Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Sullivan Slobbers For Obama

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Media, Neoconservatism

As you know, pundit Andrew Sullivan was one of the failed “experts” who provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

To be fair, Sullivan distinguished himself from the rest of the nation’s philosopher-kings in that he did recant. Deep in a Time Magazine column he buried an expression of “a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me.” This alone makes him infinitely nobler than most other teletwits who’re shoved down the collective gullet by media, and who were all wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq, and many other grave matters.

Of course, the media is every bit as mired in moral and intellectual confusion as the pundits they feature . If they exposed their failed experts, they’d be exposing their own moral and intellectual flabbiness. They’d be beaching themselves, which is how they all ought to end up—beached.

The same Sullivan, wrong for so long on such a crucial matter, appeared on Meet the Press, April 6, intoxicated—drunk with love not for war, this time, but for Obama. Bami is absolutely sincere about everything he says, Sullivan almost sobbed. Thankfully, a wry Christopher Hitchens was there to provide a counterweight to Sullivan’s emotional effusing.

“Richly revealing was the way Obama tarred his maternal (white) grandma with the taint of racism,” not once, by mistake, but repeatedly. You’ll all agree that was quite something to behold. Hitchens certainly thought so. He smiled and said something to the effect that never before had he seen put into practice the expression throwing granny to the wolves. Or throwing granny under the bus. Obama’s outing of his infirm, 86-year-old grandma as a racist, fit to be lumped with the vile Rev. Wright—that was a first for to Hitchens. (And to me; most good people show respect to their grandparents.)

In response, Sullivan oozed denials, the sum total of which amounted to, “Leave him alone, you nasty man; Bami didn’t mean it that way.” Andy dominated the remainder of the conversation with “arguments” of a similar caliber.

I paraphrase the gist of what Dr. Thomas Szasz once said to me: Hitchens may be wrong on many issues, but at least he’s highly intelligent.

And what a conversationalist!

Back to my main point: Crunchy con Sullivan should not be listened to when he prostrates himself at the feet of Obama and asks that we do the same. For too long he’s dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage on some pretty defining issues. Isn’t it time his status as “experts” for whom public goodwill runs eternal be revoked? At least Hitchens, unlike Sullivan, didn’t vow that he had looked into a candidate’s eyes and seen his soul.

Updated: Foul Tom Friedman

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Pseudoscience

Thomas Friedman, the mustachioed crunchy-neocon, can’t go wrong. He was wrong about Iraq, but that didn’t come back to bite him. What’s a little war between friends? He purports to understand free market economics, yet, on the Late Night Show, he complained that not enough capitalists were developing green technologies—the most lucrative potential market there is, says Friedman.
Let’s see: Is this because capitalists are not as smart as Tom Friedman, a statist ponce who pimps for the powers that be? Naturally, Friedman is being holier than thou. Scientists are fiddling with green technologies all the time; industrialists, not so much, since the scientists have yet to find a way to make these technologies commercially viable.
The profit motive, Mr. Friedman, ensures resources are directed to their most efficient use. Technologies that aren’t commercially viable are too expensive; aren’t profitable and are, therefore, invariably wasteful—of the very resources they aim to preserve.
Friedman, who got behind the neoconservative Manifest Destiny, is hungry for a new National Greatness Agenda. I guess exporting democracy didn’t go that well. In the Green Agenda he sees “a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.” Hence his motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
“Reincarnation of the Reds” is more like it.
Americans have been fooled by the likes of Friedman, but the British Times Literary Supplement panned his last book—the reviewer had little good to say about Friedman’s reasoning.
As I’ve said, my only consolation is that the gangreens “are worried sick about the planet—genuinely…The Worry Factor may just increase the rate at which this particular invasive species falls off the earth.”
Come to think about it, the ethically challenged Friedman didn’t care much about the casualties of an unjust war; I’m sure he doesn’t lose sleep over alleged global warming.
Friedman’s grammar: he said “more fit,” and “more strong,” when he should have said “fitter and stronger.” And he polluted with a mouthful of cute coinages, such as “global weirding,” and by saying we should have an “earth race” (as opposed to an arms race, supposedly) with China. Puke.

Update (Feb 27): Cooling Trend. From “Daily Tech,” via WorldNetDaily:
“Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.”

Update II: George Reisman, Ph.D, sends along this apropos comment:

“As the ice thickens in the Arctic and in Antarctica and record cold temperatures are recorded practically across the world [SEE BELOW], so too does the ice thin—under the feet of the environmentalists and their global warming crusade. It may almost be time to begin speculating on what will follow global warming as the next great scare.”

George is referring to the appropriately humorous title of Sen. Inhofe’s circular: “Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way.” You can find a good collection of up-to-date articles here on the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.

Foreign Interventionism Chickens Come Home to Roost in Balkans

America, Foreign Aid, Islam, Neoconservatism, The West

Europeans take a little longer than Middle Easterners to get lathered up over American meddling. Clinton and his coterie of left-liberal neoconservative advisers led the 1999 NATO intervention into Yugoslavia, intervening in this centuries-old, ongoing dispute on the side of the ethnic Albanians (and their terrorist arm, the al Qaida-backed Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army).

There was no genocide. The killings were of the large scale craven kind the locals had engaged in for centuries. Soon after the “salve” we Americans applied to solve the problem, Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, leaving only approximately 120,000 under NATO protection. Ancient churches were burned to the ground by the triumphant Albanian Muslims who turned on the Serbs.

America’s national interests were not served in choosing Albanian Muslims over Christian Orthodox Serbs, although Kosovars promise they practice what they term euphemistically “Islam lite.”

Bush followed in Clinton’s trails to hail Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Kosovo is home to the most sacred of Serbian relics and lands. It was Christian before it was Islamized.

Up-to-the-minute reports speak of close to a million Serbians gathering in Belgrade to protest the Kosovo declaration of independence and to express anger at the US. It’s all very well when a handful of people on the Side We Don’t Like break into the U.S. embassy and wreck it. But when close to a million march in solidarity against American policies—a decade hence, no less—they become harder for neocon think tanks to dismiss and diss.

For once, the blame lies squarely at the feat of Hillary’s husband. Former Clintonite, James Rubin, Christiane Amanpour’s toy boy, blames the Russians for the fever that is gripping Serbians—the Russian and Serb leadership. We all know that the people upon whom we visit our policies are but puppets manipulated by evil marionettes–unless those pulling the strings are American. Then the puppets—or puppies—are praised.

Mitt’s Gone; Bill’s Back

Elections 2008, John McCain, Neoconservatism

“It doesn’t take much to sunder a debate about the Republican Party’s inconsequential core. The Rush Limbaugh-led insurrection against John McCain gave the fleeting impression that the movement was on the cusp of such a reckoning. No longer.
 
In close succession, Romney resigned, and McCain wowed the Conservative Political Action Conference. Behind the scenes, Bill Kristol practiced his curtain calls. Kristol is the uncrowned come-back kid—the attractive, affable neoconservative mastermind has backed McCain’s campaign for some time now. Philosophically, Kristol is the king of consistency. Neoconservative all the way. Like McCain. Just as it appeared the neocons were slowly being inched out, they’re back.
 
It’s proving well-nigh impossible to Kill Bill…”

“Mitt’s Gone; Bill’s Back” is a particularly hot column, if I say so myself (No one else will; I’m sorry; these here lovely people have, in spades, and they’re worth more to me than mainstream media and publishing.) It was written in one sitting today, after listening to McCain’s CPAC speech. I made my deadline, just.

Feel free to disagree.