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Featured Is neo-conservatism extinct?

Discussion in 'Political Debate & Discussion' started by church mouse guy, Sep 11, 2014.

  1. church mouse guy

    church mouse guy Well-Known Member
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    Merriam-Webster has officially defined neo-conservatism so let us look at what they say:

    Definition one may refer to liberals who became conservatives under President Reagan. I think that liberals becoming conservatives are few in number, especially since the most liberal administration (being impeachment proof) ever now is in total power in Washington DC.

    Definition two breaks down into two different issues: a) promotion of other republics and b) promotion of USA national interest.

    The promotion of other republics, in the spirit of '76, saw us cheer Simon Bolivar and Tousannt L'Oveture among others. It is always exciting when a nation gains freedom and people gain human rights. However, the USA is now weak and bankrupt and unable to help much. This type of activity is restricted by the reality of a depression-like American economy.

    The promotion of "United States national interest in international affairs including through military means" is how foreign policy is done. President Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander in World War II, used the motto "Peace Through Strength." Any nation has legitimate national interests and those interests must be protected by military power. Hence the need for a strong military. As the old saying goes, Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.

    For additional information:

    http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1075556/neoconservatism
     
    #1 church mouse guy, Sep 11, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 11, 2014
  2. poncho

    poncho Well-Known Member

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    Neo Con.

    1. Small group of politicians coming from as early as the Ford administration up to the Bush II administration.

    2. Have a fake pretense about believing in smaller government. In reality believe in big spending and tax cuts for their wealthy political and business friends, hence deficit spending.

    3. They fake being social conservatives, although true social conservatives believe they really care about social issues. Neocons distract the public by acting like they really care about social issues like gay marriage, abortion, and flag burning. Meanwhile they are busy conducting wars and stifling your freedom.

    4. Believe in costly wars and creating boogeymen to try and make you think only they can keep you safe while they restrict your freedoms to "protect you". This is their signature issue, to help keep them in power.

    5. Actually despise any types of small government advocates, Barry Goldwater, traditional live and let live conservative, and libertarians.
    George Bush I and II, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, are all a bunch of neocons.

    Neo-Con

    Anyone that believes in governance by the “noble lie” and the delusion of safety through global control.

    http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Neocon

    Neo Conservatism is alive and well and residing in the corporate sponsored think tanks that "advise" the White House, and it's still alive and well on Baptist Board.

    Need proof?

    Read the threads here having to do with "Russian Aggression". Neocons don't need proof. They just need to have enough gullible followers to keep repeating the same lies the WH and corporate media spew over and over as if they were true and painting anyone who questions them or points out the complete lack of evidence to back their claims as "traitors".

    http://www.baptistboard.com/index.php

    Isn't that right CMG?
     
    #2 poncho, Sep 12, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 12, 2014
  3. carpro

    carpro Well-Known Member
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    Wish we had 'em all back right about now. Be a heck of an improvement over what we have. :thumbs:
     
  4. poncho

    poncho Well-Known Member

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    No, there'd just be a bigger body count.

    Bush was playing huggie poo kissie face with the Saudis that fund and arm the head choppers and crucifiers same as Obama is today.

    The Bushies, Clintons and Obama work to protect the very people we need to be dealing with. But they got oil so they can do whatever they want while our politicians keep kissing their rear ends.

    You don't fight an enemy by being allied with it. You don't fight a "war on terror" by funding and arming the terrorists.

    It's common sense or at least it should be.
     
    #4 poncho, Sep 12, 2014
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  5. carpro

    carpro Well-Known Member
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    Agreed.

    Be a huge improvement over the morons running things now.

    Neo cons are , on the whole, so much more likable that Obamabots.
     
    #5 carpro, Sep 12, 2014
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  6. poncho

    poncho Well-Known Member

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    But who's really running things?

    The only thing Obama runs is his mouth. He's been following the same PNAC/Kissinger/Brzezinski neocon agenda that George W. Bush was.

    The president and congress are basically yes men for the banks and multinational corporations now. They don't dare use the restroom without consulting with a corporate sponsored think tank first.

    The whole left vs right thing is a scam.
     
  7. carpro

    carpro Well-Known Member
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    To you.

    I say, bring the neo cons back. They at least had a foreign policy and recognized the difference between allies and enemies.

    Obama can't see the enemy when it's right in his face. Blinded by his ideology, not his puppeteers.
     
  8. church mouse guy

    church mouse guy Well-Known Member
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    There aren't any neo-cons left to bring back if you use the dictionary definition of the word or even the Encyclopedia Britannica analysis of the doctrine.

    Liberals are no longer becoming conservatives.

    No one is saying that the USA should help fledgling republics anymore.

    Everyone says that the USA should have a strong military to protect American interests overseas. That is no longer being debated as even Democrat are defecting from 0bam@ on that point.
     
  9. prophet

    prophet Active Member
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    There is a massive influx of liberals into conservative thinking.
    It happens when those liberals marry and have kids.

    The soccer moms of the 90's are the neocons of now.

    They aren't for liberty, they are looking for security, and their first team let them down. So, they switch sides.

    They started a small business, and found out that they became an enemy of the state.
    So they begin to flock with others like themselves, tuning in to Fox, or some other middle of the road source of pseudoconservative ideology.
    They become activist.
    They get behind a weakling like Romney.
    Their kids reach their teens, and become the same starry eyed liberal that mom was.
    The cycle repeats.
     
  10. church mouse guy

    church mouse guy Well-Known Member
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    I think that the neo-cons were more than liberal youth who became conservative with middle age. They were card-carrying liberals who disliked the Democrat foreign policy when Democrats became the peace party after Viet Nam, although the Encyclopedia Britannica traces them to the doctrine of supporting liberty and military intervention.

    As for Romney, he was a moderate but his Mormonism caused many white Christians to abstain in recognition of the Mormon doctrine that they would take over the government with social works when the constitution was hanging by a thread (their words). Ed Decker (Saints Alive) has written on this in detail. Personally, I recognize the fear but I think it comes more from Harry Reid than Mitt but I am opposed to another run for Mitt.
     
  11. poncho

    poncho Well-Known Member

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    The Comeback

    But the neocons were anything but finished. They had positioned themselves wisely.

    They still controlled government-funded operations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); they held prominent positions inside think tanks, from the American Enterprise Institute to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Brookings Institution; they had powerful allies in Congress, such as Senators McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman; and they dominated TV chat shows and opinion pages, particularly at the Washington Post, the capital’s hometown newspaper.

    Since the late 1970s and early 1980s when they first emerged as a noticeable force in Washington, the neocons had become “insiders.” They were both admired and feared for their intellectual ferocity, but — most important for their long-term survival – they had secured access to government money, including the slush fund at NED whose budget grew to over $100 million during the Bush-43 years.

    NED, which was founded in 1983, is best known for investing in other countries’ “democracy building” (or CIA-style “destabilization” campaigns, depending on your point of view), but much of NED’s money actually goes to NGOs in Washington, meaning that it became a lifeline for neocon operatives who found themselves out of work because of the arrival of Obama.

    While ideological advocates for other failed movements might have had to move back home or take up new professions, the neocons had their financial ballast (from NED and many other sources) so their ideological ship could ride out the rough weather.

    Read More At: http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/14/neocons-have-weathered-the-storm/

    Neoconservatives never went away they just hid in the shadows for a bit.
     
  12. carpro

    carpro Well-Known Member
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    Maybe we can bring back the very first neocon, John Kennedy.:smilewinkgrin:
     
  13. church mouse guy

    church mouse guy Well-Known Member
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    Carpro, when did JFK ever become a conservative? Johnson said that the Great Society was the JFK social welfare plan, so he cannot qualify on that account as a domestic conservative. JFK was a big government guy.

    JFK ran on the missile gap so he probably was a hawk on defense, but with the memory of WW II so fresh most people were hawks. However, I cannot recall where JFK waxed nostalgic about giving people their human rights and a representative government so I count on you to remind me.

    I assume that you do not think that a strong military should be deployed to protect American interests overseas, which I consider traditional American foreign policy since the late 19th century.
     
  14. Salty

    Salty 20,000 Posts Club
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    When comparing.....
     
  15. carpro

    carpro Well-Known Member
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    He was a big spending liberal, who passed a tax cut and believed in the projection of American military power and sent a sizable number of troops to Vietnam.

    IOW a neocon :smilewinkgrin:
     
  16. poncho

    poncho Well-Known Member

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    Neocon Sleight-of-Hand

    The neocons are also back to their old sleight-of-hand conflating the terrorists fighting the Assad government with the Assad government. In the op-ed, McCain and Graham cite Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson supposedly calling “Syria ‘a matter of homeland security’” – when he actually said in the linked speech from last February:

    “We are very focused on foreign fighters heading to Syria. Based on our work and the work of our international partners, we know individuals from the U.S., Canada and Europe are traveling to Syria to fight in the conflict. At the same time, extremists are actively trying to recruit Westerners, indoctrinate them, and see them return to their home countries with an extremist mission.”

    In other words, “Syria” was not the problem cited by Johnson but rather the “foreign fighters heading to Syria” and the possibility that they might “return to their home countries with an extremist mission.” The distinction is important, but McCain and Graham want to blur the threat to confuse Americans into seeing “Syria” as the problem, not the extremists.

    A similar approach was taken by Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, one of the Obama administration’s top liberal war hawks. On Sept. 4, she sought to conflate recent allegations that Assad may not have surrendered all his chemical weapons with the possibility that any remaining weapons might fall into the hands of ISIS terrorists.

    “Certainly if there are chemical weapons left in Syria, there will be a risk” that they could end up in the hands of ISIS, Power said. “And we can only imagine what a group like that would do if in possession of such a weapon.”

    If any of these rhetorical tactics are ringing a bell, it’s because they are reminiscent of how the neocons frightened the American people into supporting the Iraq War in 2002-03. Back then, Bush administration officials blended unsubstantiated claims about Iraq’s WMDs with the prospect of them being shared with al-Qaeda.

    http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/11/neocons-revive-syria-regime-change-plan/

    Neoconservatives care about one thing—war (and where they can wage it). Says contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, neocon Max Boot: “Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad,” a progressive, Wilsonian vision, if there ever was one. As for traditional conservative concerns like limited government, fiscal responsibility, and constitutional fidelity, these are ideas neoconservatives will occasionally pay lip service to, so long as none of these principles interferes with their more important task of global military domination. It is no coincidence that George W. Bush—the first full-blown neoconservative presidential administration—did not limit government, was not fiscally responsible, and shredded the Constitution, while still implementing the most radical foreign policy in American history. Writes conservative columnist George Will, “The most magnificently misnamed neoconservatives are the most radical people in this town.”

    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/tactv/neoconned-no-more/

    There's no question that neoconservatism is alive and kicking and rearing it's warmongering head again. The real question no one is asking is . . . is true conservatism extinct?

    True conservatives have all but disappeared from Baptist Board. Those few that remain get the Hermann Goering* treatment by the neocons on the board constantly.



    * With traditional conservatism being represented in its modern form most prominently by so-called “paleoconservatives” like commentator Pat Buchanan or libertarians like Texas Congressman Ron Paul, Boot recently described such non-“neo”-conservatives to Newsweek: “A lot of them tend to be libertarian cranks: neo-Confederates, really insane, racist, xenophobic types.” “Libertarian cranks” could describe the current crop of constitutionally minded, anti-government protesters, and so-called “neo-Confederates” primary concern has always been states’ right, an increasingly hot topic. As for his portrayal of traditional conservatives as “really insane, racist, xenophobic” types, Boot’s criticism is not unlike the Left’s attempts to portray anti-Obama tea partiers as “racist,” and serves as a reminder of neoconservatives’ progressive inclinations.

    Neoconservatives never have been conservative, neither was Bush on “national security,” and these points must be hammered home before the Right can achieve a sturdier ideological footing. Laughably, Boot complains that neocons have been “vilified as being barely human beasts who have to be kept chained in a cage somewhere,” and yet without hesitation slanders real conservatives as “libertarian cranks,” “neo-Confederate,” and “racists.” It’s time for the Right take “neo” out of conservative, chain neoconservatism to progressivism, and put these liberal beasts back in their cages.

    Like I told you before CMG neocons are just Wilsonian progressives dressed up in conservative clothing. They're scoundrels that have wrapped themselves in the flag and go around scare mongering to get the one thing they want most. War, wars and more war.

    Patriots they are not.
     
    #16 poncho, Sep 13, 2014
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  17. church mouse guy

    church mouse guy Well-Known Member
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    JFK was a liberal, not a neo-conservative. A liberal and a neo-conservative are not the same thing.
     
  18. carpro

    carpro Well-Known Member
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    It takes a liberal to make a neocon.
     
  19. church mouse guy

    church mouse guy Well-Known Member
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    But JFK fits neither definition posited by Merriam-Webster:


    1: a former liberal espousing political conservatism

    2: a conservative who advocates the assertive promotion of democracy and United States national interest in international affairs including through military means

    JFK stayed a liberal all his life. He never advocated the assertive promotion of democracy but defended the war in Vietnam as being in the national interest only. Note that the definition includes the word and. But then JFK was not a conservative advocating anything but a liberal advocating military action.
     
  20. poncho

    poncho Well-Known Member

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    “They’re kind of like the terminator, they just don’t die,” says Michael Lofgren, who worked on Capitol Hill as a defense budget analyst for 30 years before retiring and writing The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted in 2012.

    Lofgren was one of a number of Beltway critics balking at a letter signed last week by 60 mostly neoconservative throw-backs from the Iraq War—including Paul Bremer, Karl Rove, Dan Senor, and Elliott Abrams—calling for the president “to take meaningful and decisive actions to stem the Assad regime’s relentless aggression, and help shape and influence the foundations for the post-Assad Syria.”

    Led by neoconservative scion William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the signatories are the latest incarnation of the now-defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which in 1998 wrote to President Bill Clinton urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. PNAC once represented a powerful swath of the Washington neoconservative policy establishment, but later drew fire for its role in the run up to the Iraq War. It elicited particular ire after the promised weapons of mass destruction were never found and the United States became mired in an insurgency that none of the letter’s signatories—many of whom occupied top policy jobs in the Bush Administration—had anticipated.

    PNAC later resurfaced as the Foreign Policy Initiative, which, along with the kindred Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, has pushed for an extended presence in Afghanistan, big defense budgets, and Syria as the next beachhead of regime change in the Middle East.

    “You would think they would be so discredited they would be shamed, but they have no shame,” Lofgren tells TAC.

    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/web-categories/politics/
     
    #20 poncho, Sep 14, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 14, 2014
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