Category Archives: Neoconservatism

CPAC Sheds A Heavy Weight; Gains Light-Weights Galore

Bush, Conservatism, IMMIGRATION, Intellectualism, John McCain, Neoconservatism

As was mentioned a few posts back, Chris Christie will be conspicuous by his absence from this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which will commence on March 14.

New Jersey’s popular Republican governor is getting his comeuppance. He campaigned for the Democrat Barack Obama throughout October of 2012. Now the governor has not been invited to partake at CPAC. “He’s not … conservative,” offered Al Cardenas, who is chairman of the American Conservative Union that sponsors CPAC.

CPAC has hosted countless unconservative members of the establishment, one of them was the Republican’s presidential nominee for 2008, John McCain.

As part of the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity, McCain worked to legalize 20 million illegal immigrants. He blessed George W. Bush’s deficit spending and obscene stimulus package. By National Review’s count, McCain voted for higher taxes 50 time. And like any good liberal, he disparaged Mitt Romney for making it in the private sector.

The Conservative Political Action Conference would be acting less incongruously were they to blackball dough ball Christie for being the consummate backstabbing, slimy, opportunistic politician. Republicans who are not conservative are the norm.

For example, Jeb Bush. This year brother Bush will be a featured speaker at CPAC. Bush junior is hardly much of a conservative. Jeb Bush’s new book, “Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution,” advocates further liberalization of US immigration policy. However, so liberal has the GOP become on immigration, since November 2012, that Bush’s book is being rejected as too hawkish.

Fear not. Substituting, at CPAC, for the absence of one heavy weight governor—and the reference is not to Christie’s intellect—are plenty lightweights. See for yourself.

Desmond Tutu NOT An Example Of Black Privilege

Affirmative Action, Israel, Neoconservatism, Race, Racism, South-Africa

I am not sure why the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, reviewed by philosopher-pundit Jack Kerwick on FrontPage Magazine, picked on Desmond Tutu as an example of black privilege in South Africa.

It must be an authorial tic peculiar to neoconservatives, and applied to anyone with an anti-Israel position, for which Archbishop Tutu is famous. It is also typical of the neoconservative’s reflexive ahistoric approach, where a proposition or an idea (black privilege) is applied without nuance, to any and all annoying blacks (Tutu is that alright).

Horowitz and Perazzo even show that black skin privilege transcends continents. Alluding to South Africa’s Bishop Demond Tutu, they write: “What white spiritual leader could support the torture-murders of South African blacks, compare Israel to Nazi Germany, and still be regarded as a moral icon? A black cleric like Bishop Desmond Tutu can.” (Indeed, as occasional Front Page Magazine contributor and former South African resident Ilana Mercer amply demonstrates in her, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, the new South Africa is black skin privilege on steroids.)

(From “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream” by Jack Kerwick.)

I don’t think Desmond Tutu is an example of black privilege. He supports it, but doesn’t exemplify it.

If anything, the elderly Archbishop, whose inauguration I attended and with whom my father and I took afternoon tea many decades back, embodies the old-style, old school African man. Tutu grew up in wretched poverty, received—and gladly accepted—a decent education courtesy of the Church, and worked his ministry so hard as to reap the rewards. (In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” I discuss the wonders the white-run churches had done in South Africa, as do I mention what was for me a memorable meeting with the Archbishop. From that occasion I took away that he was fond of my father and respectful of dad’s Jewish faith and scholarship. How good an equalizer were some schools in the old South Africa? You be the judge. Tutu and I, and tens of thousands of other Africans, belong to the same alma mater: UNISA.)

Sure, Tutu is a left-liberal. But to me, as I said in “King Tut(u) Not So Terrific,” his impiety stems from never having piped up about the ethnic cleansing of rural whites, Afrikaners mostly, from the land in ways that beggar belief. Saint Mandela has also remained mum about these Shaka-Zulu worthy murders.

And so have our neoconservatives!

Witness the authors of Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream, who, it would appear, protest Tutu’s alleged support for the “torture-murders of South African blacks” (by which I am told they meant white South Africans), but say nothing, seemingly (just like Tutu), about the targeted slaughter of whites in South Africa, and then only when it’s politically safe to do so. (Watch Barely a Blog for commentary about Oscar Pistorius.)

Jack Kerwick, of course, is correct (and most kind) to subtly remind neoconservatives that it is “the new South Africa [that] is black skin privilege on steroids” (and that a rightist has already plumbed the depths of this topic).

UPDATED: Hagel Raises Neocon Hackles (‘Axis Of Error’ Enraged)

Foreign Policy, Israel, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Neoconservatives are having grand mal seizures and that’s a good thing. “President Obama on Monday nominated former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel as defense secretary,” reports the Washington Post.

Obama called Hagel “the leader that our troops deserve” and a “champion of our troops and our veterans and our military families.” He said Hagel, a former Army sergeant, would be the first person of enlisted rank and the first Vietnam War veteran to head the Defense Department.
“Maybe most importantly, Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction, Obama said.

CNN recounts that Hagel’s:

fierce opposition to the Iraq War went far toward creating the schism that now exists between him and the Republican establishment.
“The damage this war has done to our country will play out for years to come,” he wrote in his 2008 book, “America: Our Next Chapter.”
“While it is easy for nations to blunder into war, they never blunder into peace,” he added.
His opposition to the 2009 surge in Afghanistan put him at odds with the president who nominated him.

This is all good, although Hagel’s promise to “advance global freedom, decency and humanity’ in the effort to ‘build a better world for all mankind'” smacks of neocon Manifest Destiny. Defend US borders and no more.

As to the hackles Hagel has raised among Israel devotees. “Nothing Hagel has said about Israel,” ventures Richard Cohen at the WaPo, “is not said in the Israeli press on a daily basis. Trust me: By the Wall Street Journal’s standards, Israeli media would be deeply anti-Semitic.”

(Cohen points out that Chuck Hagel “earned his wariness of war the hard way — two Purple Hearts in Vietnam.” Cohen is wrong to frame war wariness as a privilege that needs to be earned.)

UPDATE (Jan. 8): Lindsey Graham, a member of the unholy trinity of neoconservative law makers—the “three amigos; the three blind mice; aka the ‘axis of error’”—“was on CNN’s ‘STATE OF THE UNION’ yesterday calling this an ‘in your face’ nomination and basically saying that this is going to be a very controversial pick for President Obama.”

UPDATED: No Country For Old, White Men

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Critique, Democrats, Elections, Feminism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The West, The Zeitgeist, War, Welfare

“No Country For Old, White Men” is the current column, now on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“…Romney was booed when he wooed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Enough to provoke the ire of blacks, Latinos, ladies of all hues, the halt and the lame was the mere hint that the too-white-to-like Romney would slow down the gravy train. Lickspittle Republicans were as eager as the Democratic representatives of these identity groups to lambaste Mr. Romney for being too attractive, too macho, too white, too Christian, and too rich.

No one could have failed to notice that Mitt Romney resembles the “Mad Man” played by Jon Hamm, in the eponymous AMC series. Both men are tall, dark and handsome, with the kind of picture-perfect, quintessential American good looks. Both hide their feelings and are spare with their emotions. When they show their softer side–it actually means something. Each is dutiful and dependable.

Such qualities, once considered desirable in a man, now offend the dominatrixes who run the nation’s newsrooms.

“He’s a very private man; and that’s a liability.” “How can you get me to vote for him, if I don’t like him?” “He needs to humanize himself.” And, “Can he [even] be humanized?” demanded one CNN ghoul by the name of Gloria Borger on the eve of Halloween. Mitt Romney was inhuman: That, very plainly, was the premise of this harridan’s rhetorical question.

“Ann Romney’s job, and she’s been pushing for this in the campaign, is to kind of humanize him,” noodled the banal Ms. Borger over and over again, for the campaign’s duration.

This was the menstrually inspired miasma that emanated from TV studios countrywide.

Thus did Mitt Romney come to embody elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure: …”

The complete column is “No Country For Old, White Men,” now on WND.

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UPDATE: VIA JACK KERWICK:

You are absolutely correct for noting the unmistakable racial subtext of this election and people’s reaction to Romney. … MR and his wife are straight out of 1950’s America, the Dark Ages when blacks, women, and homosexuals were oppressed, the days before the Enlightened ’60’s. Romney is ‘Father Knows Best,’ Ward Cleaver. Obama, in contrast, is the symbol of the new, multicultural America.