Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Liz Cheney: Like Father, Like Daughter

Ann Coulter, Family, Homosexuality, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

Liz Cheney is a snake like her father, Dick, whom Fox News continues to dust off periodically and present as a voice of wisdom. Even though she hangs out with her gay sister and sister’s partner and expresses support for the couple in private, the opportunistic Liz—who is running for office—disses her sister’s life in public:

It’s a good thing Mary Cheney can’t vote in Wyoming.

After an appearance on Fox News Sunday in which Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney said she and her married gay sister “just disagree” on the subject of marriage equality, Mary Cheney posted a sharp rebuke to her Facebook page. “Liz – this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree, you’re just wrong – and on the wrong side of history,” she wrote.

Mary Cheney’s wife, Heather Poe, also took to Facebook to sound off. “Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 – she didn’t hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us. To have her say she doesn’t support our right to marry is offensive to say the least.”

Their comments came after Liz Cheney, who is struggling in the polls against Rebublican [sic] incumbent Senator Mike Enzi, tried to explain to host Chris Wallace that her support of a State Department policy that grants benefits to same sex couples is not inconsistent with her broader opposition to allowing those couples to get married.

Ann Coulter had some fighting words for Liz (in defending the indefensible: the GOP):

“The problem is we have hucksters, shysters, people ripping off the Republican Party for their own self-aggrandizement, for their own egos, to make money,” Coulter said on Fox News’s “Hannity.”

“I would put Todd Akin, Newt Gingrich, Liz Cheney, Mark Sanford all in the same boat, and the consultants who persuaded Linda McMahon and John Raese to run,” she added.

Republicans just can’t stop mentioning issues that win them no support from most Americans. Most people think that a person’s sexual life is his or her business. What’s wrong with saying, “I have very many positions on policy, gay marriage is not one of them.” It’s hardly a make-or-break matter. Or simply echo this paleolibertarianism position:

In furtherance of liberty, Uncle Sam’s purview must be curtailed, not expanded. On this score, let our gay friends and family members lead the way. Let them solemnize their commitment in contract and through church, synagogue and mosque (that will be the day!). Once interesting and iconoclastic, gays have become colossal bores who crave nothing more than the state’s seal of approval. Go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy and private property were the object of gay anger and activism.

*Image credit

 

Curse of Chucky Krauthammer

Media, Neoconservatism, Republicans, War

Fox News is energetically marketing the neoconservative warmonger, Chucky Krauthammer. A generally “fair and balanced” newsman, Fox News’ Bret Baier turned positively obsequious in his Krauthammer coverage, making a song-and-dance of disclosing their close friendship. It’s all so incestuous, isn’t it?

When it comes to spying on Americans, Charles Krauthammer sees Obama’s NSA, 4th Amendment infractions as a vindication of Bush’s. The columnist has invited Democrats now excusing Obama to pardon Bush and … party on.

“After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer quickly scolded ‘the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown. Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer.”

Like all “neocon artists”—they were once radical leftists and are still hardcore Jacobins—on the invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Neocons had dismissed and maligned the Old Right (that’s us) and rubbished generals and government officials who warned against that war: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, former general and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf; former NATO Commander Wesley Clark; former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and Marine Corps Commandant James Jones: all were cool to the war. Retired General Anthony Zinni, distinguished warrior, diplomat and card-carrying Republican, warned Congress against the “wrong war at the wrong time.” The neocons dismissed them all as “yesterday’s men.”

From anti-discrimination legislative attacks on private property and First Amendment rights to the promotion of “large-scale Third World immigration” that displaces “Western core populations by groups that are culturally different and, in some cases, openly antagonistic”—the neocons are in philosophical tandem with The Left.
… these “illiterate leftists posturing as conservatives,” as Paul Gottfried has dubbed them, have been partial to—even complicit in—the historical elevation of Martin Luther King Jr. above the Founding Fathers. Neocons are always eager to conflate the messages of the two solitudes, even though the founders’ liberty is related to King’s egalitarianism as neoconservatism is related to traditional Republicanism—never the twain shall meet.

About the “sage of Fox News,” Jack Kerwick has reminded me of Krauthammer’s admission, as late as the eve of the 2008 election, that neither he nor George Will could figure out who Obama was: a centrist or a leftist. This, ventures Kerwick, speaks volumes. How anyone could’ve doubted that O was anything but a radical leftist, especially after the Jeremiah Wright thing blew up, is unfathomable. Jack thinks “Krauthammer and co. have zero business doing what they’re doing if they are that blind. And, of course, they got the country into Iraq.”

As to Chucky’s prose. He writes decently enough, but I am never curious enough to complete a column of his. It’s as unexciting as he is.

Chucky Krauthammer is a failed “expert,” for whom public goodwill runs eternal. “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while neoconservative false prophets are called back for encores?” This last question was posed and answered in “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!”:

The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.

The Goldberg Variation*

Conservatism, Debt, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Republicans

This response, written by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, arrived in my email In-Box. This is the first time I’ve received a mass mailing from Mr. Goldberg. It would appear that Jonah Goldberg was somewhat exercised about the reactions to his expected flippancy about the tea party’s “quixotic debt-ceiling showdown.”

Although he harps on the responses aimed at him on Twitter, those are not worth a straw. Pat Buchanan’s veiled allusion to Mr. Goldberg’s ilk, on the other hand, is likely a different matter. In “The ‘We Can’t Win’ Wimps Caucus,” Pat writes the following:

“We told you you would lose!” wail the beltway bundlers of the Republican establishment.

“We told you you would lose!” moan neoconservative columnists from their privileged perches on the op-ed pages of the beltway press.

“Look at what Ted Cruz and these tea-party people did to us,” wails the GOP establishment. “Look what has happened to our brand.” And 2014 was looking wonderful.

What a basket of wimps.

My column, of course, mentions names:

Media conservatives and liberals were agreed. The Republican brand, as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it, had been damaged by the debt-ceiling standoff.

Chuckie Krauthammer, another phony conservative, concurred. After badmouthing tea-party Republicans for attempting to leverage a partial government shut-down and debt-ceiling deadline to dilute ObamaCare, Krauthammer scolded “the media” for its biased coverage of the quixotic showdown.

Pot. Kettle. Krauthammer

Read “What If The Media Were Moral?” on Economic Policy Journal, the preeminent libertarian website.

*****

* “The Goldberg Variations”: “‘The Goldberg Variations’ is the last of a series of [sublime] keyboard music Bach published under the title of Clavierübung …”

Diplomacy Or More Devastation?

Foreign Policy, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Russia, UN, WMD

The latest Syria developments, as of Tuesday, September 10, are that “UN Security Council closed-door meeting called by Russia has been canceled, according to the Council’s current president Australia’s Ambassador to the UN, Gary Quinlan.” (Via RT)

And, via Politico:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday he wants Congress to delay its efforts to vote on authorizing the use of force in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons until the round of diplomatic efforts that began this week has a chance to play out.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Obama to renounce the use of force.

Note that “Obama and Kerry … haven’t been shy about taking credit for the [Russian] proposal [to disarm Syria of chemical weapons], saying on Monday and Tuesday that they discussed the idea last week with their Russian counterparts.” (Politico)

Will the president go back to saving-face mode, or will diplomacy win out?