The Rising Antiwar Tide...in the GOP

One of the best columns I have read lately:
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The Rising Antiwar Tide
… in the GOP

by Justin Raimondo​

There are rumblings in the GOP that, if they get much louder, threaten to split the Republican Party over the war issue – and I don't think anything could be much louder (in a good way) than Victor Gold's colorful dissent from the pro-war neocon orthodoxy. As deputy press secretary to Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign, Spiro Agnew's press secretary in the early '70s, and a senior adviser to Bush père in the '80s, Gold is a self-described "Goldwater conservative" whose new book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and the Neocons Destroyed the GOP, is a shot across the bow at the Coulterized, Kristolized "conservative" movement. As Gold puts it,

"So it is that six years into the country's first neocon administration, what Americans have learned about Irving Kristol's 'new kind of conservative politics' is that it's merely a recycled model of the old liberal politics that led to the decline and fall of the Democratic Party in the 1960s: a fiscally irresponsible, ever-expanding federal government presided over by an imperial executive imbued with a messianic view of America's right to 'democratize' the heathen; or, as Irving's neocon son William, editor of the Weekly Standard, prefers, our moral duty to 'actively pursue' policies leading to Woodrow Wilson's dream of a 'benevolent global hegemony.'

"Translated from the neocon: Today we own Washington, tomorrow the world."

Gold's thesis is that the party of George W. Bush has become just as corrupt and delusional as the party of Lyndon Baines Johnson – in good part because the Scoop Jackson Democrats who brain-trusted and defended the Vietnam War have long since migrated to the GOP, where they've taken over and replicated their old policies of big government at home and big trouble abroad....

The Republican Party faces a choice: it can continue down its present path and follow the Leader and the neocons over a cliff, or it can change course and return to its historic roots as the party of limited government at home and limited ambition on the international front.

To the neocons, the Republican Party was just a means to an end, not a cause unto itself: it was their vehicle to power, and once they had arrived, its fate was irrelevant to their central concerns. A parasite, after all, cares nothing for its host.

- rest at http://tinyurl.com/35hbyn