Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Update 4: Huffing Over Hagee

Christian Right, Islam, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism

Desperate to create a Rev. Wright parallel in John McCain’s political universe, liberal madmen have been gleeful about uncovering Reverend Hagee’s many controversial statements. Hagee, an enormously powerful evangelical who’d endorsed McCain, has since withdrawn his endorsement.

Keith Olbermann, who barks orders AT his viewers as a Soviet commissar might do—but not as a TV talker ought to—offered up Hagee’s words:

“God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land”; the Roman Catholic Church is “the great whore”; “Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for homosexual sin.”

Olbermann had a giant “gotta moment” when it transpired too that Ohio megachurch pastor and author Rod Parsley, an “evangelical supporter of McCain,” had “sharply criticized Islam, calling the religion [an] inherently violent,” “anti-Christ religion,” and “the Muslim prophet Muhammad ‘the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.’”

So? Many respectable scholars concur. Many more Americans agree.

As to the first thing that had Olbermann elated: As I understand them, many Christians believe that, good or bad, God controls events and that there is a method in the madness around us, and in unfolding events in general.

Hagee, moreover, is an eschatological scholar. As such, his raison d’être is an overriding concern with “the end of the world or of humankind,” and all that stuff.

Update 1: Obama clearly wants a quid pro quo. He has implied that, just as he doesn’t hold Hagee against McCain, so too should the Arizonan not be encumbered by Hagee. Meanwhile, McCain is bending over backwards to denounce Hagee, which only helps legitimize the media-manufactured parallels between Hagee and Wright. McCain is stupid. (But then I’ve said so before.)

Update 2 (May 23): PARSING PARSLEY. First off, to be anti-Islam is not to be anti-Muslim. This distinction is conveniently collapsed by the left-liberals piling on Hagee. Islam is indeed a violent creed, conducive to violence. Come back to me on that, when you’ve perused our Islam Archive, where you’ll find references to many reliable sources. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel here for those who do not want to do the reading.

Pastor Rod Parsley also said that “America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed.” We live in the YouTube age, when every botched, unfortunate utterance by a public figure is dissected ponderously, after which denunciations are issued and apologies exacted.

Please calm down to a blind panic.

The estimable Robert Spencer has parsed Parsley’s statement. I take a different tack to the tack taken in the first part of Robert’s assessment: “Statements like that give the anti-jihad movement a wingnut patina that, of course, ABC is happy to perpetuate in this anti-McCain hit piece.”

Parsley, clumsily, was probably referring to the hard-core Christianity that early Americans espoused. They would surely never countenance Islam.

I see Parsley and Hagee, with all their faults, as “ours,” if you know what I mean. They’re warrior Christians. Granted, I’m not; besides being an irreligious Jew, I oppose aggressive wars. Still, Hagee is a crusader of sorts. He belongs squarely within the tradition of a vigorous, fighting Christendom. He’s an anachronism (but so am I in many ways) and he’s indubitably of the West.

Rev. Wright, on the other hand, is not “ours” in any way. His thinking is non-western, alien. He comes to destroy the West, as he hates with all his might the men who founded it.

The kind of rabbis who condemn Hagee as an anti-Semite—they’re engaged in grand-scale projection, for they, not Hagee, will help bring about the end of a West, after which Jews will be even less secure. Very many liberal rabbis are honorary Muslims, or dhimmis, as far as I’m concerned. Hagee is an honorary Jew.

Update 3 (May 24): Sigh. There are those who argue against Hagee and all else they dislike by declaring themselves and their opinions as the norm, the magical mean. Evangelicals are, apparently, outside the norm. Now there’s a rational argument. That’s profoundly annoying to this writer, especially when contributors do so in defiance of facts.

Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers, whatever—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is as American as apple pie. Ever heard of the First and Second Great Awakenings? “Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution [no less], which took place soon after.”

Afrocentrism, on the other hand—Wright’s creed—is as American as Idi Amin. African-Americans, I suggest, are morel likely to be evangelicals than Afrocentrists.

Update 4 (May 25): This is not a statement of support for either tradition, but merely a statement of historical truths vis-à-vis America’s creedal nature. (If I am not wrong, revivalists were active in the abolitionist movement.) Do I personally have more affinity for a Zionist Christian (Hagee) than an anti-Zionist, Afrocentrist of the left (Wright)?

You bloody bet.

But that’s because I’m a woman of the Right, not a neoconservative. Neoconservatives have very little patience or affinity for “their own.” As I’ve written, “Neo-con nirvana is a U.S.-supervised world where Afghani and Israeli alike are fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world.” (A mold, incidentally, to which Wright would be infinitely more suitable than Hagee.) I’ve long maintained that neocons—they’re crypto-leftists—are as deracinated as any good left-liberal.

Neoconservatives, moreover, have always evinced contempt toward the Religious Right. You’d think the likes of Hagee would have learned. In fact, neocons consider the Religious Right a bunch of rube hicks. I’ll take the rubes any day over the wretched neocons, the two factions’ philosophical overlap notwithstanding.

Updated: Count McCain and Countess Condoleezza, His Vampire Bride

Elections 2008, John McCain, Neoconservatism, Race

“A new poll of New York State voters suggests a hypothetical John McCain-Condoleezza Rice ticket would beat the so-called ‘dream ticket’ of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, even though Rice has sought to douse rumors that she’s seeking the VP slot.”

If this is true, then Americans deserve to have their blood sucked dry by these two neoconservative vampires.

The presumptive Republican nominee is a neoconservative deluxe. Read my detailed analysis of “the pollution he has left along his political path” in “Mitt’s Gone, Bill’s Back.”

Condi’s his evil ideological twin—a neocon. At the very least, how can the genus Boobus Americanus forget this woman’s role, as the head of the National Security Council, in September 11?

As I wrote in “Hold Their Feet To The Fire”:

“According to Rice’s official bafflegab, a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets belongs to the realm of analysis. It wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.’”

“Incredible doesn’t quite describe what Condoleezza calls intelligence ‘specifics.’ The National Security Adviser [implied back then that she would have] moved to act if she [had gotten] word of time, place and method of attack. What next? A gilded, personalized invitation to attend the crime scene?”

She headed “an office created by the National Security Act of 1947 to advise the president on ‘integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security and to facilitate interagency cooperation.’ If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she [oversaw].” Or so I wrote in 2002.

Condoleezza was a colossal failure. If this new pole is accurate, Americans are emotional wrecks. I suspect they’re responding to the Ebony and Ivory seduction.

Update 1 (April 12): In 2005 I consigned Condi to the hate America crowd. Here’s why:

“Hating America is wildly in vogue among Bush and his devotees. Condi and acolytes, in particular, showcased their contempt for this country’s history by continually comparing the carnage in Iraq to the constitutional cramps of early America. As The Wall Street Journal put it, ‘There were a few glitches 200 years ago in Philadelphia too.’ For its part, Fox News kept coupling George Washington’s name with Saddam’s slimy successors: à la mode, man!”

“No matter that faction fighting in Iraq is as old as the sand dunes. As James L. Payne has reminded those struck with historical Alzheimer’s, there are cultural barriers to democracy, chief of which is a high-violence society. Iraq is—and has always been—a society in which assassinations, riots and terrorism are viewed by a large segment of the public and its leaders as legitimate tools in a political struggle. Iraq is a high-violence society now. And it was one in the days of Sumer, Saddam, and in the millennia in-between.”

“Yes, the uncivilized hoots, hollers, and deadly blasts instigated by members of Iraq’s tribal troika capture to a tee the tone of the debates in, what’s that document called? The Fedayeen Papers?”

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.