Neoconservative Rats Jump Bush’s Sinking Ship
For most real conservatives, the presidency of George W. Bush has been a disappointment. He has three major accomplishments: 1) tax cuts, 2) decent Supreme Court justices, and 3) excellent initial response to 9/11 and prevention of another attack. While he has been much superior to Al Gore or John Kerry, many of us hoped for more from Bush, a man who seemed like “one of us” instead of just the latest lesser of two evils (this is debatable, though, as the man was born in Connecticut and lived in a Yankeefied upper crust suburb of Dallas before buying his ranch shortly after being elected President).
His tax cuts have been offset by spiraling deficits that our children will have to pay or will lead to the bankruptcy of the government. His Supreme Court picks, while decent so far, are not men with strong conservative records or scholarship (thus sending a message to talented judges to keep their mouth shut about their conservative views or they will never be appointed as a justice)- and this is forgetting the Harriet Miers debacle, where Bush tried to appoint a pro-choice mediocre-skilled crony to the nation’s highest court.
The “War on Terror” has the longest list of caveats. Bin Laden is still at large. Conservatives who once made fun of liberal attempts to use the military for “nation building” defend, with a straight face, efforts to do just that in Iraq. Saddam was our Middle-Eastern puppet dictator who ran off his leash- the rational response would have been to kill Saddam and install another puppet. Instead, we are wasting billions of dollars and hundreds of lives on an occupation trying to turn hateful people with their nasty narrow-minded little religion (with its beliefs in Sharia and female circumcision) into Jeffersonian democrats. Nobody handed America its freedom on a plate- it was bought with our own blood. When Middle Easterners want to be free, they will have to pay the same price. It cannot be paid for them.
This delusion that all peoples everywhere are yearning for Western-style liberties and democratic institutions is at the heart of Bush’s failed Iraq policy. People groups and nations tend to do what they want to do- it is arrogant to assume that we know better what they want than they do.
Of course, Bush is not entirely to blame. He is a man with a bit of a messianic complex, with a lot of stubbornness, and thus ripe for manipulation from realist conspirators. Chief among the manipulators are a group of foreign-policy agitators commonly known as the “neoconservatives”- generally, these people are New York intellectuals who were Communist radicals in the 1960’s who converted to conservatism in the 1970’s. Politically, they are at odds with true conservatives because they support every destructive policy wrought by JFK and LBJ. On foreign policy issues, however, they have successfully perverted the average American’s healthy non-interventionist instincts into the swaggering militarism we see today. They are political parasites who seek a host to do their bidding, and Bush was the perfect mark. Now, however, they are jumping ship and sticking Bush with the blame as the failure of their policies becomes manifest:
www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/neocons200612
In 2004, Pat Buchanan extended a olive branch to Bush from traditional conservatives- he urged conservatives to vote for Bush in hopes he would dump the neoconservative infiltrators in his second term and work for important conservative issues, like securing the borders.
Instead, Bush has stubbornly stuck to his program, pushing for more blood and treasure wasted in a Middle Eastern hellhole while supporting amnesty for illegal aliens. Bush and the Congressional Republicans continued massive deficit spending, brought federal regulation of local schools, while doing little to nothing on the issues their base cares about.
They made their bed, and tomorrow they get to lay in it.
The larger issue is why does this happen? As I will discuss in a subsequent post, the dominant ethnic group in the US is the Scots-Irish. This group’s biggest flaw is their tendency to idealize their leaders. There are a lot of people in this country who believe their president can do no wrong, and no amount of information or data will shake that belief. They take their blind faith in the leader as a token of their own virtue and the virtue of the nation. There are a lot of historical parallels for such hero-worship, but none of them are indicative of a political environment that is conducive to sustaining the republican government our forefathers gave us.
Do you think the GOP deserves to lose?
I won’t vote Democrat, but I will be leaving a lot of my ballot blank tomorrow.
November 7th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
Is Rummy a prophet? Adelman’s quoting him as saying the war, if lost, would be lost in Washington… I have to say, I agree with some of their comments, Tom. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Reagan conservative. I can’t imagine but that the Gipper would have carpet-bombed (or at least made the very honest threat) any and all countries believed to be involved. (which, by the way, Waffle Bill shoulda done in Yemen) (And likely would’ve followed Pat Robertson’s advice with our pals Saddam and Hugo, among others) And as I’m spitting and cussing after the vanity Fair peice, good ol’ Pat brought me back down to earth. I have been thinking that the GOP is in fact hoist in its own petard for some time now.
I won’t rail about two-term limits, etc., but I really have started having trouble telling the two parties apart lately. And not because the Dems are moving right. The bottom line is, we live in an increasingly fallen world, and “power corrupts” — not to mention that the GOP, which for the four decades plus prior to the second Clinton administration was the minority party, still acts like the minority party.
So the nation-building of the neocons is not the way to go. And the cowering in the corner the Democrats suggest just disgusts me. But I don’t think — sorry, Pat! — isolationism is the way to go, either. So where’s the happy medium?
I’m not gonna touch your comments about Scots-Irish hero-worship… too irritated about all this other crap to treat that fairly.
November 8th, 2006 at 3:32 am
The Republicans were handed the keys to the government and didn’t do a whole lot. Why should they expect their conservative voters to trust them again?
I, like Brian above, am a Reagan conservative (I have even referred to myself as an independent conservative). I see the big picture. This election has done nothing but speed America to its eventual demise. But to answer your question, I don’t think they necessarily deserve to lose, but I’m not suprised that they did. Although it have been increasingly difficult to tell which party is which, I still give the edge to the Republicans. They give me more hope.
I have to say that although I like President Bush and voted for him, I have been disappointed in his “compassionate” conservatism. If you have to put a compassionate in front of conservative, then I guess you aren’t really conservative. Bush, unlike Reagan, is not leading a movement of conservatives and I think this ultimately was his downfall. He bragged of having “politcal capital” which he was going to spend after the last election and he has done nothing of the kind. He should have stopped playing nice with the Democrats and taken the gloves off. I liken it to a football team being up by 2 late in the game, going into prevent defense and allowing the other team to drive down the field and kick the game winning field goal.
Anyway, great site Tom. Keep up the good work.
November 8th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Brian, Pat did support the war in Afghanistan, just not Iraq. He opposed the first Iraq war as well, mostly because GHWB basically gave a green light to Saddam to invade Kuwait and then changed his mind. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to rough up the Arabs every now and then (to ensure access to their oil), but this should extend to destroying their military capability only (which our military excels at), not nation-building (which no military can do). Even the latter is not necessarily a good, as abortion and pornography are now legal in Iraq under Bush, while they were illegal under Saddam. I’d bet more babies have now been butchered and families destroyed than Saddam ever executed- as our Lord said, sometimes if you cast out one demon, seventy will return to take its place.
Doug, I hope we can get gridlock again. I had hopes for the Reps, but if gridlock causes a moral reprobate liberal like Bill Clinton to sign welfare reform and one-party control causes a “conservative” like Bush to expand the welfare state at a greater pace than LBJ, I’ll take gridlock.
My fear, though, is that Bush really is a liberal. He has indicated publicly that he doesn’t think abortion should be outlawed, that he supports civil unions, and most heinously, there are whisperings he is looking forward to working with Democrats in the HOR to pass his amnesty.