Free Republic

Despite George W. Bush's many failures as president, in one area he was an unqualified success: demonstrating the impossibility of big-government conservatism. For decades, clever pundits and Republican apparatchiks have been touting this self-evident oxymoron as the path to political success. After eight years in practice, it has proved to be the road to irrelevance and ruin - politically as well as financially. Ideologies that celebrate the swollen state while traveling under the name "conservative" are nothing new. As the Old Right faded into the modern American conservative movement, Eisenhower-era "Modern Republicans" preached a "dynamic conservatism" that was to be...

The editors of two of the country's most powerful publications, conducting a gloat-fest over the corpse of Reaganism last week, described their idea of true conservatives: Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham asked a remarkable question of Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, in New York's Greenwich Village Wednesday evening: "Isn't Barack Obama the most significant Burkean in American politics today?" "Burkean" refers to Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British parliamentarian who sympathized with the freedom-loving revolution in America while vehemently opposing the anarchistic revolution in France. Tanenhaus, author of an impressive biography...

... "Irving Kristol was an intellectual giant who played a major role in developing the anti-communist arguments that led to the defeat of the Soviet Union," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Times. ... ... Known as the godfather of neoconservatism, Mr. Kristol was a youthful radical who went from embracing communism in his 20s to attacking it publicly in his 30s. In subsequent years, he became an equally forceful advocate of free-market economics, including the supply-side tax cuts enacted during the Reagan administration and dismantling much of the so-called welfare state. Neoconservatism was a label originally bestowed...

Irving Kristol, 89, a forceful essayist, editor and university professor who became the leading architect of neoconservatism, which he called a political and intellectual movement for disaffected ex-liberals like himself who had been "mugged by reality," died Friday at the Capital Hospice in Arlington. He spent much of his career in New York but had for the last two decades lived at the Watergate apartments in the District. He died of complications from lung cancer, said his son, William Kristol, the founder and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

Rosie O'Donnell, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and James von Brunn have a lot more in common than not. All have a problem with "Neocons" and two of the three are clear that they have a fear of the power of Jews ... and believe that 9/11/2001 was not the result of jetliners being hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center in New York City. Imagine that! An odd observation and investigation shows intersections of thought and philosophy shared by these three people and it begins to suggest that they all were reading from the same prayer book. The issues in...

Andrew Sullivan has decided that he now knows the truth about neoconservatism: "We patiently listened as neocons told us that the Palestinians are too dysfunctional a people ever to have democratic rights or their own state, but that the the ancient sectarian warfare of Iraq can be transformed in a few years!"

Neoconservatives are elated with Obama's appointments, recognizing that the new guard is very much like the old.  Some traditional conservatives were hoping that with Bush leaving office and Obama coming in, the neocons would be put out of power, but sadly, they're not going away that easily. Contrary to the public's perception of President-elect Obama as the peace candidate, he has been extremely hawkish in his appointments. The selection of Joe Biden as a running mate was a sign that the globalist and hawkish wing of the Democratic Party (where the neocons originally hailed from) was going to be strongly...

The rise of the neoconservatives within the GOP has not only discredited the Grand Old Party but tarnished the image of conservatism. The Republican party suffered an overwhelming electoral defeat this past November. The establishment media were all too quick to proclaim that conservatism is dead and we're now at the dawn of a liberal age. Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wrote in Time magazine that we are facing the dawn of a "new liberal order." In making this proclamation, Beinart overlooks the fact that the public was not voting...

The Death of Neoconservatism by David Donadio November 20, 2008 American presidential elections are often best read as verdicts on the administrations that precede them, and in that light, Barack Obama’s victory on November 5 marks the long-overdue death of neoconservatism. I doubt the Democrats are going to build an everlasting majority with disaffected conservative realists, or even hang on to those realists forever – let’s wait a few months until the showroom shine fades from Obama’s administration, or just a few minutes if it turns out the Clintons really are going to enjoy a third term over at the...

If you're interested in figuring out where the Republicans went wrong and why they no longer have any connection to anything that could properly be called conservatism, I recommend this fine essay by Paul Gottfried in the latest issue of The American Conservative. Here is how Gottfried debunks the notion that John McCain is in any way the philosophical successor to the man who preceded him in representing Arizona in the U.S. Senate: "McCain may hold the Senate seat that was once Goldwater's, but he is in no way his philosophical successor. The 2008 election was a contest between two...

BY now you've probably heard: The GOP is becoming too regional, too white, too old to compete nationally. Democrats look like the cast of "Rent," while Republicans look like diehard fans of "Matlock" and "Murder, She Wrote." Fine. The GOP needs to win over more Hispanics, young people, suburban women. That sounds plausible. But what does "win over" mean? To listen to many pundits, it means Republicans must become Democrats. The GOP has become too socially conservative, and if it wants to win the support of mainstream voters, it will need to become more socially liberal. If only the party...

Another part of Bush's speech dealt with the supposed spread of "democracy" in the Muslim world: "He [Bush] also offered plenty of praise for democratic advances, naming countries like Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco and Jordan. 'The light of liberty is beginning to shine,' he said." Is he crazy? In Turkey, the so-called "light of liberty" is undoing Kemalism, putting the secularists in the universities, the judiciary, and the army, under great pressure, and bringing Islam back, step by grim step, as Erdogan and now Gul, cleverly backed by all kinds of people, including the shadowy millionaire Fethullah Gulen, probe and...

"Frankly, I can be wrong, but I do not think that America can carry to the presidency a candidate as on the left as Barack Obama." Norman Podhoretz, May 14, 2008 Check the link for the complete interview on Iraq, Iran, the WoT, neoconservatism and US presidential elections.

From our earliest days, Americans have supported the promotion of democracy around the world, often by force and without undue heed to international institutions. William Henry Seward, a founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln's secretary of State, argued that it was America's mission to lead the way "to the universal restoration of power to the governed." A generation earlier, statesman Henry Clay championed the idea that America had the "duty to share with the rest of mankind this most precious gift" of liberty. Both world wars, Korea and Vietnam would be inconceivable without accounting for America's dedication to the...

I know there are a few competing priorities, but at this moment in our long life as a nation I can think of no more urgent task for Congress than to pass emergency legislation banning the further use of the word “neocon.” At least until a committee of deep thinkers can get together to agree on a commonly accepted definition. (A starting point may be the Robert Kagan essay I referred to in an earlier posting.) Until that happens, its use will only continue to muddy and obfuscate the debate over otherwise important issues. Exhibit 2,348,485 of this terminological confusion...

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...

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...

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...

The Giuliani candidacy has polarized politically conservative Christians and Jews — perhaps less over Rudy’s position on abortion than, more subtly, over a question of emphasis. Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s star foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who would not rule out supporting a third party candidate if Giuliani gets the nomination? To adjudicate the dispute, I propose an appeal to the part of the Bible on whose authority Jews (like myself) and Christians...

Have America's troubles in Iraq sounded the death knell of neoconservatism, the political ideology that is said to be behind our presence there? Over the past year, there has been no shortage of voices saying so, many with undisguised glee. Abroad, the Times of London heralded "the end of an ideological era in Washington," while the Toronto Globe and Mail reported with satisfaction that neoconservatism has been "decisively wiped out." Observers here at home have agreed. To the historian Douglas Brinkley, Democratic electoral victories in November 2006 spelled "the death of the neoconservative movement," while at National Review Online John...

Have America’s troubles in Iraq sounded the death knell of neoconservatism, the political ideology that is said to be behind our presence there? Over the past year, there has been no shortage of voices saying so, many with undisguised glee. Abroad, the Times of London heralded “the end of an ideological era in Washington,” while the Toronto Globe and Mail reported with satisfaction that neoconservatism has been “decisively wiped out.” Observers here at home have agreed. To the historian Douglas Brinkley, Democratic electoral victories in November 2006 spelled “the death of the neoconservative movement,” while at National Review Online John...

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...

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...

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz faces mounting criticism from directors of the international lending organization, who say he relies on a coterie of political cronies who are advisers with little expertise in development while driving away seasoned managers. Half of the bank's 29 highest-level executives have departed since Wolfowitz, the former US deputy defense secretary and an neo-conservative architect of President George WBush's invasion of Iraq, took office in June 2005. Among them was Christiaan Poortman, vice president for the Middle East and a 30-year World Bank veteran, who left in September after resisting pressure to speed up the pace...

Steady condemnation from conservatives for the Iraq Study Group report may be providing some cover to the Bush administration as it completes its own review of strategy in Iraq, apparently with little enthusiasm for the panel's prescription of U.S. troop withdrawal and dialogue with Syria and Iran. The criticism of the panel, co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), has burst forth from the leading institutions of the right: the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard; conservative talk radio; and scholars at some of...

RUSH: To the phones we go. We'll start in West Palm Beach here across the bridge. This is Chris, and welcome, sir. Nice to have you with us. CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for having me here. Hey, it amazes me. I don't think George Washington wanted war with the British as badly as you want war with Iran, and this troubles me that you have somehow got the American people to believe that if we didn't attack Iraq and if we don't go into Iran, somehow Al-Qaeda is going to come over here and conquer Washington, DC. Now, I don't...

Surrender as 'Realism' Retreat would win us no friends and lose us no adversaries. Foreign policy realism is ascendant these days, we are told. This would be encouraging if true, because our foreign policy must indeed be realistic. But what passes for "realism" today has very little to do with reality. Indeed, if you look at some of the "realist" proposals on the table, "realism" has come to be a kind of code word for surrendering American interests and American allies, as well as American principles, in the Middle East. Thus, the "realists" advise us to seek Syria's help in...

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | While leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who wanted a particular place searched: "The vice president wants to know if you've looked at this area. We have indications — and here are the geocoordinates — that something's buried there." Kay and his experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of Lebanon. This story from Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" would be hilarious were it not about war. The vignette is...

/begin my translationUT Arlington Students, "to burn N. Korean flag and Kim Jong-il's effigy"Students at University of Texas, Arlington, notified the school authorities that, on Sept. 11, the fifth anniversary of 9/11 attack, they will hold a rally in which they will burn N. Korean and Iranian flags, along with the effigies of N. Korea leader Kim Jong-il and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Texas local papers reported that students want 'to hold a rally for one and a half  hour in front of the main campus building since N. Korea and Iran have become deadly threats to U.S. and world...

"President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Fascist Tool." So ran the New York Times headline on Oct. 26, 1948, after what Dewey biographer Richard Norton Smith called a "particularly vitriolic attack in Chicago" by Harry Truman. What brings this to mind is President Bush's assertion that we are "at war with Islamic fascism" and "Islamo-fascism." After the transatlantic bomb plot was smashed, Bush said the plotters "try to spread their jihadist message I call – it's totalitarian in nature, Islamic radicalism – Islamic fascism; they try to spread it, as well, by taking the attack to those of us who...

Neoconservatism: Why We Need It is a vigorous defence of the most controversial political philosophy of our age. In this timely book Douglas Murray explains what neoconservatism is, in theory and practise. He defends it against its critics and explains why – despite the noisy claims of its opponents - neoconservatism is good. Murray is the first person to make a sustained case for why neoconservatism is relevant to Britain. And neoconservatism, it is argued, is the future not just of the British Conservative party, but of any political party committed to the ideals of freedom at home and abroad....

Time Magazine in its July 8 issue makes a rather bold statement declaring "The end of cowboy diplomacy" of George W. Bush. These type headlines are seen during the slow news season of August or September in Washington when the U.S. Congress is in recess and not much is happening. But there is no lack of high drama right now. Kim Jong Il's decision to defy the United States by firing a series of missiles has a created a mini-crisis in the nation's capital and in East Asia. The next event of high interest is Iran's impending decision of this...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran knows what he wants: nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; suppression of freedom at home and the spread of terrorism abroad; and the "shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems." President Bush, too, knows what he wants: an irreversible end to Iran's nuclear weapons program, the "expansion of freedom in all the world" and victory in the war on terrorism. The State Department and its European counterparts know what they want: negotiations. For more than five years, the administration has dithered. Bush gave soaring speeches, the Iranians...

Senator John Kerry has been comparing the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and indicating that they are very similar; his conclusion is its time to get out. Not for the first time, Kerry is dead wrong. There are indeed similarities, but — not withstanding what we read and see in the media — there are important differences as well. Let me offer a blunt appraisal. It is not regarded as polite to mention it — almost no one does — but most of the grunts in Vietnam were draftees; in Iraq, they all volunteered. On the Vietnam Memorial in Washington...

"WHO TODAY IS CALLED a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?" Harvey Mansfield asked this question almost 30 years ago in the preface to his Spirit of Liberalism, and the answer was almost self-evident. This was during the Carter administration, and things haven't gotten better since. There have been some exceptions to the rule of liberalism's weakness, but these exceptions have been fleeting, and the rule seems stronger than ever in the America of 2006.Not so in Great Britain. There, Tony Blair has shown strength and confidence in defense of liberty, and it turns out he is...

Francis Fukuyama has been hailed in Britain and the US as a supporter of the Iraq war who has now courageously defected to the anti-war camp and shredded the neoconservative arguments justifying it. If that were so, it would be quite a coup. The American philosopher and political economist made his name in 1992 with his influential bestseller The End of History and the Last Man, written after the cold war and fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he argued that wars of ideology had ended in the permanent triumph of democratic capitalism. An early neoconservative, at 53 Fukuyama...

Francis Fukuyama's recent essay in the New York Times, "After Neoconservatism," isn't just a call for neo-realism in lieu of neoconservatism. It's a call for nothing in lieu of something. Admittedly, sometimes doing nothing is the best policy. But after 9/11, as we survey the threat of Islamic terror and rogue states, should we really settle for so little? After excoriating the real and imagined sins of neoconservatism, Fukuyama offers the following plan for reforming our foreign policy: 1) "In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to...

<p>Being someone of a liberal persuasion, it might come as a surprise that I not only sympathize with neoconservatives, I genuinely agree with much of what they have to say. Unlike traditional conservatism, neoconservative philosophy amounts to more than just “Leave us alone.” It inherently rejects both “Fortress America” isolationism and Kissingerian realism in favor of an activist foreign policy of promoting human rights and propagating democracy.</p>

E-mail Author Send to a Friend Version February 20, 2006, 7:23 a.m. Presidents, Today Good advice. By Alan Dowd For all their flaws and gaffes and imperfections, America's presidents have given us a treasure trove of good advice and wise counsel over the centuries. Perhaps some of their advice will help guide us through these unpredictable times. For those who are dubious about the spread of representative government, George Washington reminds us of the irresistible power and momentum of freedom: "Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." Burnishing their neoconservative credentials, albeit about...

On the evening of January 29, 2002, President Bush strode to the podium in Congress to deliver the State of the Union address. His speech was a triumph of triumphalism, with roars and applause punctuating nearly every sound bite. Fresh off a quick and massive victory in Afghanistan, Bush outlined his vision for U.S. foreign policy. Speaking firmly, almost with an auditory swagger, Bush told the public that the war on terrorism had given the United States a new mission. We would hunt down terrorists, destroy regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction, and spread freedom throughout the world. He called...

At a time that American “neoconservatives” are under almost daily attacks by a coalition of all those unhappy about the Bush presidency, one might think neo-conservatism is the last product anyone would want to market anywhere else. And, yet, here we have one of the rising stars of British conservatism offering a whole book to propose precisely such a product. As the British Conservatives choose a new leader they may also want to have a look at what this book, by Douglas Murray, offers to fill what he sees as the party’s ideological vacuum. “If the Conservative Party can adopt...

The nation that neocons most despise has followed their immigration prescription. American pundits have been crowing about how much better America is at handling minorities and immigrants than is France, which got what it had coming during the weeks of car-burning riots. As in France, where the political class seemed more interested in the riots’ impact on the 2007 presidential election than in stopping the destruction, few talking heads here were inclined to blame the rioting on the rioters. After all, the columnists feel, the North and West Africans setting cars on fire are just a bunch of lowbrow punks,...

Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement -- most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire -- a new spokesman is needed. If I were in the opposition camp, I would want a deeply patriotic, highly intelligent, distinguished establishment figure. I would want Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft has been obliging. In the Oct. 31 New Yorker he came out strongly against the war and the neocon sorcerers who magically foisted it upon what must have been a hypnotized...

Washington, according to some reports, feels like a city at war. A few days in the US capital are enough to reveal the splits, not just between Democrats and Republicans, but also the various factions on the right, squabbling for the president's fickle attention. Much depends on the outcome of these struggles. Several people I met, none of them even vaguely on the left, were convinced there would be no war. The president, they assured me, was backtracking. Others told me, with equal conviction, that Bush certainly would go to war. Then there are those who talk as if the...

<p>The White House said on Wednesday it was confident a Senate committee would back John Bolton for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but Democrats said they will make a compelling case that Bolton is unfit for the post.</p> <p>The White House said on Wednesday it was confident a Senate committee would back John Bolton for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but Democrats said they will make a compelling case that Bolton is unfit for the post.</p>

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERSFROM: GARY SCHMITTSUBJECT: Half Measures in Egypt According to press reports, Egypt’s parliament is likely to pass a constitutional amendment today that would allow opposition figures to run for president. This apparent democratic breakthrough, however, is undermined by the amendment’s stipulation that to be placed on a presidential ballot a candidate would need the approval of 300 members from various “elected” Egyptian government bodies – bodies now under the control of the sitting president, Hosni Mubarak.The decision by Egypt to take this half measure is the result of pressure put on President Mubarak by President Bush and Secretary...

IT WAS ONLY 7:15 a.m. on October 26, 2003, and Paul Wolfowitz was already thinking about Saddam Hussein. The deputy secretary of defense had been awake for just over an hour when he and two civilian Pentagon advisers walked into a large office for a briefing on electricity.Wolfowitz wasn't happy. The office was in one of Saddam's opulent palaces. Six months after the fall of Baghdad, there were still three-story busts of the former Iraqi leader perched atop the four corners of the massive structure. Virtually all of the images of the deposed dictator throughout Iraq had been defaced or...

ABOUT Q&A C-SPAN's New Interview Series Every Sunday night on Q&A, we introduce you to interesting people who are making things happen in politics, the media, education, and science & technology in hour-long conversations about their lives and their work. The show airs at 8pm & 11pm ET on C-SPAN each week, every week of the year. But if you miss a program, you can catch up on previously aired shows on this web site. Either stream the video at any time convenient to you, or read the accompanying transcript. Also, you can do a keyword search against all the...

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will ask the panel's Republican majority to delay a vote scheduled for Tuesday on the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, according to Democratic Senate officials. The Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, will urge Republicans to allow the panel more time to review allegations that Mr. Bolton has acted abusively toward subordinates and others, the Democratic officials said. However, the panel's Republican chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, plans to urge the panel to vote in favor of Mr. Bolton. "I do...

New allegations of bureaucratic bullying are unlikely to change minds on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee over whether to confirm John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Republican chairman said on Sunday. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana said he would press ahead with the committee vote set for Tuesday, while the leading Democrat on the panel, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, said Democrats were waiting for further responses from Bolton before deciding whether to demand more hearings. "Hopefully not, but we're waiting for Bolton's answers to find out whether or not he's giving us honest responses,"...