Reader Upper West sends me news of David Brooks’ piece today: the Republican party has a fever and the only prescription is more neoconservativism. Bobo shrugs off Iraq:
Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement.
Well, that’s what happens when you fuck things up, people hate you and ignore you. If neocons wanted to be taken seriously, they should shut the fuck up about Islamofascism and stuck to broken window theories. To be sure I don’t think that neoconservatism is completely without intellectual merit, but its original sin came much earlier than the Iraq War. Here’s a great piece on how Saint Irving Kristol went all in on crackpot economic theories, such as supply side, which are accurately described as “anti-Chicago as well as anti-Cambridge, Mass”. Kristol’s justification:
Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…
By hitching their wagon to the supply side star, some neocons certainly amassed a lot of power and sometimes a lot of money. Just as Nickelback gets more pussy in an hour than you will get in a lifetime, Irving’s son Bill gets more for a speech than you make in a month.
A few years ago, I would have described people like the Kristols as whores, but that’s a poor comparison, of course: selling your body is nothing like selling your soul. And anyway, Bobo and some of the other more pathetic neocons (FWIW, there are some neocons I respect a bit) crave intellectual respect nearly as much as they crave money.
On balance, it seems unfair to dismiss them as witless greedheads, despite all the evidence.
Baud
You are a master of the simile.
Or is it an analogy?
chopper
somebody shoulda told that to the actual, you know, neoconservatives.
reflectionephemeral
I was just thinking earlier this afternoon that “todo esta bien, chev-re” is a really funny thing that people don’t talk about that much.
ETA: as to the substance of the post, I. Kristol’s definition of neoconservatism is astonishingly substance averse.
Baud
@chopper:
Hey, Brooks didn’t say U.S. domestic policy.
PeakVT
Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement.
Oh, fuck Bobo and that kind of re-writing of history in general. The group of people who can fairly be labeled as “Neocons” were both primarily interested in foreign policy and only made an impact on foreign policy. If they talked about domestic policy at all, it was generally nothing more than anodyne restatements of moderate (by today’s standards) conservatism. Nobody gave a fuck.
Chris
Huh?
I guess this comes from growing up to political awareness during the Bush years, but I wasn’t aware of any neocons having any sustained interest in anything but bombing furriners.
Violet
Why do bad things not happen to the Bobos of the world?
Trollhattan
What about Uz-beki-stan-i-stan?
Letter to dead tree new editor in today’s edition cited recent Iraq bombings and lamented “Obama losing the Iraq war after GWB’s successful surge had it nearly almost kinda won.”
Yeah motherfucker, if only the nation hadn’t elected the candidate who’s platform since the primaries started with “end the Iraq war.” How’s that work, anyway. You still get bonus deaths and injuries from Afghanistan, but are you satisfied? Nooooo.
Also, too, to hell with David Brooks.
Trollhattan
@Violet:
Am sure they do, but more along the lines of Javier not keeping the topiary in tip-top shape and Hans failing to stanch the pesky oil drip emanating from the S600 “Merc.
NotMax
Yup, that whole Project for New American Century was just a fluke.
Sheesh.
Gin & Tonic
Where’s the dividing line between the neocons and AIPAC? Primarily domestic policy my ass.
Dolly Llama
Who are these neocons you sorta respect, Doug? You made it a point to say it two different places in the post.
SteveinSC
(FWIW, there are some neocons I respect a bit) Well you are welcome to that “respect” if you think acting as a smoke screen for American kids in service to Likud deserves respect. The neocon fraud was as transparent as the “cleaning the swamp” concoction bullshit and who it was intended to benefit.
Chris
@Trollhattan:
That’s what’s going to go down in history as the Very Serious Persons’ narrative for the Iraq War, in much the same way “we lost Vietnam because LBJ, Walter Cronkite and fucking student liberals tied our troops’ hands” has gone down as their narrative for the Vietnam War.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Where is DougJ and what have you have done with him?
Seriously, though, with the exceptions of Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg, I don’t consider most neocons actually witless so much as umm … shit, what’s the word? … begins with an ‘e’ … evil! That’s the word I was looking for.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Chris: Wait, I thought we lost the Vietnam War because the Democrat Congress didn’t help South Vietnam in 1974.
Violet
Please name names.
Dolly Llama
@PeakVT:
This, pretty much exactly.
WereBear
@Violet: How do we know if they do?
If Bobo did regret what he swapped for his principles, self-respect, and humanity, we would be the last to know, I think.
I once was in a study group with a fellow student who had interned with a Hospice group. He said it was a primarily good experience; except the man who was not facing his end very well.
Apparently, he had been a very bad man; he did not go into detail. But he was terrified of what might come next; he regretted all the things he had done, but now there was no way to make them up, apparently.
He died alone and screaming… except for the student intern, who had still not gotten over it. He said to me, “I always wanted to be a good person, you know, but this made me feel really good about that decision, and I’m not letting anything stand in the way of it.”
maryQ
Hitler took a lot of criticism for genocide, but he was primarily interested in imperial dominance.
JGabriel
@Violet: @Violet:
Perhaps the holy and merciful FSM thinks having a mind like Bobo’s is punishment enough?
(I don’t, but I suppose that’s part o’ the reason why I’m not holy.)
.
Violet
@Chris: We lost Vietnam because dirty fucking hippies and Democrats.
BillinGlendaleCA
@JGabriel: Well, his middle name is Milhous now.
Trollhattan
@Chris:
Spot on. Encountered people who, upon Cronkite’s death said, “Good, that traitor who lost Vietnam finally gets his.”
Like everybody, I recall that February 1968 editorial and how the war quickly ended soon after. Darn that Walter.
Hawes
Neo-cons were the “intellectual” backbone of the Reagan movement, particularly invested in anti-Soviet, anti-detente policies. They also wrapped themselves around supply side, because whatever the fuck.
Also, who do you respect?
Suffern ACE
@Trollhattan: the Iraqis could end their civil war any time they want to. The peace is theirs. They are not children and we are not their parents who will ground them with our surge.
Dolly Llama
Had to look it up just to make sure I hadn’t missed a rich domestic policy platform from the neocons, but the consensus opinion seems to be that, yeah, they cared about foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, and that was about it.
Violet
@WereBear: Well, there are obvious things we would know about: accidents, dread diseases, bankruptcy, job loss, disasters striking, etc. I’m not wishing anything like that on him, but we would know or hear about those things.
Haydnseek
C’mon, Doug, we know how much they crave money. Their version of intellectual respect consists of an honorary degree from Bob Jones University. (It pains me to capitalize that.) They sidle into the national media version of the bus station bathroom, and if they don’t get some of that sweet wide stance media action, then it’s just because the ultraliberal media (this is a fictional construct) reported the facts, complete with HD video, audio, and a formal statement that consists of them walking back their insane statements faster than Michael Jackson in his moonwalking prime.
WereBear
@Trollhattan: Jiminy, it must be interesting to live in a world where you never screw up; only betrayed and abandoned.
Violet
@JGabriel: If having a mind like Bobo’s is punishment enough, that’s fine. But can he please keep his thoughts and opinions to himself instead of inflicting them on the rest of us. We’ve got plenty of crazy without him contributing.
Suffern ACE
@JGabriel: yeah. I think of neo-cons as straussian nuts. So if they had a domestic plan and you liked it, that meant they were lying to you about something because they thought you were a rube unable to handle the truth,
dance around in your bones
Stevie Wonder! I speak very, very um, fluent Spanish…..
Other than that, I got nothin’. David Brooks, eeewww.
Svensker
@Dolly Llama:
Yeah, I wanna know, too.
Lavocat
Ah, yes, but I much prefer my pussy to be high-quality twat, as opposed to the regular run-of-the-mill pussy.
WereBear
@Violet: Actually, we can’t wish anything on Bobo that would upset other people; like disease or bankruptcy or the like. At least, that is what my philosophy teaches.
Which is why I deal with such people by wishing upon them self-awareness.
Even glimpses of it will do that job; and quite in line with enlightenment, too.
Just Some Fuckhead
Neoconservatism is the belief that the world can be made into a better place by targeting and killing the right people.
burnspbesq
“…neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement.”
Damn, Bobo’s having acid flashbacks again.
Svensker
Actually, true, in that the neocons wanted to bend everything in the U.S. toward world hegemony and if that included sacrificing Mom, Dad and the Two Kids — plus their jobs, theirs pensions, their Medicare, their savings, their lives — that was just hunky dory. So, yeah, domestic policy… in service of the War Machine.
Redshirt
Well, they are very serious people. We should give their ideas a fair hearing.
Yatsuno
@burnspbesq: Actually, I think if BoBo had dipped into d-lysergic acid, he might just be a bit more relaxed of an individual. Then again he might have dropped the brown stuff…
Chris
@Hawes:
Yeah, that was my impression. (Ditto all the culture war, religious right crap. I never got the sense that they cared much about, or were even too aware of, domestic issues – except to the extent that hippies are assholes because they don’t support them enough, so whoever’s against the hippies, they support).
It’s also why I don’t think “neocon = Likudnik agent” thing exactly fits. Neocons are into aggressive militarism in general towards the bogeyman of the day, which today, happens to be “Islamofascism,” which makes Israel the obvious ally. But neocons predate the whole “war on Islam” thing – when they got started, communism was the bogeyman and Israel was just one of a bunch of allies (East Asian and Latin American right wing dictators were their biggest darlings back then).
JGabriel
PeakVT:
I wouldn’t call neoconservatism moderate conservatism so much as Buckley conservatism.
If Buckley conservatism sounds moderate by today’s standard — given his 1950’s rants about race in the south and his 1980’s rants about gays (such rants being a continuing tradition among today’s conservatives) — then it’s the standards that that are wrong, and it only illustrates how far off the deep end today’s conservatives and Republicans have sunk.
WereBear
@Yatsuno: LSD did wonders for Cary Grant.
geg6
Domestic policy? Really? And here I thought neocon was just a gentile spin on Likudnik.
And you gotta name names, Doug. Because I certainly can’t think of a respectable neocon. Seriously, Jen Rubin? Bill Kristol? Charles Krauthammer? Dick Fucking Cheney? What’s to respect?
Violet
@geg6: Agreed. I can’t think of a neocon that is deserving of respect, even a little bit. Their philosophy is so bankrupt and immoral. How can one respect that?
Redshirt
I think a Neocon domestic policy could be summed as: Make conditions as difficult as possible for the majority of people so signing up for the military is one of the few good options. The Empire needs Stormtroopers! And more wars, also too.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
Because there is no God to strike them down with lightning from the heavens or swallow them up into the earth.
Violet
@Redshirt: Dovetails nicely with the general Republican domestic policy: IGMFY.
Chris
@Violet:
Yeah… DougJ, let me pile on and ask, which neocon do you respect, if any? I’m genuinely curious if there’s any of them that’s anything but a complete waste of flesh.
Violet
@WereBear: In Bobo’s case, self-awareness would be a kind of living hell. I’m happy to wish that for him.
Citizen_X
Still would not make up for being a member of Nickelback.
Citizen_X
Moderation? I quoted you!
Petorado
No term has been rendered more meaningless than “conservative.” Any noble aspirations assumed by using that word have long been stripped away.
As best I can discern, a conservative his someone who hates his fellow countrymen who are different in any way so much that they will actively work to dehumanize them and strip them of rights. A “neocon” is a conservative who hates people in other countries even more, and therefore thinks the national priority is to bomb the foreigners to oblivion.
Redshift
@Chris: For anyone old enough to have lived through the Sixties (even as a child), whether you’re liberal or conservative can be predicted almost entirely by whether you think hippies were cool or were dirty scum who ruined the country.
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I doubt it. Obama won the election on a platform of getting us the hell out of Iraq, and it was a genuinely popular one. The Republicans tried to criticize him for giving up, and nobody bought it. Even they have moved on to other, more topical calumnies, and I don’t see them going back to this one after failing with it so badly the first time around.
Also, too, the story about us losing Vietnam is only effective because the North overran the South a couple years after we left. The longer Iraq can continue to stumble along without becoming an obvious dictatorship, theocracy, or AQ hideout, the more justified the withdrawal will look and the sillier claims that it was an ignominious capitulation on the brink of victory will seem.
WereBear
That is so true, and it’s still operating today. The sixties were such a seismic event that it sorted… until death.
Roger Moore
@Yatsuno:
I think you mean lysergic acid diethylamide./organic chemist
Redshift
@Roger Moore: Yeah, it only works for the Vietnam War because the people we were fighting against won when we were no longer fighting them. Saddam Hussein ain’t coming back, and unless al-Qaeda were to actually take over Iraq, there’s no “who lost Iraq” narrative. Americans can be convinced to care about losing a war, even if it’s one we were stupid to get involved in. No matter how loud wingnuts squawk about it, Americans can’t be convinced to care that some country might not have become more of a hellhole (contrary to the obvious evidence) if our troops had stayed indefinitely. (See Afghanistan, for example.)
Mike in NC
Neocons like Kristol, Rubin, and Krauthammer pay obligatory lip service to the broader GOP agenda, but all they really care about is Israel, Israel, and Israel.
Ruckus
@Haydnseek:
No one forced you to capitalize it.
I for one refuse to show any normalcy to assholes so I don’t capitalize their names or organizations. It is the very least I can do, disrespect them, for their disrespect for everyone else is palpable.
Ruckus
@Redshirt:
I believe we gave their ideas way too much of a hearing. And why fair? There is nothing fair about their ideas.
Villago Delenda Est
Say WHAT?
Neocons are all about protecting the racist shit of Likud from the consequences of their racism.
jprfrog
In Brooks case, pompous, self-deluded, pseudo-intelligent, tone deaf, and yes, ultimately witless.
Jamey
Troll harder, Doug…
Jamey
@Roger Moore: Nixon ran on a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war. There were other planks to the platform, but he didn’t bury this promise, either. Just sayin’…
Villago Delenda Est
MEMORANDUM
From: Jehovah
To: Satan
Re: Temperatures in your domain
Lucifer, I’m going to be sending you that asshat Brooks. You’re going to have to open a new wing with even higher temperatures than I requested for Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.
You’re going to need to do it anyway for the deserting coward and Cheney. Contact St. Peter for financing assistance, if necessary. This Brooks guy needs to suffer.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
They don’t care about Israel, per se. They care about the scum of Likud and the ultraorthodox fundie fuckheads who support Likud.
Roy G.
So Bobo is pretending the Project for a New American Century never existed?
PNAC’s stated goal is “to promote American global leadership.”Fundamental to the PNAC were the view that “American leadership is both good for America and good for the world” and support for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”
Uh huh.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roy G.:
Oh, THAT explains trading arms for hostages with Iran to finance terrorists in Nicaragua!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Villago Delenda Est:
They might be terrorists but they were our ANTI-COMMIE terrorists.
MomSense
@Violet:
I’m wishing sinkholes, or guillotines.
Mike in NC
@Villago Delenda Est: Also the rape and murder of nuns. But hey, Ronnie had such a sunny disposition!
Roger Moore
@Redshift:
Of course, this opens up the other narrative that the neocons would really prefer to sell: that Iraq was a glorious victory and vindication of their desire to invade. I think they’re far more likely to say that Iraq is OK now but would be a shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East if only Obama hadn’t betrayed Bush II’s vision. I still don’t think anyone will buy it, but it’s at least slightly more connected to reality than blaming Obama for losing a war we didn’t actually lose.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Remember, according to John McCain(he was a POW, ya know) not staying is losing.
Omnes Omnibus
Wrong! Hugely fucking wrong. The neo-cons have always been foreign policy oriented. They are interested in the projection of power. Weirdly, unlike McCain, the true neo-cons don’t really care if they get a war or not. They want to use gun boat diplomacy and make people kowtow. If it requires a war, so be it. If not, that’s cool too. As far as domestic policy goes, they will sign on to anything. Single payer healthcare, pogroms, whatever… Just let them run foreign policy and they are happy. Hell, a bunch of them clustered around Scoop Jackson back in the day. He was a New Deal guy and committed Cold Warrior. Richard Perle came from his staff IIRC.
Bobo doesn’t even know his ass from a hole in the ground regarding his own movement.
PeakVT
@Omnes Omnibus: More likely Bobo is just flat-out lying.
Roger Moore
@BillinGlendaleCA:
There are times when I wish John McCain had stayed in Vietnam.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: You do recall correctly about Perle. Richard Rhodes, in Arsenals of Folly heaps contempt on Perle for derailing the 1986 Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev and thus prolonging the nuclear arms race. Another key player at the time was a congressman from Wyoming who’s been discussed here from time to time.
Omnes Omnibus
@PeakVT: Yeah, why was I giving him the benefit of a doubt? With that type it is better to assume evil until stupid can be proven.
@Gin & Tonic: Do your recall the big deal Perle always made about being a registered Democrat? Oh, and Cheney was never really a neo-con. First, he wasn’t brainy enough and, second, I think he was in it for the money. the neo-cons will take the money, sure, but they are believers. Cheney was an ally not a member.
MomSense
@Roy G.:
The list of things Bobo pretends is getting incredibly long. I keep thinking that at some point the level of insanity displayed by the Republicans will finally be too much for him but, like peak wingnut, it never happens.
Gin & Tonic
@Omnes Omnibus: But Cheney, as Ford’s chief of staff, was instrumental in the formation of “Team B”, which led to the Committee on the Present Danger, which was where the Scoop Jacksonites (Perel and Wolfowitz) spread their wings, and crossed paths with Jeane Kirkpatrick and that crowd, to end up having so much influence on Reagan. The Team B strategy was a proto-historical Cheney move – sabotage from within.
Southern Beale
Gosh I’m so old, I remember Alex Pareene writing that the GOP was “almost running low” on neoconservative hawks. That was { look through calendar } oh yeah, yesterday, 5:35 a.m.
Punditry is starting to annoy the hell out of me.
Southern Beale
@Gin & Tonic:
“Committee on the Present Danger” has such a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Wonder if Frank Luntz was working for him, even back then.
Gin & Tonic
@Southern Beale: Since its first iteration was in the Truman administration, I doubt it. The 1970’s iteration took the name, but I’m not sure any of the personnel, as I don’t think it really existed at all through the 1960’s.
Without summarizing a book in a blog post, Rhodes makes a compelling case, amply supported by primary sources and interviews with the dramatis personae, that the US saber-rattling prompted by the Perle-Wolfowitz-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, due to an ailing and insecure Andropov, very nearly led to a Soviet pre-emptive (nuclear) first strike against the US in the fall of 1983. They were perhaps hours, not more than days, away from that before people came to their senses – closer to war than we were during the Cuban crisis. “Present Danger” indeed.
pseudonymous in nc
File under “it’s not a big college town.”
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Hard to tell sometimes where neocon ideology ends and MIC greed starts.
That thing you said about “don’t really care if they get a war or not” applies to the MIC types too, except in their case it’s “as long as obscene truckloads of money get funneled to us.” Before 9/11, the Bush team’s big idea in foreign policy was to basically restart the arms race by getting back to work on SDI and creating a new generation of nukes for “bunker buster” purposes. No war, but still plenty of ratcheting up international tensions – and gunboat diplomacy, saber rattling, and these other things the neocons are fond of.
J R in WV
” And anyway, Bobo and some of the other more pathetic neocons (FWIW, there are some neocons I respect a bit) crave intellectual respect nearly as much as they crave money.
On balance, it seems unfair to dismiss them as witless greedheads.”
First, you need to list respectable neocons, if you expect anyone to pay attention to your opinion. I respected my conservative but thoughtful father, but I wouldn’t expect that to sway anyone’s opinion of neocons in general.
I agree that we should not dismiss them as witless greedheads. They are far too dangerous to be dismissed, and although their intellect appears to be devoted to instilling class hatred into our populace and fomenting war, they are not witless.
Their greed knows no bounds, and is only exceeded by their deliberate and designed-in evil.
Thanks for playing!
The36thChamber
“To be sure I don’t think that neoconservatism is completely without intellectual merit”
Revealing about the Obama supporter authoritarian mindset.
gordon schumway
Neoconservatism is entirely about re-litigating the Vietnam War with the hippies.