Monday, September 30, 2013

Krugman to Kristol: GOP doesn’t “understand anything”

Paul Krugman came out swinging on ABC’s “This Week” in a debate over over Obamacare with neocon Weekly Standard editor and general vector of monstrosities, Bill Kristol.

The New York Times liberal columnist accused the GOP of “policy ignorance” in voting to delay the healthcare act.

Read the entire article

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Jeremy Scahill Lambasts ‘Imperialist’ Obama’s ‘Neocon’ Foreign Policy

Appearing on Democracy Now! Wednesday afternoon, The Nation‘s national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill tore into President Obama‘s United Nations General Assembly speech, lamenting how the president has capitulated to “neoconservative” norms of imperialism and the exporting of American values at gunpoint.

Scahill recalled how his jaw dropped at the portion of Obama’s speech in which he declared it America’s role to ensure the “free flow of energy” resources around the world. “[The president] basically came out and said the United States is an imperialist nation and we are going to do whatever we need to conquer areas to take resources from around the world,” he asserted. “It was a really naked sort of declaration of imperialism, and I don’t use that word lightly, but it really is.”

Read the entire article

Monday, September 23, 2013

Straussians Talk Amongst Themselves—in the NYT

Although Straussians and their neoconservative allies no longer have to deal with serious Old Right opposition, they may run into problems from libertarians, particularly if Rand Paul’s supporters become a powerful force in the Republican Party. The libertarians represent what the Straussians fear and detest, a very restrained foreign policy and a more limited government, in which their adherents will find fewer and fewer opportunities for their well-paid services. If anyone thinks the followers of Leo Strauss will go back to being what they were circa 1960, namely an academic circle, then dream on. They’ve already tasted power and love it.

Read the entire article

Friday, September 20, 2013

Claes Ryn, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, And Me

The conventional view is that Strauss and his disciples worked mightily to renew interest in the “ancients” as an alternative to modern political conceptions. This may not be the case, however. Straussians were really interested in enlisting ancient and early modern European political writers for their own crusade for American democracy—and that in a very contemporary form.

Also not surprisingly, given their contemporary focus and ambitions, Straussians over the decades have turned increasingly to political journalism. Pure scholarship seems to count less and less significantly in their putative field of study. And the reason is not primarily that they’re battling the “America-hating” Left—it’s that their interpretations are methodologically eccentric and brimful of their own ideological prejudices. They represent neoconservative politics packaged in academic jargon and allied to a peculiar hermeneutic that I earnestly try to make sense of in my work.

Read the entire article

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Woodrow Wilson & The Neocons

As a supplement to Robert Wenzel's earlier post, there are plenty of reasons why Neocons like Max Boot advocate "Hard Wilsonianism," and why neocon Michael Gerson admires how Woodrow Wilson "skillfully made the transition to wartime leadership."

Robert is correct when he wrote that Wilson in many ways: "was the first neoconservative."

Take a gander below at what Wilson said on July 4th, 1918 to a gathering at George Washington's tomb on Mount Vernon:

“It has been left for us to see to it that it shall be understood that they [the Founders] spoke and acted, not for a single people only, but for all mankind. We are in this war to fulfill the promise of their vision; having achieved our own liberty we are to strive for the liberties of every other people as well.”
Read the entire article

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

NeoCon: We’ve Got ‘No Right’ to War Weariness

The polls don’t lie – war is unpopular. And the Republicans in Congress – always-faithful proxies of the neoconservative military agenda – aren’t responding to the usual whistles this time, either. This has transformed usually cool cats like Eliot Cohen into backyard scrappers, taking swipes at nearly everyone. Good. True colors aren’t a bad thing. Kevin Drum calls it "one of the most offensive columns I’ve read in a long time." Let’s allow Cohen’s words speak for themselves:

The important point here: stay clear of the neoconservatives’ agenda for muscular interventionist policy unless you’re prepared to get scratched and torn in the next day’s papers. No one has the right to be weary of war, especially if you’ve never served in combat, or have no relation to someone who has. Even then, if you’ve got a problem with going to war, just keep it to yourself.

Read the entire article

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Obama, Dempsey slap down neocons on Syrian false-flag

The mainstream media - led by the neocon Zionists and their allies - are spinning the story as a humiliating disaster for the US and Obama.

The whole neocon choir is chanting the same propaganda talking points:

- By not enforcing his chemical weapons “red line” Obama has squandered prestige and credibility- not just his own, but also that of the presidency and the nation.

Read the entire article


Monday, September 16, 2013

Fake PhD Syria ‘Expert’ O’Bagy is Neocon and Israeli-linked Operative

Every fake war requires a parade of fake experts to help shill for military intervention. Elizabeth O’Bagy is a prime example of one such operative. Beyond her fake credentials, however, her story leads right to the heart of who is really pulling Washington’s strings on Syria.

“Dr” Elizabeth O’Bagy, a Georgetown University alumna, was thrust into the national conversation this past week after she wrote an op-ed piece for Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal, an article which was later cited by both US Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, in their case for a military strike in Syria.

The only problem was that O’Bagy, a “senior research analyst” at Washington’s heavily pro-Israeli and neoconservative think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), allegedly landed her job by claiming she had received her doctorate from Georgetown University. She has since been sacked from her role at the think tank.

Read the entire article

Friday, September 13, 2013

The Neocon Fantasy Machine Rolls On

The Kagans – so many you can barely keep track of them – are a particularly Washington clan. Like other neocons – the Podhoretzes and Kristols come to mind – the family occupies various posts and play assorted roles in advancing the idea of US global hegemony, constant interference in other countries (but never Israel!), and warfare. They played a key part in deceiving much of official Washington – wittingly or not – about the situation in Iraq, and thereby bear responsibility for the catastrophe that followed. Their “surge” subsequently failed to achieve what it was designed for: getting a multi-sectarian government with lower levels of mass violence in Iraq. You can see how utterly divorced from reality that pipe-dream was by just reading the news reports daily of the low-burning civil war there every day.

So is anyone surprised they were duped again? Zack Beauchamp (former Dishtern) gives a great account of the sorry story of how the woman who became one of the more conspicuous advocates for full-scale entry into another Middle East civil war was not what she said she was. Elizabeth O’Bagy lied to Kimberley Kagan about her doctorate and Kagan never checked it out before putting her Institute for the Study of War on record behind it:

Read the entire article

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Ardent Neocon Preaches More War

If we don’t attack Syria, it will make it harder to attack Iran!  War!  More War!  Ever War!

It’s amazing how much these guys sound like Commies with their commitment to exportation of The Revolution at gunpoint, no matter how stupid and counter-productive.  Sure the war ideology doesn’t work in reality. But it does work in theory, dammit!

On this day in which we remember when some other warlike jerks achieved a “limited airstrike with no boots on the ground” against thousands of civiliian victims–a strike that the neocons parlayed into a catastrophic decade of fruit war in the service of social engineering–I for one pray that the neocons will never again have influence again.  They are peas in a pod with all those who try to usher in the Millennium through murder.

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Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: No support for neocon ideology

After President Barack Obama addressed the nation about Syria Tuesday night, supporters pledged to cautiously back his pursuit of a new Russian-led diplomatic solution while critics panned what they called a "haphazard" response.

 In a primetime address from the White House, Obama described the potential diplomatic path proposed by Russian officials, saying that Syrian President Bashar Assad's possible surrender of chemical weapons to international control could provide a solution to the standoff without U.S. military intervention. But, he added, the United States must remain prepared to use military force if the diplomatic effort fails.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two Republicans who supported Obama's call for the use of military force, said in a joint statement that the president should have laid out more specific criteria for assessing the Russian proposal.

Read the entire article

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Syria and the Neoconservative Agenda

There is great division of opinion regarding potential U.S. military action in Syria. However, one group is ecstatic over President Obama’s endorsement of a military attack on Damascus. These are the neconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration, and who still hold tremendous influence in Washington. An attack on Syria would be one step in fulfilling “stage two” of a longstanding neoconservative plan to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East in three stages: Iraq, Syria and finally Iran.

The pattern for this plan has been to wait for an event that can be sold to the world public as justification for military attack, and then to push forward, pressuring the military and government officials to move forward with the next stage of regime change.

President Obama is, perhaps unwittingly, fulfilling this plan, conceived in 1996 by an informal organization, the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, headed by Richard Pearle and including well-known neoconservatives, Douglas Feith, Meyrav Wurmser, David Wurmser, Robert Loewenberg, Charles Fairbanks, Jr. and James Colbert. All are connected with organizations favoring right-wing extremist Israeli policies toward Palestinians and other Middle East nations. The Study Group plan, titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” was prepared for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The “clean break” refers to their advice that Israel break from the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

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Barack Obama, NeoCon Warmonger…Who Knew?

In 2009, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize despite barely getting his seat warmed up in the Oval Office. In 2009 current Secretary of State John Kerry called Assad’s Syria “an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.” In 2011, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad as a “reformer.” In 2007, then-candidate Obama attacked President George W. Bush for considering military strikes against Iran’s nuclear capability without the approval of Congress, declaring it a violation of the Constitution.

A few years later Obama attacked Libya without congressional approval, and now seeks that approval to attack Syria, even while maintaining that he does not need it in order to act.

Read the entire article

CNN and the Neocon/Interventionist Pigs SILENT on Ma’loula Enormities

CNN blatted away in the breakroom today at work. There was NOT ONE WORD SPOKEN on the Golgotha of Syrian Christians. It was “Go to hell, go directly to hell, and don’t bother us, for you don’t matter in our New World Order”. This is an outrage. No one’s standing up for Syrian Christians and Alawis in Washington. NO ONE. There’s much posturing, and much self-righteous indignation about a supposed “chemical attack” that’s not even confirmed, but the actual killing of Christians, Alawis, and Shiites, and the torching of their homes, businesses, and houses of worship doesn’t even merit a footnote. If anything is EVIL, this is evil. It’s an absolute inversion of reality; it’s the substitution of a dream world for the real world. These people are the enemies of everything decent and honourable… they may be well-spoken… they may be well-groomed… they may be “nice” and have all the right “credentials”, but they’re evil to the bone and false to the core. They’re poster children for Hannah Arendt‘s concept of the Banality of Evil… they’re modern-day Eichmanns (who wasn’t a “monster” at all… he was a faceless dweeb). They drool with pleasure at their “indignation”… you see, they’re so much “better” than we hoi polloi, dontcha know.  They shudder over what may be nothing but a manufactured provocation, but they’re silent on the actual murders and rapine in Ma’loula. NOT ONE WORD was said about Ma’loula. NOTHING. If that doesn’t tell you that the American political class (both Republicans and Democrats) is in league with evil and corrupt to the bone, I don’t know what to say to you.
 
NO WAR IN SYRIA… that’s the beginning and end of it all.
 

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Do You Want to Hear What a Hardcore Neocon Sounds Like?

Dan Senor never met a war he didn’t like. During the Bush administration, Senor was one of the main advocates for regime change in Iraq. In an interview with ABC, the neoconservative Trotskyite bemoans the influence of limited government Republicans in the GOP and worries that if we don’t attack Syria, it might mean we won’t get to attack Iran either.
Listen to Senor in this clip:

Source

Monday, September 09, 2013

Syria: Here We go Again!

Paul Wolfowitz, the Neocon and former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense who played such a prominent role in the Iraq policy of the W. Bush administration, was on CNN this week end urging US military support for the Free Syrian Army. He was one of many who bought into the anti-Saddam exiles in the US, the UK and other countries who hyped the WMD argument for the US invasion of Iraq.

It is amazing that Fareed Zakaria would package a “mock” team for his GPS show on Sunday consisting of four men (no women) all of whom were involved in the utterly failed American policies in the Middle East over the past 11 years.

Read the entire article

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Bush neocon Dan Senor worries that Syria vote means that Congress won’t back Iran strike

Neoconservative Dan Senor, who worked to spin the Iraq war for the Bush administration, said on Sunday that he was worried that if Congress votes against military action in Syria then lawmakers may refuse to use military force against countries like Iran for the rest of President Barack Obama’s term.
During a panel discussion on ABC News, Senor pointed out that there were two camps within the Republican Party.
“One is sort of the Rand Paul camp: loosely defined, isolationists, doesn’t want to be engaged in the world no matter what Obama says, can’t be moved,” he explained. “There’s another camp… which has been supportive of engagement in the world, but they say they don’t trust Obama, they don’t have confidence in him, they don’t think he competent.”

Saturday, September 07, 2013

NeoCon Traitors

Long ago, Patrick Buchanan received a bull of excommunication from the neocons as an Unpatriotic Conservative for the grave sin of refusing to back their plans for salvation through democratic capitalist militarism.  They snookered the Right into buying the notion that their Machiavellian war worship was patriotism and denounced critics as disloyal.

Now the paladins of patriotism and loyalty are themselves showing their willingness to ditch all ties of honor and loyalty as they continue to whore for war.  The “true conservative” neocons are now embracing Obama in their deathless zeal for war, betraying both party and country by dragging us toward this supreme stupid scheme of supporting Al Quaida.  And lots of Republicans seem to be grasping what creeps these guys really are.

Read the entire article

Friday, September 06, 2013

For Cruz, Lee, Paul, and Palin the Password is 'Lindbergh'

Ted Cruz, Bill Lee, and Rand Paul are isolationists, per Jennifer Rubin, the in-house neocon at the Washington Post. Throw in Sarah Palin, too. The senators and former governor want nothing more than two briny oceans to defend the nation from the world's predators and cutthroats. Heck, maybe they don't even want militias.

Palin and the three rising conservative stars are secret America Firsters. "Lindbergh" is their password. Shhh!

Hands up, guys and gal, Jennifer Rubin's outed you.

It's more like Rubin tarred y'all, pinning America First buttons on your lapels all by her lonesome, to the gloating approval of Barack's buddy, John McCain, and his sidekick, Lindsey Graham (Tonto to the neocons). You see, Cruz, Lee, Paul, and Palin believe that intervening in Syria serves no American national security interest. Rubin, neocon she, thinks that America's national security interest is just about anything the neocons say it is.

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The Neocons Are Right (or Left?) Back Where They Belong

Over at the American Conservative, Kelley Vlahos writes that the “Neocons are back,” and they’re flocking to the left over the matter of Syria. Kelley’s correct—the neocon hold on the Republican Party has slipped, giving way to a rejuvenated non-interventionist vanguard.

Kelley traces an excellent history of the movement’s contemporary manifestation, beginning with Bill Kristol’s “now defunct” Project for a New American Century. However—and I imagine Kelley would agree—a lengthier look back at the movement shows its home on the left offers a comfortably collectivist fit, having emerged from the Soviet-side of the political spectrum. (FYI…I wrote at length about this topic back in 2011.)

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Liz Cheney, Neocon, Joins 'Team Rand' to Run for Enzi's Senate Seat

A sneering Liz Cheney, looking to unseat Wyoming GOP Sen. Mike Enzi, told a Tea Party town hall in Jackson Hole Tuesday night that she would not support a congressional resolution to back President Obama’s planned Syria strike, deriding him for “an amateurish approach to national security and foreign policy.”[...]

Cheney’s turnaround is pretty striking. She was a co-founder of the neo-con group Keep America Safe, along with always-wrong war-lover William Kristol. TNR’s Marc Tracy has detailed Cheney’s long list of statements backing action against Assad going back to 2007. As an assistant secretary of state she tried to use funds for regime change in Syria and Iran. Just last month, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin (who’s in the running to share Kristol’s title of “always wrong,”) listed Cheney as among the rising Republican stars who would buck “the isolationist trend in our party and in the country itself.” But now, running in a state that’s skeptical of more foreign interventions, she’s siding with the isolationists.
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Neocon dominatrix S.E. Cupp pines for a “long-term conflict” in Syria

S.E. Cupp opposes military intervention in Syria– but not for the reasons you might reasonably expect.

Not because it aligns the United States with al-Qaeda terrorists.
Not because it would lead to the mass-slaughter of Syrian Christians.
Not because it would be handing over a nation to radical jihadists.
Not because the “evidence” of Syrian chemical attacks was clearly a nefarious hoax perpetrated on the world by the Obama regime.

S.E. Cupp opposes military intervention in Syria because it’s not a “long-term” commitment…
I think if we’re going to go in at all…it has to be with a long-term strategy in mind.
And I know that’s not popular! There’s no appetite for a long-term conflict in Syria. But again, there is so much at stake!
Read the entire article

Neocons Are Back—But Not in the GOP

After years of what seemed to be a self-imposed dormancy, the war hawks Barack Obama repudiated as a candidate are suddenly the biggest supporters of his Syrian intervention, proving there might be a second act for the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party after all.

But the new friendship comes with a catch: Obama’s Republican spear points, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, want an extended American intervention in Syria—beginning with the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. So far, the administration is only asking Congress to pursue limited air strikes in Syria: no regime change.

Read the entire article

Thursday, September 05, 2013

You Know You Are A Neocon If...

You like starting wars you can’t finish. If you do start a war you can’t finish, so what, it’s not like your kids are dying. You think you are better than pretty much everyone else, especially poor people, who are the problem by the way. You’ve never fought in a war, but you talk tough on Fox News. While you parade around mainstream media as a “political strategist,” you’re actually on the payroll of Booz Allen Hamilton or some other defense/intelligence contractor. Your name is Chris Christie. When reading about the Revolutionary War, you find yourself sympathetic to the British cause. The punishing amount of wedgies you received as an adolescent has made you permanently insecure and trying to act macho. Your machismo really comes out when you have an opportunity to pick on people or nations you deem weaker than you. You think it is “conservative” to ignore the Constitution. Source

Neocons: Alligator Mouths Writing Checks They Can’t Bring Themselves to Cash

Keep in mind who neocons actually are: They are liberals who are willing to make war – but only to spread democracy. They think we have some sort of altruistic responsibilty to bring democracy at the point of a bayonet to those parts of the world where such notions of democracy not only don’t exist, but are actively, even violently, resisted. The use of overwhelming force to defend the U.S. from our enemies is not a neocon notion, it is a conservative one – in the paleo sense of conservatism. The prissy neocons are the ones who go to war and then lose because they are, underneath it all, appalled by warfare, and seek to impose upon it the sort of rules (and rules of engagement) that guarantee an eventual loss. Read the entire article

Monday, September 02, 2013

Invoking International Law Against Obama: Old Europe, New Europe and NeoCon Fail

Poland hasn’t gone so far as to denounce the US for plotting illegal activity, but it has firmly declined to be involved in any military action vis-a-vis Syria. Prime Minister Donald Tusk referred to Polish troop deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, saying: “We have experience in this part of the world, which shows that military intervention, even from the most obvious and noble motives, rarely produces the desired effect.” The US Neoconservative scorched earth tactics in pulling a ‘coalition of the willing’ into the cauldron of Iraq has left the US with virtually no allies save a handful of countries (chiefly France and Turkey) who wisely stayed out of the Iraq fiasco and so aren’t traumatized.
Poland is suggesting a face-saving way out, that Russia should intervene with its Syrian ally to extract pledges and ensure that chemical weapons are not used again. (Unfortunately, Russia is in complete denial about the Baath regime’s chemical weapons use and so at the moment not exactly helpful).

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Democrats.com blames 'neocon war criminals' for 'demanding a Syria War'

Bob Fertik of Democrats.com sent a mass email on Wednesday to subscribers which declares, "The neocon war criminals who took the U.S. into an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq are back - and demanding a Syria War."