“Bush is the delinquent foreign-policy maestro of an otherwise great country. He has failed to deal honestly and rationally with the realities of the region, preferring wishful thinking and simplistic black-and-white threats to the hard work and nuanced sensibilities that are needed to grapple with the problems, challenges and opportunities of the Arab-Asian region. His desperate, last minute, pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat attempt to achieve Palestinian-Israeli peace at Annapolis was clearly insincere - because he didn’t invest the required political capital to get it done, and lacks the intellectual clarity and moral gumption to make it happen. He hoped to ride a runaway horse to the finish line and ended up in a horror house of mirrors. His peace partners have proved illusory, his necessary impartiality is nonexistent, and his sense of how Palestine and Israel fit into the wider picture in the Middle East is totally absent. ” Read the rest of this entry »
This week the President of Iran was strutting around his nation’s main uranium enrichment facility, claiming installation of 6,000 new centrifuges in addition to the existing 3,000 there–an ill-advised nose-thumbing gesture in the direction of the US and Israel.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a chronic sufferer from the need for attention on the world stage, who has been in remission since his visit to the UN last fall. With this latest turn for the TV cameras, he is showing symptoms of an acute and, for his regime, possibly life-threatening new outbreak.
Dick Cheney immediately made the diagnosis on right-wing talk radio. The Iranian President, he told Sean Hannity, is “a very dangerous man” who “has repeatedly stated that he wants to destroy Israel” and believes that “the highest honor that can befall a man is that he should die a martyr in facilitating the return of the 12th Imam. It’s a radical, radical point of view.”
Gen. Tommy Franks was off the mark when he called Douglas Feith the dumbest effing guy on the planet. On 60 Minutes last night, Feith showed that stupidity alone is not enough to describe a clueless academic intoxicated by power and willing to stoop to intellectual dishonesty that would shame any used-car salesman
“What we did after 9/11,” he told Steve Kroft, “was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.”
“So you’re saying,” an incredulous Kroft followed up by asking, “you didn’t think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it–more important to go after people who weren’t responsible for it?”
Feith, who helped cook the intelligence to justify the invasion, was pimping his doorstop book that blames everyone else, especially L. Paul Bremer, who ran the Iraq occupation for the first two years, for the ensuing fiasco.
If he had had his way, Feith claims, he would have turned the country over to con man Ahmad Chalabi, who fed him and his Neo-Con rubes $33 million of false information to lie us into the war.
Dumb isn’t enough. Try shameless, arrogant and deceitful. There is at least one like him on most campuses. Just our luck that this specimen ended up in Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.
Having run through a series of rationales for the Iraq war that would have daunted a less arrogant man, George Bush finally settled on a real keeper in the fifth year of the Forever War: It was necessary in order to bring down the very terrorists who launched the 9/11 attacks.
While it took some time to debunk the earlier rationales, this one was an instant classic, a whopper so big and transparently false that it beggared belief.
This, of course, was because the Al Qaeda insurgents who have bedeviled the star-crossed American occupation were a product of the occupation itself and had only a tangential connection to Osama bin Laden and the men who flew jetliners into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a farm field in Western Pennsylvania.
But we can thank the president for one thing: The phony connection between Al Qaeda in Iraq and 9/11 invites another and one that I offer with circumspection as we slouch into the sixth year of the war.
What Bin Laden was not able to do on that fateful morning and in the years since, Bush has done for him in some respects.
At first glance, that statement may seem shockingly inapt until you consider:
* Bush’s ability to play on America’s fears far better than The Bearded One ever could.
* Bush’s penchant for divisive politics has further exacerbated social divides in America.
* Bush’s pathalogical inability to level with Americans has further undermined their faith in goverment.
* Bush’s economic policies have exacerbated troubling long-term economic trends and helped plunge America into recession.
* Bush’s war has further destabilized arguably the most volatile region in the world.
* And Bush’s actions, including advocating torture and casting aside international treaties and conventions, have brought great shame on America.
I wrote here last night about my perception that John McCain’s campaign as the presidential nominee of the Republican party was starting off on the wrong foot.
Emblematic of that to me was McCain’s decision to tear to Washington to receive a personal endorsement from George W. Bush today.
That’s about it, then, isn’t it—-all the talk about McCain as the new type of Republican moderate destined to lead the party back to its roots? I’m guessing that this latest news will put an end to talk among disenchanted Democrats of voting for him in November.
Today, McCain voted legislation that intended to do exactly what he himself has advocated: adopted the Army Field Manual interrogation standards for the US government. Anti-torture advocates, such as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, supported this crucial bill. McCain himself said in a Republican debate in November that the Army Field Manual should be ‘the gold standard for interrogations.’
Romney is proving an expert at reinventing himself and reframing his positions as his campaign rolls along. I imagine if he gets the nomination he’ll be an expert in reinventing himself again.
Judging by the number of voters who seem drawn to John McCain, it seems as if he’ll have to moderate his message, however much this might distress the party hardliners who are currently clinging to him as their last best hope against “liberal” John McCain. I don’t fault him for that; I’ve never bought into the notion that so-called “flip-flopping” is a cardinal sin.
After seven years of Bush and his unshakable confidence in his convictions, I have come to the conclusion that an elected official needs to be sufficiently flexible to adapt to changing circumstances. But the media does view it as a cardinal sin. If it were not a cardinal sin, it’s just possible Hillary would unbend and confess, “Yes, oh God yes, my Iraq vote was the worst mistake of my political career!” But she can’t, because it’s a cardinal sin.
You could even say that it takes a special kind of courage to flip flop on issues as much as Romney has had to do to become the favorite son of Republican hardliners. This is the most charitable way to look at the criticisms of Romney, and I am all about being charitable.
Some might argue that Romney has taken flip flopping too far. Not me, though. Instead, I’m just hoping that the best man will win. We can’t afford anything else.
In his present incarnation, Michael Luo says, Romney is leading a “citizen revolution” as the “anti-establishment insurgent.” Hey, it worked for Jimmy “I have never set foot in Washington” Carter, another state governor. (Not with me: I voted for Gerald Ford.) Even so: it worked for Governor Carter. Will it work for Governor Romney?
I like Hillary Clinton. Although my heart belongs to John Edwards, I voted for her as the candidate most likely to succeed, and even succeed superbly, at the thankless damn task that cleaning up after George W. Bush is likely to prove. After all, it’s not a
job for someone who can’t deal with being hated. But what a lot of people are saying now is that Hillary is too hated generally to make it to the White House; therefore Dems should get behind Obama.
I say that Obama would be much better off if he let Hillary do the cleaning up before he takes the presidency; it’s going to be a nasty, unpalatable job for the most part involving choices between one decision with consequences that are hard to stomach and another that is even worse. But Obama has signified that he would like to be president now. And many of my friends want him simply because they’re sick of the sound of Clinton-bashing. At least with Obama, mused one, we’d hear new, fresh contumely.
And we all know it’s true: Hillary is hated by many-many-many. In fact, she routinely gets reviled by right, left, and center. At The New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses the loathing that Hillary Clinton evokes from her detractors (not all of whom are Republicans), compared to which, he says, " the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity." Fish lists some of the crazier allegations against Hillary. As he says, when the question presented is "“Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical
question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland."" (NYT)
But I’m more interested in the allegations of Hillary-haters who aren’t actually certifiable. As Fish points out, many of the allegations against her are flat-out contradictory. She is damned by her detractors (who aren’t limited to Republicans) no matter what she does.
First we got Coulter promising with a straight face to campaign for Hillary if McCain wins. Now Rush Limbaugh is saying that he’d rather see Clinton or Obama win the presidency than John McCain, despite Bob Dole’s plea for sanity on the party’s far right. Too bad, Bob Dole. That ship sailed a long time ago.
When it comes to the McCain mutiny, Limbaugh has plenty of company on the right side of the dial. Laura Ingraham endorsed Mitt Romney last week, saying, "There is no way in hell I could pull the lever for John McCain." Sean Hannity, who also endorsed the former Massachusetts governor, regularly rips McCain. Hugh Hewitt is urging the audience for his syndicated radio show to fight for Romney against what he calls a media-generated "McCain resurrection." But with a program heard on 600 stations, including Washington’s WMAL, Limbaugh is the loudest and brashest voice inveighing against the man he derides as "Saint John of Arizona." (New York Times)
Could it be that even some of the dittoheads have noticed that the far right has turned out to be wrong about every single thing it’s said every single time? Doubtful. Clearly, though, a certain number of sane Republicans have noticed.
by Damozel |Hurray! Ann Coulter has semi-endorsed Hillary, sort of! Ed Morissey asks "Has Ann Coulter jumped the shark?"He wonders if this will finish her off with anyone who still takes her seriously, assuming anyone still does. Jill Miller Zimon has the video right here. Is this the greatest campaign season ever, or what? It’s not exactly fair on Hillary, but I can’t help chortling madly as I watch it again and again and again.
So. Ann too is well and truly infected, as the Captain puts it, with “McCain Derangement Syndrome.” You might be surprised by her extreme solution to it, but I’m not. True, from Duncan Hunter to Hillary might strike some as something of a leap, but McCain has the power to drive neocons right over the jagged edge, bless him. This campaign season, liberal is the new conservative!
Paul Wolfowitz has screwed up virtually everything he has done in association with the Bush administration and America is the worse for it.
The smarmy neocon was a key architect of the Iraq war and as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary of defense proved to be adroit at assigning blame to practically everyone except himself as the war came a cropper.
Wolfowitz then went on to become president of the World Bank, which had been widely criticized by the White House for corruption and cronyism. He promptly installed his girlfriend in a key position with a hefty compensation package and resigned only after a bitter and protracted showndown with the bank’s board.
Now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who knows a thing or three about screwing up, will name Wolfowitz to head a high-level advisory panel on arms control and disarmament.
It so happens that Wolfowitz has substantial experience in arms-control matters, but that’s not the point. The reality that the Bush administration repeatedly and shamelessly rewards bad behavior is.
Unless Rudy Giuliani pulls off a Florida surprise in next Tuesday’s primary, there are now three Republicans with some chance of winning their party’s presidential nomination: John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. Recently, I speculated on who might be the vice presidential running mates of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the event that one of them becomes the Democratic nominee for president. But what about the remaining Republican contenders?
Each would have their own particular needs when it came to selecting running mates. In this post, I want to address what and who McCain will likely need in a running mate.
McCain should, by all rights, be the clear frontrunner, given the usual orderly succession of Republican presidential politics. That he isn’t results in part, from the fact that neoconservatism, with its advocacy of Wilsonian intervention in foreign affairs, has at least temporarily changed the definition of conservatism. Additionally, on at least two major issues–immigration reform and campaign financing–McCain has departed from conservatism. Some will also mention his opposition to President Bush’s 2002 tax cuts. Others will excoriate his participation in the Gang of Fourteen, ignoring how the compromise struck by those US Senators in 2005, made it possible for the President’s conservative nominees for the US Supreme Court to be confirmed without controversy.
Be that as it may, McCain, an orthodox Goldwater-Reagan conservative who is an advocate of strong national defense, restrained government spending, Second Amendment rights, and an end to abortion, doesn’t have the luxury that Ronald Reagan had in selecting running mates in 1976 and 1980. Read the rest of this entry »
Ronald Reagan has been the luckiest president of my lifetime, which is one reason that I find myself chuckling when his name is invoked — as it frequently is these days — by the Republican presidential wannabes and by that Obama fella on one or two occasions, as well.
What do I mean by luckiest?
Because Reagan was pretty much an empty vessel into which every Republican mover and shaker of consequence of his time poured their own political views and agendas. He was a universal wrench of a man whose primary qualifications were a mediocre movie career and so-so turn as governor of California. He had no interest in details and was befuddled by complex concepts, but was extraordinarily adept at exciting the Republican political base and making Americans feel really good about themselves even as he rewarded the rich and undercut the middle class.
Aside from that nasty assassination attempt, some recession messiness during his first term and being caught out in the Iran-Contra affair, things usually broke Reagan’s way whether he was napping or not, most notably when the Berlin Wall came down and Soviet Union swooned on his watch. Today he is an oft-cited conservative icon despite the reality that he had little substance beyond his political skills.
I am fond of saying that you make your own luck, and George Bush certainly has done so.
Like Reagan, Bush has been pretty much an empty vessel into which today’s Republican movers and shakers (read neocons and right-wing Christianists) have poured their own political views and agendas. Like Reagan, he was more resume than man when he became president. And like Reagan, seems to use a notably small part of his brain but once upon a time could excite that political base.
After the 9/11 attacks, Bush did a passable job at making Americans feel really good about themselves at a really lousy juncture in their history and then, because he believed the sycophants around him when they called him The Latest and The Greatest, recklessly squandered the greatest presidential mandate since Pearl Harbor on the Iraq war and other misadventures. So enormous has the collapse of the Bush presidency been that it has to be ranked right behind the 9/11 attacks as the biggest story of the young millennium.
The Republican Party is trebly hobbled this election season:
With Vice President Cheney a hiccup away from what Redd Foxx called The Big One on “Sanford and Son,” the party has no heir apparent. Bush has almost single-handedly ended the Republicans’ grip on power. And because he is so toxic, the presidential candidates have to look hard over their shoulders to when that city on the hill last shined so brightly for the Grand Old Party.
We’re in recurring nightmare territory here. A Zogby poll shows more than half of voters would support a military strike to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and believe it likely the U.S. will do so before next year’s election.
On PBS’ News Hour, normally an oasis of rationality in the TV news desert, we have a solemn debate about attacking Iran between Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and Norman Podhoretz, the Neo-Con relic Rudy Giuliani is propping up to prove he is a true conservative.
When Zakaria points out we have used deterrence and containment against nuclear threats from China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, Podhoretz accuses him of “an irresponsible complacency…comparable to the denial in the early ’30s of the intentions of Hitler that led to what Churchill called an unnecessary war involving millions and millions of deaths that might have been averted if the West had acted early enough.”
If Zakaria’s informed rationality and Podhoretz’s apocalyptic drool are given equal weight as two sides of the argument, we may be headed for another Iraq, propelled by the same political and media cowardice of five years ago.
The Senate passes the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment designating the Iranian Revolution Guard as a terrorist organization by a vote of 76 to 22, with Hillary Clinton, among other Democrats, failing to see that the Bush-Cheney Administration will surely use it to justify an attack on Iran without seeking Congressional approval.
Such willful blindness now leads to apparent public approval of what would surely be another act of national insanity, putting American troops in harm’s way in three Muslim countries based on no compelling national interest beyond the loopy theories of a gaggle of armchair warriors in a discredited lame-duck Administration.
To top it all off, we have Rudy Giuliani war-mongering for votes in New Hampshire by accusing Clinton and Obama of wanting to negotiate with bad people and debating whether to invite Ahmadinejad and Osama to “the inauguration or the inaugural ball.”
Why aren’t more politicians and media people speaking out about this recurrence of madness?
The man with the white walrus mustache is back in Washington after a European tour of touting war with Iran. He has a new book to promote and a new cause–rallying Republican Congressmen to oppose the nuclear agreement with North Korea by that left-wing softie, George W. Bush.
Last week he met with 42 GOP members at the invitation of Iowa Rep. Steve King, whose main legislative goal is to abolish the income tax, and argued that “North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily, and that it is only a matter of time before their cheating is exposed, at which point one hopes that Bush will repudiate this charade.â€
Bolton’s new book is titled “Surrender Is Not an Option,†reflecting the unyielding bellicosity of the man who calls himself a Goldwater conservative, as opposed to those parvenu Neo-Cons he considers “liberals who’d been mugged by reality.â€
If he had his way, Bolton would solve all our world problems by bombing and invading, in contrast to his youthful aversion to warfare.
“I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” Bolton wrote in the 25th reunion book of his graduation from Yale about his decision to join the National Guard and go to law school. “I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”
Unlike the war in Iraq today and whatever new ones he can instigate tomorrow.
In March of 2005, I wrote a post at the Centrist Coalition, in which I predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination. In that post, I criticized her both for her support for the Iraq War and her pandering tosocialconservatives.
Six months later, I wrote a follow-up post in which I lamented that anti-war Democrats who have relentlessly criticized Bush for invading Iraq would nonetheless rally around the candidacy of Hillary Clinton who voted in favor of the 2002 resolution that gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq:
And here’s the sad part. All of the Democrats who have been denouncing the Iraq War for the last two and a half years will flock to Hillary Clinton and proclaim her the savior of the Democratic Party, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she, like Bush, was responsible for a war that sent a couple thousand American soldiers to their deaths and claimed the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. We can expect Clinton and the DLC to advertise the fact that the Bush administration STILL has not apprended Osama Bin Laden, and instead of arguing for a more humble and realistic foreign policy that rejects the naive notions of the current administration’s War on Terrorism, Clinton and the DLC will argue that the War on Terrorism was not fought HARD ENOUGH and that it would had succeeded had Bush not bungled it all up.
Sure enough, Senator Clinton announced her candidacy in December 2006, and she’s been leading in the polls ever since.
Senator Clinton’s candidacy was initially met by fierce criticism from anti-war activists within the party–many of whom thought her sudden conversion from war-supporter to war-opponent less than 14 months before the 2008 primaries smacked of political opportunism and were further angered when she refused to apologize for voting for the 2002 resolution that sent our country on the path to war with Iraq.
Yet Senator Clinton was not about to be denied her party’s nomination. Just as President Bush has employed revisionist history to explain why we went to war with Iraq, so to has Senator Clinton in order to justify her support for the 2002 resolution. Last February, I wrote a post at the Coming Realignment in which I argued that Senator Clinton was retroactively attempting to alter her justification for supported the war in the first place. Senator Clinton argued that she only supported the 2002 resolution in order to put pressure on Saddam Hussein to allow weapons inspections and that she did not support the invasion itself. However, as I pointed out then, a March 2003 video depicting a meeting between Hillary Clinton and members of Code Pink (a group of left-wing activists) shows that this was not the case at all. As the video clearly shows, Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq (with or without international support) less than two weeks before our government’s “shock and awe” campaign in Baghdad commenced.
As Hillary Clinton’s lead over her Democratic rivals increases, I continue to be astounded by how easily Democrats are willing to support a Senator who for four years, supported this misguided war in Iraq. This is the same Hillary Clinton who criticized Russ Feingold for daring to suggest that we withdraw from Iraq back in 2005.
A hawk…A panderer…A political opportunist…
But a neocon?
That’s what libertarian Radley Balko argues in an article over at Reason. As he sees it, a Hillary Clinton presidency wouldn’t be all that different from a George W. Bush presidency, and he provides an account of some of the political positions taken by Senator Clinton that suggests a strong neoconservative streak in her:
Then there is Hillary Clinton on the issues. Cato Institute President Ed Crane recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times pointing out that when you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton’s grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn’t conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.
In fact, the L.A. Times reported last week that Clinton has refused to commit even to pulling U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, which, if elected, would be the end of her first term. TV journalist Ted Koppel recently told NPR that Clinton has admitted the U.S. would still have troops in Iraq at the end of her second term.
The 1990s, remember, weren’t exactly a decade of peace. Bill Clinton ordered more U.S. military interventions than any other post-WWII administration, and there’s no reason to think any of them were over Hillary’s protestations. She supported the U.S. military campaigns in Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. She once boasted that as the tension in Kosovo mounted, she called her husband from her trip to Africa and, “I urged him to bomb.”
Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government’s ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing “decency” standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.
Hillary Clinton may be loathed by leading neoconservatives and may loathe them in return. Yet they have more in common with each other than either of them would care to admit. As a U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton has had seven years to lay out her political positions, and she hasn’t shied away from making speeches or meeting with constituents. But in the end, a politician is judged by how he/she exercises that unique power that distinguishes him/her from the rest of us–the power to vote for or against legislation. And on many of the most controversial and far-reaching pieces of legislation that have been passed these last seven years, Senator Clinton has voted the de-facto neoconservative position.
After 7 years of Bush and Cheney controlling the Executive Branch, I can see why Democrats would want to see change come to the White House.
UPDATE: I want to remind regulars and visitors at TMV to read Radley Balko’s piece over at Reason. It was his article that inspired my post and whose title I surreptitiously stole. Obviously I couldn’t quote his entire article, and there is much that he writes about in terms of Hillary Cllinton and neoconservatism–particularly with regards to executive power–that I didn’t cover in my post.
In 2002, Andrew Card, then Bush’s Chief of Staff, told the New York Times why the drumbeat for war against Iraq started in September: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.â€
It’s September again, this year’s product is war against Iran and the sales pitches have started.
“Iran’s pursuit of…nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,†President Bush told war veterans last week. Promising to apply diplomatic pressures first (sound familiar?), he nonetheless vowed, “We will confront this danger before it is too late.â€
In the U.K. Telegraph, a story is planted about war-gaming a blockade of Iran: “”The results were impressive. The policy recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes.”
Ever-faithful John Bolton, our unconfirmable former ambassador to the U.N. is telling Israelis via video hookup that President Bush “has made clear that a nuclear Iran is not acceptable.”
Even Gen. Petraeus is not too busy surging in Iraq to observe the “malign involvement of the Iranian Quds force with the militia extremists that have been supported by them, trained, equipped, armed, funded and even in some cases directed.â€
Sen. Bernie Sanders, pointing out that the “Fox propaganda machine†is at work again on the Iran campaign, urges “the mass media not to play the same craven role that they played in Iraq, where they essentially collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush’s policies.”
In five years, it is clear the Bush-Cheney Administration has learned nothing. Have the American people and their media?
Jamie wrote a must read post for The Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan is once again on vacation) about neoconservatism and then especially the frequent use of this word by progressives. Jamie writes:
There’s been a lot of discussion on the blog about the use–and abuse–of the label “neo-con.” Which has got me thinking–what is it that causes people to label others this way? And why is it that people who would never consider themselves neo-conservatives are labeled as such?
Today, it seems that a “neo-con” (at least in the fevered imaginations of the net-left) is someone who frequently calls attention to the unprovoked aggression of despotic regimes (e.g. Iran and Syria), the violation of human rights in other countries, and advocates the moral superiority of democratic countries in international affairs. A “neo-con” is now anyone who dares make an issue out of the aggressions and inhumanity of despotisms without explaining them away, and for advocating America do something about these aggressions and inhumanities. It is for this reason that so many on the left attacked Bayard Rustin in the 1970’s and 1980’s when, in addition to speaking out about racial injustices in the United States and condemning Reaganomics, he also spoke out, vociferously, against the PLO, Robert Mugabe, and the Sandinistas. But Rustin was hardly a proper neo-conservative, even if he happened to write the occasional article for Commentary and helped found the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. And so, simply for stating uncomfortable realities about the world, someone is called a “neocon” (which in today’s political discourse–not just left-wing discourse–is akin to labeling someone a “pinko” in the 1950’s) and readily dismissed.
It seems that, in both the right and left blogospheres those who do not toe the party line are attacked and called names: Liberals are traitors and conservatives are warmongers. “Neo-con” has become the de facto curse word in the left-wing blogosphere, applied to anyone who dares oppose the dictates of Chairman Kos (do his followers realize the cruel irony of calling themselves “Kossacks?”)
This last post by Jamie was a response to posts by Steve Clemons and Hilzoy - also both active at Andrew’s blog. As those who regularly read Clemons’ and Hilzoy’s stuff know, they might throw around the label ‘neocon’ a bit too easily. This annoyed Jamie and he published a post calling them out. The response is what seems to be a bit of a heated debate (although all involved seem to try not to take each other on too aggressively since Andrew would probably like to find his blog intact when he returns).
In this debate, I agree completely with Jamie. Neocon has become an insult for everyone who dares talk about the awful things happening in other countries. Especially if one has the guts to point out what is happening in, say, Iran, one is the danger of either being called a ‘neocon,’ or a ‘neocon apologist.’ Both labels are of course ludicrous. One does not need to be a neoconservative to be able to see that there are some serious messed up regimes in the world, and to believe that the West should do something about these regimes if possible.
What we have seen in the last two years or so is that progressives have started using the neocon label to dismiss all opposition to their own generally empty foreign policy plans. Whenever one has the guts to point out that Iran might be working on a nuclear weapon and that it is probably not a good idea to let Ahmadinejad have an atom bomb, one gets instantly attacked by bloggers (and readers) on the (far) left. Not only is one a ‘neocon,’ but one is also a ‘warmonger.’ The result is that they do not truly debate, or talk about the issue at hand, but casually dismiss everything you said by implying that the only thing you are after is war. For some strange reason these people seem to think that everybody a little bit more to the right than they loves war.
In the end, though, these progressives hurt their own cause. They have to come up with their own ideas to deal with real problems and, in the end, just dismissing any opposition by calling opponents ‘neocons’ isn’t going to work anymore.
NOTE: No, not every single liberal does this. I am not accusing all liberals of doing this. But some most certainly do.
I wrote 
