Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Update II: Brownie Points For Barack

Barack Obama, Bush, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Islam, Military, Neoconservatism, War

Yes, I award them when warranted.

• Obama has lifted the “Pentagon’s 18-year ban on media covering the return of fallen U.S. service members” to the Dover air force base in Delaware.
Excellent, honest move. I applaud Obama for taking it. In this way, Americans can see what death in the service of America’s recreational wars looks like.
As a child in Israel, I remember funerals for the fallen being state affairs. The entire nation would honor the fallen soldiers and be made to confront the agony of death. No wonder Israeli Jews have no stomach for wars.

• Recalibrating the relationship with Russia: another very good move, although, given how Bush-like Barack is—in other words, neocon-compatible—it’s hard to envision him taking a fundamentally different stand on Chechnya or Georgia, for example. Still, restarting the relationship with Russia is in itself a start.

• All in all, making nice with “Old Europe”—which is how the stupid, reckless Bush administration dismissed Europe (including its correct objection to the Iraqi invasion)—is a good thing. Sure, neoconservative war harpies get hot for over heated rhetoric against any and all. They’ll have to get their kicks playing video war games. As will they have to get through their thick skulls that this country is no longer a super power. It’s neither sexy nor smart to smite the world when you’re … broke and bankrupt.

No matter how Republicans spin it, Obama’s overtures to Islam and the Muslim world do not present any change from Imam Bush’s religion-of-peace preaching.

• It’s premature to rejoice over the cuts to some military spending announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates today. Touted as a balancing of “want and need,” and intended to gear “Pentagon buying plans to smaller, lower-tech battlefields the military is facing now, and expects in coming years”—Gates’ proposed $534 billion budget for the coming year is up from $513 billion for 2009.

This is really nothing but a reshuffle.

Update I (April 7): Obama gets credit on Cuba too. This from MyWay News:

President Barack Obama will soon move to ease travel and financial restrictions on Cuba as his administration conducts a broad review of its policy toward the communist nation, a senior American official said Monday.

“We can expect some relaxation, some changes in terms of the restrictions on family remittances and family travel,” said Jeffrey Davidow, the White House adviser for the upcoming Summit of the Americas, which Obama will attend.

Davidow said Monday that the changes – which officials say would allow unlimited visits to Cuba by American families and remove caps on money transfers – are intended not only as a moral step for the estimated 1.5 million Americans who have relatives in Cuba, but also to foster change there.

Good going. Trade—not democracy or sanctions—is also the best antidote to war. The more economically intertwined countries are, the less likely they are to quarrel. Boycott Cuba less and barter with it more and it’s bound to tone down its belligerence and transform for the better.

Update II (April 8): Neocon Newt Gingrich is going gaga, but here again Obama’s “refusal to take military action against nations like North Korea and Iran” is the right thing to do.

Newt the nut told Fox News’s Gretta von Susteren that Obama needed to learn from his trip. And what is it that Newt believes the lessons ought to be? Obama must follow the neocons’ policy prescriptions and consider nations that do not do what we want them to do as hostile. From the fact that Europe didn’t indulge Obama, he needs to learn what Newt and the neocons preach: there is no basis for diplomacy, unless the world bows to America.

Only America has national interests; other nations have a problem aligning theirs with America’s.

Update III: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Frum

Iraq, Just War, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism, War

Neoconservative David Frum writes in Newsweek: “I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect).”

Like, whatever.

“In 2007, 17,430 Iraqis died in violence. In 2008, 6,772 people were killed. The first two months of 2009 saw 449 die, the lowest official toll since the invasion.”

All in all, the documented civilian deaths from violence are: 91,131 – 99,510.

Murder makes David “feel silly.” Kind of like a school girl. I like totally get that, although, I’m not sure Iraqis are feeling as giggly. In fact I know they’re not.

Friday was the anniversary of the March 20th American invasion of Iraq in 2003. (Click “Iraq” to read my archives.)

Update I (March 21): A reply to Fanusi’s comment. If you’ve read my archives, you also know that I’m persona non grata among the chattering class–the idiot elites who monopolize discourse in this country, despite having a 100% error rate. Therefore a debate between myself and Hitchens will never happen.

Were the gormless gladiators of (so-called) conservative cable to stage a debate, it would be between a popular bimbo and his highness Hitchens (a very intelligent man, in my opinion, and a fabulous writer). That’s the level of debate they cultivate–and are comfortable with. (Besides, I’m a writer, not a circus animal à la Coulter. I’m quite happy to be left alone—and out of the nation’s TV vomitorium.)

As to Fanusi’s “argument”: By “Baghdad being home to men like Abu Nidal and Mr. Yasin” I presume he means that there were terrorists living in Iraq, ergo, we were justified in invading a country that did us no harm and posed no threat to America.

What about all the “Islamikazis” who call America home? What about the 9/11 mass murderers who relied for their plans on Condi and Bush’s sneering indifference to their Constitutional duties?

I’m afraid that the logic of Fanusi’s “argument” must lead us to invade Germany or The Netherlands as well. The latter probably have less of a handle on Islamic subversives than Saddam had; his interests were inimical to the goals of the jihadis. But neoconservatives haven’t yet grasped that simple fact, because, like, “dem Arabs are all the same.” Or as I put it, “McCain can’t tell Shiite from Shinola.”

We are incapable of defending our own borders against Mexican narco-terrorism. No need to look for monsters to destroy beyond our abysmally porous borders.

Update II: For those who’re interested, here are articles from the Frum Forum:

“Neocon Deluxe, David Frum, Damns Rush”

“SON OF UNCLE SAM”

“FRUM’S FLIMFLAM”

To be fair to Frum: I find him to be a fine writer. His first book was certainly very good–that was before he took to neoconing.

I never read Kristol and Brooks. It doesn’t get duller than those two. Ditto Krauthammer and Will, although the latter can write and the former has written one or two good pieces about the eco-idiots.

When Coulter is good she is very very good, but that’s twice a year, when she tackles the law or the gangreens. For the rest, she is actually a colossal bore: “liberals that; liberals this; Bush brilliant; B. Hussein Obama a bastard.” Insufferable stuff.

The last of her good pieces was “Olbermann’s plastic ivy,” about which I blogged.

But we’re straying.

Myron captures the soul and strategy of Frum: 1) America has changed. 2) In the New America, certain principles are obsolete. 3) If it wants to lead the principles-bereft America, the Party must adapt to this reality.

I don’t want to wade into the Republican fetus fixation. I’ll say only this: As a libertarian who owns her own body, I have no problem with reversing “Roe v. Wade.” Such a reversal will do no more than remove the issue from federal jurisdiction and discontinue that source of funding.

A woman has the right to pay for an abortion; she does not have the right to compel those who find her choice repugnant to pay for it. So, I have no idea what Frum is talking about when he says he is pro-choice (his wife is a “conservative” feminist). Leave it to localities to fund or not to fund.

Update III: I owe David Frum an apology. Mr.
Frum writes:

The sentence you quoted from my Newsweek article reads:

“I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton.”

By truncating the sentence in the way you did, you turn its meaning upside down.

If you cannot make a polemical point without deceit, you should reconsider the validity of your polemical point.

David Frum

[SNIP]

Mr. Frum is correct. I made a mistake.

To accuse me, however, of an intention to deceive because I made an honest, if hasty, mistake is wrong.

Supporting an impeachment over a lie about a sexual peccadillo is certainly silly, but failing to expiate for the role one played in an unjust war is way worse than silly.

Public expiation is owed for the war. It was not forthcoming. The sentence that followed mention of the invasion of Iraq seemed so frivolous, that, yes, I saw red, and misread.

For that I, once again, apologize.

Mr. Frum, however, has yet to apologize for a transgression far graver than my minor mistake: providing “intellectual” justification for that war.

Neocon Deluxe, David Frum, Damns Rush

Conservatism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The State, War

Neoconservative David Frum has really done it this time. Recall, for disavowing the war in Iraq, and being critical of the amorphous, ever-morphing War on Terror, he went after paleos, daring to call the likes of Pat Buchanan unpatriotic. (I responded on LewRockwell.com: “FRUM’S FLIMFLAM.”)

Now Frum is gunning for Rush Limbaugh in the most poisonous manner. As you know, I’m no ditto head. I’m beholden to nobody and nothing but the truth, as I call it (and I’ve called it quite well, I might add).

However, I’d defend Limbaugh over and above a neoconservative of the deepest dye such as Frum, who has likened Rush to Jesse Jackson:

“Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s,” writes Frum, a former Bush speech writer who stabbed his own boss, George Bush, in the back.

The encomiums Frum offers to Obama have certainly landed him many a favorable interview in mainstream media—don’t those unwatchful dogs love centrists, even when the latter have been instrumental in agitating for unjust wars. (Ones where young people not their own fight and die.)

Here’s Frum juxtaposing Obama to Limbaugh (I’ll tell you now-now why this comparison is so singularly statist):

“On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.”

And Rush:

“And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.”

[SNIP]
What left-liberal pabulum. The focus on Rush’s exterior and the “self-indulgence” dismissal is repulsive. The free market, for the most, is how Limbaugh has earned the dough with which he feeds his alleged insatiable needs. I grant you that the man is excessively enmeshed with political power, but, overall, it’s fair to say that Limbaugh did not capture the market share of ditto heads he enjoys by political force.

Obama, on the other hand, has never earned an honest dime in his life. The president may be lean, fit and ascetic, but he has done so on the backs of taxpayers; he’s the very definition of a PARASITE of the political class.

For the most, and as much as I disdain his Bush alliance, Limbaugh has made his living via the economic means. The political class and its sycophants—senators, congressmen, presidents, their speechwriters, lawyers, and lobbyists—they utilize the political means to earn their keep. The first relies on voluntary associations and is free of coercion; the last is coercive and involuntary.

As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard reminded, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory…but oh so very effective.

The fact that Frum can’t tell the two apart tells us all we need to know about David. In this particular tiff, better to cheer Rush Limbaugh than slip between the sheets with Frum and his ilk. These effetes also campaigned against Sarah Palin because they look down on her. (And perhaps because their wives are such gossips.)

An excellent start for movement conservatives in reclaiming conservatism, the Republican Party, and exciting the base, would be to distance themselves from neoconservatives, starting with David Frum.

Let me preempt: Too many libertarians sit on the fence, holier than thou, refusing to engage the issues of the day, because oh-so superior. I disagree with such aloofness. Although I come from a different ideological solitude than Frum/Rush, I am convinced of the need to remain engaged, so as to keep proving that mine is the better perspective. This cannot be achieved without getting involved in the day’s rough-and-tumble.

Economic Animism

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Economy, Neoconservatism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Republicans

Republikeynesians, especially, have been demanding that in his first address to a joint session of Congress, Obama “talk up” the economy. “What Obama Should Do,” blared the typical headline in the neoconservative National Review. And the answers: “Be positive, if prudent,” instructed Bill O’Reilly. “Restore economic confidence,” advised Conrad Black, a conservative who also believes that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the champion of freedom. (Black, who, incongruously, combines a call for serious central planning with a condemnation of it, has, seemingly, learned nothing from falling prey to the same predators.)

This tired battle cry just goes to show the depths of this lot’s economic “thinking.”

Most Republicans have taken up economist John Maynard Keynes’ kooky concept of “animal spirits.” This was Keynes’ condescending reference to consumer confidence. Keynes believed that the fickle consumer’s biorhythms controlled the economy (I kid you not). Which explains why confused Republicans, like Democrats, keep kibitzing about “a crisis in consumer confidence.”

The implication being that “confidence” will galvanize the jobless and the penniless to spend.

I sincerely hope not.

By the way, the Voodoo Child has obliged. This is the first line in Obama’s pie-in-the-sky speech:

“[T]onight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”