Category Archives: Neoconservatism

UPDATED (3/23/022): Tucker Carlson’s Producers Rewarding Retread Reformed Neocon Tools Like Sohrab Ahmari

Argument, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, War

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On the one hand, Tucker Carlson and his oft-worthy guests make the case that America’s catastrophic institutional rot (MY EXTENSIVELY DEVELOPED TERM, no theirs) is a consequence of there being no adverse consequences attached to being dead-wrong all the time.

On the other hand, the show has a tendency to reward reformed neocons such as newcomer Sohrab Ahmari, who peddles retread banalities (or stuff the Old Right—myself included—had espoused decades ago, and from the get-go, in the case of the Globe and Mail commentary below: September 19, 2002).

Rewarding conveniently reformed, politically pleasing mediocrities makes the practitioner part of the institutional rot.

“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (Ilana Mercer, May 29, 2004) spoke to this repulsive specter:

… So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?

I got to thinking about the neoconservative talking twits. They’ve been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.
Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens (undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom seem to have conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – they all grabbed the administration’s bluff and ran with it. Like the good Trotskyites many of them were, once they tasted blood, they writhed like sharks. Compounding their scent-impaired bloodhound act was their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities – they insisted our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.
Their innumerable errors and flagrant hubris did not prevent the neoconservatives from managing to marginalize their competitors on the Right: the intrepid Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative; the quixotic Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. of LewRockwell.com, and Antiwar.com. (Plus this column, of course). Unfortunately for America, there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that these prescients did not foretell well in advance.

….the opportunity costs associated with consumption of toxic punditry are low or non-existent.

If you didn’t have the cerebral wherewithal to be against the war on Iraq in 2002, you don’t have anything original to contribute on foreign policy and anti-war or Just War thinking now.

Younger offenders can be found agitating against Iran, or scribbling inanities for the War Street Journal and other neoconservative outlets such as Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and Foreign Policy, where Sohrab Ahmari would put out irredeemable and unforgivable content such as “The Costs of Containment.”

It’s one thing to have made a mistake as Tucker Carlson had done regarding the Iraq war of aggression. Carlson apologized profusely and humbly about his Iraq error. Moreover, Carlson had never been the consummate philosophical neocon; which Sohrab Ahmari is. According to the Militarist Monitor,

“the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Sohrab Ahmari has been a vocal advocate of U.S.-imposed regime change in his native Iran, which he left as a teenager. Rosenberg likened Ahmari to Ahmed Chalabi, the formerly exiled Iraqi politician who curried favor with U.S. neoconservatives ahead of the Iraq War and lent an Iraqi name to the list of those supporting the U.S. invasion.[3]

I’ve watched the likes of Sohrab Ahmari work their magic in the malfunctioning media for decades. I also understand fully that Tucker Carlson has a producer, for he himself cannot research each such well-promoted phony who is resurrecting a career on the solid anti-war arguments of the dissident Old, paleolibertarian and paleoconservative Right.

* Image: Truth-teller on Twitter.

And in defense of The Tuck against mediocrity Claire Lehmann, who generated the non sequitur below: Tucker Carlson doesn’t support the Russian invasion! From the fact he argues unpopular truths–it doesn’t follow that Tucker is not a populist. Most immutable truth is unpopular. Popularity does not equal populism. This woman can’t even define the terms of debate.

The Z-Man (Zelensky) Is America’s Perfect Prototype Neocon Puppet, Down To Our National Cliches

America, Conservatism, Democracy, Egalitarianism, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

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In his cameo appearance before the US Congress, the Z-Man deftly drew on all the cliches of American life in the shallow end:

Volodymyr Zelensky vaporized about democracy [“it made us dumb“], our values [“in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police“], and MLK (Martin Luther King), offering his incoherent, bizarre twist on the “I have a dream” U.S. ubiquity:

“I have a dream. I have a need. I need to protect our skies. I need your help, which means the same you feel when you hear the words I have a dream.”

Translated: When the Z-Man tells you he needs your help, you should feel the same as when you hear MLK’s “I have a dream.” Or, something.

I have a dream. I have a need, too, Mr. Z. Some quid pro quo, perhaps? The following is as true as when I wrote it in 2011, during the Egyptian Lotus Revolution. This from “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians …“:

‘I know nothing so miserable as a democracy without liberty,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-1800s. He speaks for me. I find myself unable to get lathered-up about democracy for others, while I live in the democratic despotism that contemporary America has become. …

…More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.

Zelensky is America’s perfect, prototype Jacobin puppet.

Put it this way, if the American people (an inchoate meaningless phrase I countenance here for the sake of argument) were threatened by an invasion—American leaders would hold court from their safe rooms and underground luxury bunkers and give cheery addresses (in syntax as fractured and similarly studded with non sequiturs), while the bombs fell ON US.

Churchillian they’d rate themselves.

BY ©2022 ILANA MERCER

It’s Biblical: A Leader Who Doesn’t Plead For The Lives Of His People Is A Failed Leader (And A Neocon)

America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Russia, War

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A prediction: You heard it first here. This is my opinion and I could very well be wrong—but I postulate the following based on deductive faculties that have served me thus far in observing The Empire’s workings:

Based on observing The Empire’s workings over decades, I’d hazard that President Volodymyr Zelensky is probably being fiercely guarded by Americans, possibly by a private, paramilitary security company. Something like Sean McFate’s DynCorp outfit, or Russia’s Wagner Group. Or even perhaps  Ukraine’s own Einsatzgruppen (Hitler’s death squads) the Azov regiment.

MORE in support of my assumption, for that is all it is, is a revelation of some of the plans his American puppet-masters’ have for Zelensky, via NBC:

WASHINGTON — Biden administration officials have discussed plans with the Ukrainian government for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to leave Kyiv in the event of a Russian invasion, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Under a plan that’s been discussed, Zelenskyy would relocate to Lviv in western Ukraine, about 50 miles from the Polish border, the people familiar with the discussions said.

My opinion—it’s so far merely a solid guess—is bolstered by Zelensky’s relaxed, cocky  showman’s state-of-mind—bolstered as it is by wild Western reinforcement of the Ukrainian leader’s bloody bravado.

“Bloody” because of the inverted values with which the Empire has blanketed the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

To normies, a leader who doesn’t plead for the lives of his people is a failed leader. Diplomacy, negotiations, cease fire: that’s the nomenclature clear-thinking people wish instinctively to hear when they see the immiseration of Ukrainians and their cities.

And, no. So far, Zelensky has arrogantly and publicly told a military superpower, Russia, to, “hold peace talks now or suffer for generations.” That is not diplomacy, but provocation.

Why, the Hebrew Testament (while “Old,” it’s never out-of-date; hence “Hebrew”) is festooned with examples of leaders pleading—even bargaining with God, as Abraham did so ingeniously over Sodom and Gomorrah—for the lives of their people. Queen Esther did the same before King Ahasuerus (or Xerxes); Moses petitioned Pharaoh for his people, and so on. That’s what real leadership is about—uphold and fight for the people’s natural right to FUCKING LIVE.

By these criteria, Zelensky and Biden are failed leaders.

To the American Jacobins and their Ukrainian Zelenskyite puppets, TALKING ‘OUR VALUES’ is all it takes to make a good leader. Talk the neocon talk.

BY ©2022 ILANA MERCER

UPDATE (3/15): Ukraine: Republicans Revert To The Neoconservative Mean

Bush, Europe, Free Markets, Iran, Iraq, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Trade, War

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Conservatism has tragically and unforgivably reverted to the neoconservative mean. Just as in 2016, 14 years after the invasion of Iraq, rose a presidential candidate against Genghis Bush and that man’s destruction of Iraq—in ten years time, perhaps, the GOP will field a presidential candidate who’ll quit moralizing and demonizing; will strive fiercely to negotiate and accommodate, won’t alienate and sanction, and will trade, trade, trade.

But it might be too late by then for realpolitik.

The Republicans are pushing for war and that no-fly zone. They are admonishing Biden for his so-called weakness—for that is how they frame avoiding a nuclear war with Russia. The War Street Journal has only rebuke for Biden’s policy of “containment against Russia.” On Fox News it’s rah-rah for war (i. e., a no-fly zone over Ukraine) all day long. The female journos and pundits, especially, choose to use incendiary verbiage, pregnant with provocation, such as “a red line”; “this was a red line for Obama… will Biden consider it a red line.. blah-blah.”

Translated it’s, “Come on big boy; sock it to Putin.” War porn.

Rand Paul is no Ron Paul. But at least the senator from Kentucky has berated the forever-war, dastardly GOP for rejecting diplomacy with Iran, the mention of which has not even crossed their lips with respect to Russia.

UPDATE (3/15): War always brings the neoconservative to the fore. Victor Davis Hanson is one. A nice man, but never-the-less, a neoconservative, front-and-center in the enunciation of consummate neoconservative abominations known as “The Bush Doctrine,” which was responsible for the noxious bifurcation knows as, “If you are not with us, you are against us.”

The West has been caught sleeping and … an opportunistic dictator … saw a chance and … took it just like he did in 2014. 

Neocons love sanctions, which are as useless in achieving political ends as they are ruthless in their effects on the most vulnerable. As far as their ultimate outcome—embargoed are counterproductive. “Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor in the history department of Cornell University in New York, is the author of ‘The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War’ (2022)'”:

Sanctions alone have a poor record of halting military adventures. During the 20th century, only three out of 19 attempts to use sanctions as a policy to impede war have been successful: two of these were the work of the League of Nations. It nipped in the bud incipient border wars in the Balkans, between Yugoslavia and Albania in 1921 and between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925. The other successful use of sanctions was American financial pressure on sterling, which forced an end to Britain’s Egyptian military expedition in the Suez war of 1956.