. Why is that? Let me tell you what I think: It's not the drive-by media. It's not the surgically modified perky-eyed twins Nancy and Hillary. And it's not even Teddy Kennedy or Harry Reid. No. It's us conservatives. We are the enemy. We are the enemy because we, frankly, are no longer conservative. We don't know what that means any more. We the People have bought the liberal lie that...

Just Breaking

  Question: How can a candidate for president raise US$23-million in three months--only slightly less than John McCain and Rudy Giuliani combined--and still register barely above zero in polls of members of his own party? That is the sad story of Mitt Romney, the movie-star handsome former governor of Massachusetts. Romney registers a dismal fourth in Republican opinion polls. Yesterday's LAT/Bloomberg poll put him at 8% approval among Republicans. A year ago, Romney looked like an emerging Republic star. He had rescued Massachusetts from a large budget deficit without raising taxes. And he had engineered a state-wide health insurance...

Introduction Rudy Giuliani has been barnstorming the nation, proclaiming himself a conservative and saying his hero is Ronald Reagan. Recent opinion polls suggest his campaign is striking a chord with the GOP?s rank and file, and New York?s neo-conservatives have taken the lead in promoting the former Mayor as the savior of the Republican Party, and heaven knows the GOP needs saving. But those polls also indicate that most Republicans around the country don?t really know where Mr. Giuliani stands on key issues, and those who do know are glossing over some very striking philosophical flaws?at least from a truly...

One of America's most influential neocons says President Bush is prepared to use military force against Iran if he believes it will acquire nuclear weapons. This past Sunday, Richard Perle, speaking in Israel at the Herzliya Conference, said he had no doubt of President Bush's intentions. "President George Bush will order an attack on Iran if it becomes clear to him that Iran is set to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities while he is still in office," Haaretz reported of Perle's remarks. Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as chairman of the Bush administration's Defense Policy Board. Perle...

When political leaders make drastic mistakes, accountability is delivered in the form of elections. That occurred in November when voters removed the party principally responsible for the war in Iraq. But the invasion would not have occurred had Americans not been persuaded of its wisdom and necessity, and leading that charge was a stable of pundits and media analysts who glorified President Bush’s policies and disseminated all sorts of false information and baseless assurances. Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, said a rueful John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. George W. Bush knows today whereof his predecessor spoke. For as he prepares to "surge" 20,000 more U.S. troops into a war even he concedes we "are not winning," his erstwhile acolytes have begun to abandon him to salvage their own tattered reputations. Case in point, the neoconservatives. As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen have confessed to Vanity Fair's David Rose their abject despair over how the Bushites mismanaged the war...

"Are there even any real conservatives left in America?" recently asked the one eager for knowledge. "There are," responded the wise man, "but they are often called paleoconservatives." What are paleoconservatives? Well, as Russell Kirk once said, they are the only real conservatives left in America. The whole "conservative movement" has moved so far to the Left, or rather has been "neoconned," that many so-called conservatives are "conservative" in name only. What do paleoconservatives believe? Like mainstream conservatives, paleos are often religious, or at least reverent of religion. They are opposed to secularism, opposed to "gay marriage," opposed to the...

RUSH: I mentioned yesterday David Duke was over in Iran attending the Holocaust-Didn't-Happen Convention sponsored by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and I said, "If you listen to David Duke, you can't tell the difference between him and Jimmy Carter," and a lot of people wrote me, "You can't say that! David Duke has become... You can't say that!" Yes, I can, and now I'm going to prove it. We have two side-by-side comparisons. First up, David Duke yesterday on PMSNBC live with Rita Cosby. She said, "The president of Iran just said a short time ago that the Zionist regime will soon...

NYYRC December Political Forum Thursday, December 14 Time: 7:30pm - 9:30pm Location: The Grand Hyatt New York, 109 East 42nd Street, in the Alvin Room, which is located on the Conference level Our Guest Speaker: Max Boot Max Boot is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also a weekly foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and many other publications. The award-winning author and former editorial page...

Next week, the Baker-Hamilton Commission will make its recommendations on U.S. Iraq policy, and Congress will begin hearings on defense secretary nominee and Cold War realist Robert Gates. Both events will reflect the failings of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. But even as a grudging acceptance of reality takes hold in Washington, the architects of the war are urging that we double down on the losing bet in Iraq. Amid spiraling sectarian violence, the leading advocates of invading Iraq seem now to have centered on an explanation for how their idea has driven that country to blood-soaked disaster: deposing...