Neocons: Bush Isn’t Belligerent Enough
When I saw the Washington Post headline “Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush’s Foreign Policy,” I foolishly assumed that the article might have to something to do with the chorus of realists and antiwar conservatives who have long been critical of the president. No, no — the conservatives that the Washington Post cares about are the ones who don’t think Bush is aggressive enough in trying to democratize the world. This is what Paul Gottfried means when he says that for all the hostility the mainstream media shower upon neoconservatives, they still prefer to make them the spokespersons for conservatism rather than anyone of an older strain. (The article does, fleetingly, mention William F. Buckley’s and George Will’s reservations about the administration’s bellicose utopianism.)
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July 19, 2006 at 10:17 pm
[...] Now, who do you suppose said this? As Dan McCarthy notes, the article title, “Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush’s Foreign Policy” would lead you to think that the quote above was from an antiwar or realist conservative grown sick at the sight of Mr. Bush’s dastardly running of foreign policy. But, no, this comes from none other than Danielle Pletka, AEI’s resident neocon Gauleiter, er, I mean vice president for foreign and defense policy studies. I’ve heard of some people who are just never satisfied, but these people take insatiability to an entirely new dimension! What has Mr. Bush done so horribly wrong, according to their standards? According to the Post: Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon. [...]
July 22, 2006 at 4:14 am
The mainstream media has no interest in antiwar conservatism at all. In fact they would prefer if the whole phenomenon disappeared. It is a lot simpler to portray the world through bifocal blinkers.