Category Archives: Neoconservatism

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.

Update # I: NEOCONS MAD ABOUT MCCAIN

Elections 2008, Neoconservatism

The “Fairness Doctrine” is a wicked, illiberal effort to limit speech—a no-brainer for principled individuals on both the left and the right. Yet Michael Medved attempts here to frame McCain’s apparent opposition to this FCC instrument as a sign of his man McCain’s principled conservatism. This is indeed a very poor argument, as even bad liberals will—and have—reject such abuse of power.
More material, Medved, whose ideological trajectory has taken him from the left to the neoconservative left, is mad about McCain. Need I say more?
In the dust-up between Talk radio and the Republican Party establishment, I’m beginning to detect a trend: The neoconservative whey is separating from the conservative curd. What remains is not the best concoction, but it’s an improvement. McCain is the curdling bacteria.
 
McCain can run but cannot hide from the pollution he has dropped along his political path:
* McCain-Kennedy illegal-alien amnesty bill
* McCain’s opposition to a defensive, passive barrier on the border with Mexico
* McCain’s vote for radical lefties Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court
* McCain’s collusion with 7 Democrats and other bottom-feeding Republicans to sabotage conservative SC nominee
* McCain-Feingold: self-explanatory
* McCain’s 100 year-war in Iraq, and the promise of more wars
* McCain’s opposition to tax cuts—twice
* McCain-Lieberman’s legislation of Al Gore’s Malthusian hatred of humanity and progress, including to reject drilling in Alaska
 
If I’ve forgotten anything, please remind me and BAB readers.
posted by Ilana Mercer on 02.05.08 @ 8:19 pm

Update # I (Feb. 6): As usual, BAB readers and posters have filled in the blanks, pointing out by way of examples that McCain is guilty of major philosophical infractions:

* He puts “patriotism,” by which he means allegiance to the state, ahead of the thing that makes the world go around, profit. The last he maligns, which show an utter lack of grasp of the natural laws of human action.
* He departed from conservatives and sided with Democrat neocons in prosecuting the one war conservatives opposed: the war on Serbia. Lesson: McCain loves war so dearly, he’ll cross party lines in the off chance his pepes are not behind the war du jour.
* We’re waiting confirmation (URL anyone?), but it seems that McCain didn’t miss out on the biggest business shakedown in history—the prosecution of cigarette manufacturers under the “scientific” guise that free will is null and void and that smokers believed they were inhaling water vapor.
* I’m not sure what the “Keating Affair was about, but I see in the URL provided hereunder that McCain likes to move in packs of Democrats.

The Authentic Right Vs. The Neocons (Part 2)

Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Professor Gottfried and I continue the conversation we began last week. In The Authentic Right Vs. Neocons (Part 2),” the sequel to “The Authentic Right Vs. The Neocons (Part 1), professor Gottfried, once again, helps us understand how the American Right fell into the clutches of “minicon scribblers.”

I describe the “propositional nation” neoconservatives are dreaming up for us (the Left, naturally, loves the idea too): “No longer will communities comprise individuals bound by a shared language, literature, culture, faith, history, habits and heroes. Rather, what we’re being fashioned into is a disparate people, forced together by an abstract, highly manipulable, coercive, state-sanctioned ideology.”

And Paul elaborates on “The farce of democracy that we now have—which is a pluralistic society spinning into a multicultural one, run by meddlesome bureaucrats, inventive judges, and a multitude of social engineers—has nothing to do with serious self-government. It is a social experiment that is spinning out of control.”

Read on.

Update: In reply to the reader in the Comments Section: Paul is not anti-Semitic; he is anti-foreign aid to Israel—as well as to all her Arab enemies.

His position is similar to the one I expressed here:

“Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent – and out of the affairs of others – recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach. Patriots for a sane U.S. foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends, Israel included, to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours.”

I was asked to write a piece for the Paul Campaign encapsulating his position vis-à-vis Israel. I did weeks ago, but they have yet to publish it. I continue to receive many letters expressing the misconception our reader voices. I’m surprised the campaign has not made use of a useful op-ed that refuted the accusations very effectively.