The Neocons Killed the Republican Party

[Herb Schaffler]

October 15, 2008 Goodbye, GOP

The neocons killed the Republican Party. Will they stay for the funeral?

by Justin RaimondoBarring a catastrophe – a terrorist attack on American soil, a calamitous gaffe, or the documented revelation that he really is a Muslim [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. – it [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Barack Obama is going to be the 44th president of these United States. Not only that, but I'd bet [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. we'll have a Democratic Congress, one with a [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that relegates the Republicans to the role of back bench naysayers whose dissent barely registers. Last year, Paul Craig Roberts expressed the hopes of many American voters when he [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. :
"If we are fortunate, Republicans will complete their self-destruction before they extinguish the Constitution and destroy America."
It looks like he's going to get his wish.
What killed the GOP was [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. and its [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. – the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that is even now whipping across the landscape and downing Wall Street's mightiest edifices. Not only that, but the general air of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. and fear generated by the war and its economic and psychological ripple effects have created a crisis of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , one that threatens our well-being in an immediate way.
Entrepreneurs [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , because business relations require regularity, or at least some degree of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . They also assume a degree of honesty, but truth has been in short supply lately, as the history of the Iraq war, from [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , sadly demonstrates. After the American people [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. they'd been deceived – that [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ," that we never had a chance of being greeted as "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. ," and that, far from paying for itself, as Paul Wolfowitz [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , we'd be stuck with a $3 trillion bill – they [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. the GOP [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. and haven't yet looked back.
This has always been [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , no matter how [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. most of the Democratic [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. initially [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. it. The war we're supposedly "winning" has been the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of the McCain campaign, and he doesn't seem comfortable talking about anything else – unless it's why we [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. guarantee the borders of every obscure ex-Soviet "republic" for all time. The prime-time speakers at the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. echoed the party line on the war, ad nauseam, and the entire event was one long paean to militarism and the glory of war. There were more uniforms in that convention hall than at the graduating ceremonies of West Point and Annapolis combined, and all the talk was of valor on the battlefield. Perhaps they should change their name to the Praetorian Party.
They put all their eggs in one basket, and those eggs were hatched by the cowbirds of conservatism, the fabled [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . The history of this crew is too well-known to go into here in any detail: indeed, their narcissism has provided researchers with an [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of material that documents their hegira from far Left to far Right. Suffice to say that this vexatious faction entered the bloodstream of the conservative movement during the Cold War years, when pro-war (that's the Vietnam War) Democrats jumped ship and joined the GOP in protest over "McGovernism," i.e., a Democratic Party that rejected the politics of LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and the neocons' [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Democratic politician, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Boeing).
The sudden infusion of a bunch of highbrow leftist intellectuals into the conservative movement was welcomed by the organs of respectable conservative opinion, such as [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . A few dissenters, such as [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , and the editors of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. magazine, warned their fellows of trouble to come, but they were ignored. The neocons were bringing not only intellectual [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. and attention from liberal redoubts in the media and academia, but also hauling in plenty of dough. The big conservative [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. poured money into neocon projects and subsidized their up-and-coming intellectual dromedaries, driving out dissenters and imprinting the movement with their peculiar obsessions – first and foremost, an [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. .
Whatever else the neocons believed in – and this often seemed to change with the political seasons – the one constant was and is a firm belief in the efficacy of U.S. military intervention around the world. The leading neocon magazine, the Weekly Standard, once published a screed by Max Boot entitled "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " – a title that seems curiously archaic today. However, back in the neocons' heyday, when the Iraq war was still a "cakewalk," the big disagreement among [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. was whether America should formally acknowledge being an empire (Niall Ferguson) or not (Robert Kagan). This intra-neocon fight was just a strategic dispute: no one disputed the wisdom of global intervention.
When [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. warned his fellow Republicans that the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , he was vilified by the neocons and the party establishment, derided as a kook, and practically drummed out of the party by the arbiters of political correctness, neocon style. They [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. even let him on the convention floor during McCain's coronation, and they [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to count his votes.
Now that the disaster [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. has befallen them, one can only stand and watch their spectacular implosion with the utmost satisfaction. What's particularly entertaining is the speed with which the neocons are now deserting the sinking ship of the GOP, like those small mammalian creatures they resemble in mien and spirit. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. – having destroyed the GOP and the conservative movement, they leave it a dried-up husk and move on to their next unwitting host.
It's in somewhat dubious taste to say "I told you so," but that hasn't stopped me yet, so I'll say it again, as I did in February of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. :
"We are in for some very dramatic times. With the leading figures in Congress and among the presidential candidates so far from the popular will on the major question of the day – the war – and with major economic problems on the horizon (if Alan Greenspan is right, Tuesday's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in the stock market may be a hint of things to come), this country could be headed for some major turmoil. …
"The consequences of our foreign policy do not just redound overseas: the political and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. 'blowback' of the Iraq war, and whatever other wars come out of our initial intervention, is already [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of our [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. form of government, as well as putting tremendous economic pressure on a [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that could break down [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . We have borrowed our children into penury, and now we're working on their children, who are going to inherit much less than we had to start with.
"With all these rising crises looming, the American Empire promises to be the shortest-lived imperial expansion in world history. After a long and brilliant record as a successful ongoing project in [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. and representative democracy, will the American experiment end in a flashy display of military prowess punctuated by a noisy economic and political implosion?"
The events of the past few weeks have definitively answered that question in the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. .
I predict it won't be long before we're hearing the rhetoric of war employed by the re-designers of our economy: instead of a "war on terrorism," we'll soon be fighting a "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " – and it will be considered close to treasonous if anyone so much as mentions the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in this regard.
In any case, the new reality – or, rather, the newly realized reality – imposes radical restraints on us that rule out foreign wars of aggression, or "liberation," and require a concentration of our resources at home. Yet such a sudden change is going to take some getting used to by the lords of Washington, who are accustomed to thinking of the world as their playground. In the wake of such a sea-change, very often people go right on acting as if absolutely nothing had occurred, oblivious to the new reality until they run right into it, head first. That's what's happened, so far: the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of our presidential candidates, for example, show no signs of abating. They're still talking about [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. the Georgian economy (the one in the Caucasus), when people right here in this country are being foreclosed out of their homes. They don't understand the full implications of what's happening to their beloved empire, but they will soon enough.
The first politician to grasp the new reality, and successfully adapt to it, will go far. It's a pity that none of the current crop seem to get it.
~ Justin Raimondo