Are Neocons Finished and What Is Their Most Pernicious Idea?

[Cary]

I don't see a whole lot of discussion of any of this. Of course I may have missed some good threads here.

I think they're through thanks to their miscalculations in carrying out their priority project, the invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately I still see hangover of the idea that we could have "won" in Iraq, if only. . . This is too eerily similar to their ideas about Vietnam.

Of course it was predictable and predicted that they would attempt to shift blame for the loss to "liberals", "the mainstream media", or any other boogeyman they could latch onto.

Which leads into my idea of the neocon's most pernicious idea, which to me is their idea that there is no such thing as "relativism". Unfortunately this brings them into the living rooms of people who are too lazy to think and people who just don't want to think in anything other than black and white. It is also the underpinning for their relationship with truth, which is of course that the truth is not important. We all know how this has played out.

These people are truly dangerous. They are dragging us down. Are they finished? How can we keep them in the wilderness, where they belong?

Too much more to rant on here. . .

[KKKarl is an idiot]

1. ..

They are doing a good job of keeping themselves in the wilderness. The there are the hearings Congress will hold into the whole war thing. This will push them further back.

[fasttense]

2. Their most Pernicious Idea

is the flat earth, free market nonsense. Based on unproven theory they have turned Iraq into a nightmare of civil war. They hope to do the same for the US of A.

[hijinx87]

3. has someone got a decent definition of what a "neocon" is?

it seems to be used interchangeably with "freeper".

I know what I think it is, but my definition of the term
doesn't always track with the DU usage.

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[hijinx87]

7. slippery term, ain't it?

I have always thought it was a conservative with an
expansionist foreign policy.

if a neocon was a big government conservative, shouldn't
progressives have a slightly better view of them?

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[hijinx87]

12. ah, I see the problem.

you should have said "a bunch of fascist bastards", then I would
have gotten the point.

[Kerrytravelers]

17. Toodles!

[hijinx87]

25. wow. I am "bracketed" by someone that is no longer with us.

eerie feeling.

[Kerrytravelers]

27. Death is all around you!

[Cary]

6. I think that they are united by their hatred for "Liberalism"

I think that's their central idea. They believe "Liberals" are weak and corrupt and will drag the nation down. They are especially irate over "relativism". They believe that everything is either good or evil, and that they in their Platonic wisdom are the sole purveyors of that which is "good".

Of course "Liberals" are not good.

I don't think they're really conservatives. They are, ironically, extreme radicals.

Otherwise their "ideas" can run the gamut.

[hijinx87]

9. I think this is one of those terms that has had the meaning knocked out of it

somehow or other, it means "new conservative". what were these people before
they were conservative (new, or otherwise)?

[Cary]

16. Allegedly the first neoconservatives were liberals.

Daniel Patrick Moynahan, Irving Kristol, Jean Kirkpatrick, . . .

[Kerrytravelers]

11. A neocon is a form of conservative who seems to enjoy war, bloodshed and slaughter

as it increases the worth of the stock they hold in corporations who benefit financially from war. In other words, the are war profiteers.

freepers are posters on free republic who fall for all the right-wing stupidity. They blame Clinton for everything and think that * is a man of God. They are also homophobic, fundy fruitcake bigots who never shy away from a racist remark. They also have this irrational fear of science as Global Warming seems too complicated for them to grasp.

[hijinx87]

30. so, how are they different from "plain" conservatives?

and I knew what a freeper is. but it is often used much more expansively
here.

[havocmom]

15. A new political con-artist as opposed to the old political con-artists

[LouisianaLiberal]

18. The BBC's "The Power of Nightmares"

is an entertaining introduction to the neo-con philosophy and its droppings. Three one hour programs.

http://throwawayyourtv.com/2006/07/power-of-nightmares....

[hijinx87]

19. Thanks!!

although I thought the "rise of the neoconservatives" occurred
during the cold war.

[LouisianaLiberal]

21. You're right.

Strauss came to the US in 1937 (I think) and the neo-cons, his minions, found that the idea of a cold war could be manipulated to implement their ideas. If you watch the film, remember that our current secretary of defense worked for Casey during his stint at the CIA.

Below is a good article that mentions Shadia Drury's books about Strauss.
Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.ht...

[Cary]

20. This is a great series.

Most interesting, I think, are the parallels to the jihadist movement.

[LouisianaLiberal]

22. The ideological parallels are astonishing.

My favorite scene is at the end of program 2 (I think) when they show the jihadists dancing set to western music. Brilliant.

[havocmom]

5. Newt taught them the propaganda basics of Joseph Goebbels:

In a nutshell 'Don't worry about truth, keep telling the lies you want the masses to believe. Attack any and ALL dissenters personally rather than deal with the real issues they raise.'

As most neocons scurry under rocks, seeing America is waking and mad as hell, The Newt struts around thinking HE can be king next.

The Newt fell into his own trap and now he believes his own lies. Fucking, philandering poppin jay with an ego bigger than his brain thinks he can con America again, and he will give it his best shot. To my thinking, THAT is Their Most Pernicious Idea.

edit: typo

[Avalux]

8. I have my own very strong opinion of this subject -

the fellows at the American Enterprise Institute are "retiring" their PNAC association, but I am far from believing these devious weasels are through. If you read between the lines of what seems like a benign PNAC agenda promoting democracy in the middle east, you will discover their true intentions. I am convinced chaos is the number one goal - chaos that keeps governments from being able to function and maintain control of their resources (oil). Chaos that keeps feeding the industrial war machine. Loss of life (on either side) is of no consequence to these people.

This is all about corporations making money at the expense of ordinary human lives. When we invaded Iraq, the goal was to remain there permanently while feeding our tax dollars to contractors and oil companies. Our government does not want Iraq to become a successful democracy because then they may tell us to leave and we won't get control of their oil. If the country is a mess, we can convince them to privatize their oil fields for revenue (we've been pressuring them to do this). Destabalizing Iran is part of their plan - causing chaos to expand our presence in the middle east; control of oil.

PNAC is not dead; their plan was seeded a long time ago and already put into play. They will just regroup under a different moniker. Remember - the goal is not to "win" or eventually leave Iraq. The goal is to destabalize and stay in the middle east forever. The only way to stop what's happening is to stop the funding. Congress must do it's job or it will never end.

[Cary]

24. The neocons managed to be part of a coalition.

It held together for a long time, relatively speaking. Contractors and oil companies were obviously part of the coalition but I'm not sure that these forces are necessarily neoconservative.

The religious right was also part of that coalition.

You attribute to them more attachment to reality and more competence than I am willing to give them. So much of their modus operandi is based on phony factoids and unsustainable fantasy that I cannot believe there is something more functional and devious at its core. They are losers, when it comes down to it. Unfortunately their losses are our losses.

We need to do a much better job than we have done in terms of exposing these people. I give the American people some credit for finally waking up. On the other hand it is most disconcerting to me that the wake up required the unbelievable fiasco that is the war in Iraq. Why couldn't people see through this before? And, I'm really disgusted over the fact that if someone somehow managed to turn the war in Iraq around, people would once again happily present the rings in their noses so that they could be led.

Moreover there is still some punch to their nonsense about how we can't "lose" in Iraq. People still don't want to "cut and run". Of course if we're going to "lose" anyway, which no one can possibly prove, why wouldn't we "cut and run"?

Enough with the slogans. The thing that doesn't seem to be getting out there is that we, as a nation, have to make our best determination as to the probable outcome and then go with it. If we look at it objectively and we know we're going to end up "losing" then it's time pack up and leave.

[MUAD_DIB]

13. No. Sadly the are not.

As long as there are rich media magnates like Rupert Murdock or shock and aweful jocks like Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and others then the NeoCons will continue to spread their propaganda. As long as there are people like Macaca Allen, Jack Abramoff, Cunningham, Delay, Ney, Foley and others then the corruption, graft and hate will continue to eat away at America. As long as FundieChristians try to exert their will upon the American political scene and politicians continue to pander to them then change will be difficult..

But most importantly: the only way to change all the above is to keep the American public awake to all that these assholes do to subvert this country. Americans are fed up, but they also have extremely short memories.

The best way to kill the NeoCons, for the while, is to start the investigations into all their corrupt practices for the last several years.

[undergroundpanther]

14. Free markets are

a religious belief. Invisible hands and all.
Necons most pernicious belief is entitlement. Entitlement to rule, to get something for nothing, entitled to lie, entitled to tell us all how to live, what to think, see hear, feel say,
That is their most pernicious belief faith in their own power
to dominate and OWN for nothing...The neocons are a bully club a gang of slick con men sociopaths who live to fleece the nation of it's wealth ,plunder the world and give nothing back and be accountable to no one while they control everything and everyone else.
And they use the free market religion and religion itself as tools to control the hearts and minds of frightened isolated people or sociopathic sympathizers who want in on the scam.


The crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they must also be organized in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious.
—Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

Economics, as a distinct "science" that studies the "production and distribution of goods", is a branch of knowledge comparable to theology in that its object of study is the phenomenology of a particular consensual reality and nothing more. (Of course this is not to say that studying phantasms doesn't have real-life effects: many have been slaughtered in the name of long dead gods.) Economics, in this light, is a religion of money, one with its own version of transubstantiation: it magically transmogrifies people's lives, and nature itself, into commodities with dollar figures. The side effect of such magic creates wondrously bizarre things, like the creation of a priest class entire professions dedicated to determining, for example, things like "morbidity" and "mortality rates" to help investors determine how to derive maximum profit from people's illness or life expectancies (eg: investing in pension funds), institutionalized bookies helping investors gamble on the lifespan of whole classes of people.

http://inspectorlohmann.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-i...

[applegrove]

23. There was a post a few weeks ago about how neocons wanted people

to stop using empathy. I cannot remember where I got that post..but it was a neocon marching right along with the agenda.

[BlueIris]

26. They're not quite dead yet and their most pernicious idea is absolutism.

That absolutism is a valid form of government, or a way to approach any philosophy of civilization and/or government. It appeals to those who are not just lazy, but who live in fear of shame and rejection by others for any reason--like expressing individuality, or independent thought (read: most Americans).

[leesa]

28. They're hoping for escalation. Asssassinating Saddam on a high holy day

is an attempt to escalate the wars. They have not stopped. Listen to Lieberman...he's cheering the wars on as much as ever.

[Bullet1987]

29. For Now...

...I think they are done. What Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have done to this country will leave scars for years. They'll go away for a time, but will eventually pop up again I fear.

One common staple amoung neocons is their obliviousness to opposing views. Many of them stink of self-rightouesness and elitism as well. Take a look at the now defunct PNAC. Neocons are heavy on interventionism and have an imperialistic mentality when it comes to foreign policy. As stated above...many of them see the world in a good vs evil POV. Simply put, they're the far-right.