Free Republic

My granddaughter has been accepted as a summer intern for "shadow Senator" Paul Strauss. Do any of you know this man and his demeanor? I realize he is a strong Democratic/labor/TeachersUnion man. He also is very close to Elenor Holmes Norton. It seems the only internships for the summer left are those on the left . . .

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Peter E. Haas Sr., an heir of Levi Strauss & Co. who helped build the jeans company into a socially conscious clothing empire, has died. He was 86. Haas died of natural causes Saturday in his San Francisco home, company spokesman Jeff Beckman said Sunday. A great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, Haas continued the tradition of the jeans pioneer, teaming up with his older brother, Walter A. Haas Jr., to transform the small maker of Western apparel into one of the world's most famous clothing brands during his 60-year career with the company. "Throughout his career and...

The conservative Chicago theoretician was the source of Ozzie Guillen's baseball philosophy.

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

I had hoped to avoid being dragged into the Strauss/Nietzsche fracas, but then Jonah had to go taunt me by suggesting an affinity between Weber grillers and Nietzsche. Jonah--that's Max Weber you've got in your head next to Nietzsche, not Weber grills! And certainly not me! See if you get invited to my next BBQ! Three points need to be raised. First, in my opinion no American conservatives today, or ever, have been Nietzscheans (with the possible exception of Bloom and a handful close to him, and they won't admit it). Second, Strauss was not a Nietzschean. However, thirdly, Strauss...

Former US President Jimmy Carter unleashed a fierce attack against the Israeli and American governments in his speech at the Geneva Initiative's ceremony in Switzerland. Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, blamed US President George W. Bush for anti-American sentiment and worldwide terror. "Bush's inordinate support for Israel allows the Palestinians to suffer," Carter said. "This is a source of anti-American sentiment in the world and encourages terror." Carter said Israel's settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the security fence are the main obstacles to peace. He called repeatedly for the return of Palestinian refugees to the...

University of Pennsylvania political science professor Anne Norton has just published a most revealing exposé on the neocon cabal entitled Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. Distributed by the Yale University Press, it is the work of a true "insider" who nevertheless does not consider herself to be a Straussian. "I am the student of Joseph Cropsey," Professor Norton writes on the first page, referring to the prominent student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. She continues, "I am the student of Ralph Lerner, who was the student of Strauss. I studied with Leon Kass and...

Quite a few of President Bush's critics maintain that since some prominent members of the administration and their defenders are known to be former students of Leo Strauss or of Straussians, one can trace Bush's foreign policy to Strauss's political ideas. Straussians in Washington tend to be neoconservatives, and, in foreign policy, prominent neocons like William Kristol and Robert Kagan advocate a policy of "benevolent hegemony." In their argument, a benign American imperialism is justified for two reasons. First, it provides security against foreign attack; that is, it delivers "strategic benefits." But their real enthusiasm is reserved for its second...

I usually write about theater in Friday's Wall Street Journal, but I made a special guest appearance on this morning's editorial page. The occasion was the opening of Embedded, Tim Robbins' new play about Gulf War II, which he blames on the political philosopher Leo Strauss, quoting chapter and verse to prove his contention that the war was started for nefarious reasons by a cabal of Strauss' neoconservative disciples in the Bush administration (including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz). There's just one little problem—the quote in question is totally bogus. And that's not even the worst part: Strauss’ complex political...

January 19, 2004 issue Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative Appetite for Destruction Neoconservatives have more in common with French revolutionaries than American traditionalists. By Claes G. Ryn During his recent visit to England, President Bush enunciated a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” He pledged, “We will consistently challenge the enemies of reform and confront the allies of terror.” The speech was yet another sign that a new and hugely ambitious foreign policy, conceived by intellectuals many years ago, is being implemented. For those who have been the most influential in shaping the Bush administration’s foreign policy,...

Anyone up for a discussion on the conservative philospher's influence on the administration?

The only way to begin to understand Leo Strauss’s political thought is by studying his writings. This may seem a simple rule of common sense. Yet a glance at the current controversy over Strauss’s supposed influence on contemporary American politics and foreign policy suggests that this rule is easily ignored. The controversy turns on a legitimate question: “What was Strauss up to?” - or, more precisely, “What was Strauss’s intention?” But it would be misleading to attempt to understand Strauss by ascribing to him an influence, whether beneficial or nefarious, on current policy debates, and then inferring from the alleged...

Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq. What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to...

THE NEW YORK TIMES, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973. On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians...

<p>The New York Times and The New Yorker go off the deep end.</p> <p>"Just weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began nationwide circulation of 400,000 copies of the Children of Satan dossier, exposing the role of University of Chicago fascist 'philosopher' Leo Strauss as the godfather of the neo-conservative war party in and around the Bush Administration, two major establishment publications have joined the exposé."</p>

Ever since the New York Times published a long article explaining that most of the architects of the Bush foreign policy are "Straussians," more and more journalists have been asking the question, "What the heck is a Straussian?" A number of common principles have emerged after these writers have examined the writings of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neoconservativism. Straussian Principle #1 is the perversion of the idea of natural rights, as understood by John Locke and the American founding fathers. The natural law tradition holds that man possesses natural rights to life, liberty, and property and that the state...

  Neo-Conservatism Explained by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Commentators across the spectrum have finally clued in to neo-conservatism as the intellectual framework of the Bush administration. We are suddenly faced with long think pieces on the role of political philosopher Leo Strauss in influencing the architects of the Iraq war and Bush's governance in general. We are also learning about the ideological path taken by former college Trotskyites into the Republican Party of the 1970s. It's an instructive example of tenacity and dedication in translating ideas into practice. Along with the political victory of the neocons (by victory I...

<p>The late Leo Strauss has emerged as the thinker of the moment in Washington, but his ideas remain mysterious. Was he an ardent opponent of tyranny, or an apologist for the abuse of power?</p> <p>ODD AS THIS MAY SOUND, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now ascendant in George W. Bush's Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had journalists pore over Strauss's work and trace his disciples' affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.</p>

Straussians vs. Paleoconservatives by Paul Gottfried Having received a note from an inquiring graduate student, Mitchell Young, who is "banging out a Master’s thesis" at San Diego State, and cannot comprehend why I have insisted that Straussians and paleos are irreconcilably divided, I wish to offer the following friendly clarification. At the very least my explanation may be help to relieve the "cognitive dissonance" that Mitch has complained about, and which has been produced by my apparent inability to distinguish the disciples of Leo Strauss and neoconservatives. A German-Jewish classicist who fled to the US in 1938, Strauss (1899-1973) drew...