Free Republic

Between 2002 and 2008, the Left in America maintained a consistent assault against President George W. Bush which included a number of pejoratives, most notably calling him a “NeoCon.” Even my Democrat friends would look me straight in the eye and say, “Bush… that, that NeoCon!” And I would reply, “Wait! What exactly is a NeoCon?” And they didn’t know. All they knew was that it wasn’t good. But where are all those Democrats now that Barack Obama is in office? Because Obama is the greatest NeoCon of all.

I was born to Jehovah's Witness parents. When I became a teenager, I began to question that worldview. At the age of 17, I disassociated from the religion and went my own way. Over the years which have followed, my paradigm has developed according to newly acquired knowledge and experience. It continues to develop. I hope it never stops developing. Due to this background, I have a tremendous respect for the humility required to reconsider a publicly established position in light of new evidence. David Horowitz recently did so in a post denouncing nation-building. He expressed well-informed doubts regarding the...

Nashville's Belmont University, whose Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business sired Brad Paisley, Trisha Yearwood, Josh Turner and other prominent music figures, has been criticized by the Curb College's namesake himself for forcing out a soccer coach on the grounds that her public admission of homosexuality conflicts with the school's Christian identity. Mike Curb, who heads Curb Records, assailed the school's decision in a letter to Belmont's faculty senate, a group that also opposes the coach's severance. The full text of Curb's letter was published in Nashville's daily newspaper, The Tennessean. "Belmont's Curb College is the largest stand...

By the middle of 2003, as it became clear that the American invasion of Iraq would result not in a quick “mission accomplished” but a long, bloody occupation, a certain narrative of what went wrong began to take root in some precincts of the anti-war left. The decision to invade Iraq, this story went, was the result of the government falling under the sway of a dangerous ideology, called neoconservatism. The neocons, as they were often derisively called, believed in the naked assertion of American power—in a kind of imperialism, really, which gave America the right to invade other countries...

Last night, President Obama did something amazing. He delivered -- dare I say it? -- a rather neoconservative speech, in the sense that neoconservatism has argued for aggressive American involvement in the world both for the world's sake and for the sake of extending American freedoms in order to enhance and preserve American security. Perhaps Obama did not even realize it, but when he said that "as the leader of the free world, America will do more than just defeat on the battlefield those who offer hatred and destruction -- we will also lead among those who are willing to...

Karl Keating and the rest of that cast have always left a bad taste. Also saw this on Catholic Caveman, so, here is the story:

Last week, Oliver Miles, Britain’s former ambassador to Libya and a pillar of the country’s foreign policy establishment, put his thinking cap on, put pen to paper and came up with the following thoughts in a column in the Independent newspaper about the presence of the esteemed historians Martin Gilbert and Lawrence Freedman on the board of the UK’s latest Iraq Inquiry: “Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism,” he said. “…if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should...

Allow me to cut past the prologue and skip to the climax: we are ignored because we have allowed ourselves to be ignored. We are ignored because we have bought into the lie that our total civic duty is fulfilled on election day. We are ignored because we have allowed our ire to disperse through a radiator of infotainment and token political involvement which do nothing to slow the gears of despotism. We are ignored because we are too busy, too cynical, or too lazy to get involved in a meaningful way. We are now seeing the results. My challenge...

According to his obituary in the NY Times, Irving Kristol once felt intimidated among NY intellectuals when he found himself seated with Mary McCarthy on one side, Hannah Arendt on the other, and Diana Trilling across from him. This standard—of intellect, to say nothing of other allures—was very much relaxed by the time he found himself placed next to me at a dinner at the Lehrman Institute in Manhattan in the mid-1980s. Determined to upset his likely expectation of me—I having hung onto a version of Trotskyism many years after he had discarded it—I inquired politely about his time in...

Professor John J. Mearsheimer states… Fortunately, there is a strategy that has proved effective in the past and could serve again today: “offshore balancing.” It’s less ambitious than President Bush’s grand plan to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, but it would be much better at protecting actual U.S. interests. The United States would station its military forces outside the region. And “balancing” would mean we’d rely on regional powers like Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to check each other. Washington would remain diplomatically engaged, and when necessary would assist the weaker side in a conflict. It would also use...

I have always liked Gary Hart, and, when I have met him, came away impressed that he was a thoughtful person. That said, he has a long diatribe against John McCain, in which he falls into the now tired condescending trope of the sinister neocons who, as quasi-neo-Nazis, took over a clueless George Bush: Historians of early 21st century American politics will remark the degree to which radical forces, usually called neoconservatives, perverted language as recommended by the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany... Open up entire electronic networks, such as Fox, and chains of radio stations, such as Clear...

He's a Muslim. He was sworn into office on the Koran. He doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. His pastor is an anti-Semite. He's a tool of Louis Farrakhan. He's anti-Israel. His advisers are anti-Israel. He's friends with terrorists. The terrorists want him to win. He's the Antichrist. By now you've probably seen at least some of these e-mails and articles about Barack Obama bouncing around the Internet. They distort Obama's religious faith, question his support for Israel, warp the identity and positions of his campaign advisers and defame his friends and allies from Chicago. The purpose of the smear...

IN 1972, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was looking for a conservative columnist for his left-leaning Op-Ed page. At a charity dinner, he wound up sitting next to William Safire, the Nixon White House speechwriter who coined Spiro Agnew’s famous denunciation of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” They soon had a deal. But, as described in “The Trust,” the authoritative history of the family that has controlled The Times for more than a century, Sulzberger neglected to involve John Oakes, his cousin and the editor of the editorial page, in the decision. Oakes...

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...

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...

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, [...] the Project for the New American Century issued a letter to the president calling for a dramatic reshaping of the Middle East as part of the "war on terror". [...] the group's remarkable string of successes has gradually given way to a steady decline [...] events in the Middle East seemed to be going their way, at least during the first few months of Bush's second term. The unexpectedly smooth Iraqi elections in January 2005, the outbreak of the "Cedar" revolution in Lebanon (and other "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan), and...

It's blocked, but here is the URL - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612

Democrats are outraged over President Bush's new series of national security speeches. There he goes again, politicizing the war. The Democratic leadership obviously believes the president should muzzle himself so close to the November elections because what is important for national security might also help Republicans, and that must be avoided at all costs. Democrats are furious over Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion this week, in which he compared today's appeasers to those of the World War II era and warned that we mustn't turn a blind eye to today's terrorists like many did to yesterday's Nazis....

More noteworthy than Ned Lamont's defeat of Joseph Lieberman is the loony left's and Democratic leadership's puffed-up reaction to it. I say give them more rope and let them completely hang the party they've hijacked. Many are acting surprised at the Democratic Party's readiness to throw Lieberman overboard. They shouldn't be. Lieberman's 90 percent liberal voting record isn't good enough for the monomaniacal antiwar fringe. Complete obedience is required. No belligerence toward terrorists can be tolerated; all venom must be reserved for President Bush and the neoconservative cabal. While Joe Lieberman was good enough in 2000 to join Al Gore...

Karl Weiss: Bible followers mess up U.S. A letter to the editor Dear Editor: Everything Sen. Joe Lieberman says or does is for Israel. The man is a Zionist. Jews and evangelicals like Bush just love this person and it ALL goes back to that make-believe book called the Bible.Our government has been taken over by people who believe in fairy tales and mankind has been set back hundreds of years because of this. Stem cell research, birth control and cancer cures have all been stopped by these idiots. Ignorance rules in these United States. Karl Weiss Pardeeville Published: July...