Thank YOU for proving that Conservatives are nothing more then trigger-happy war-mongers who can’t wait to bang the drums for war.

Thank YOU for killing off any chance we have ever had for working with other nations diplomatically by having such an arrogant stance on foreign policy.

Thank YOU for such a jingoistic attitude towards the United States.

Thank YOU for refusing to believe that the United States could possibly be hindering the world’s progress towards peace and human rights rather then helping it.

See, it works both ways.

It’s called patriotism baby!

you first. Remember when you said you wanted to find, capture, & kill AlQaida? I guess that means since you support that part of the war, you HAVE to enlist.

See you at the recruitment office!

Todd B:

Thanks for proving Karl Rove right!

If you had gone over to Wikipedia, you would have found the correct information

Origins

Neoconservatives are conservatives who are “new” (neo) to the conservative movement in some way. Usually, this comes as a result from the migration from the left of the political spectrum to the right, over the course of many years. Though every such neoconservative has an individual story to tell, there are several key events in recent American history that are often said to have prompted the shift.

Some of today’s most famous neocons are from Eastern European Jewish immigrant families, who were frequently on the edge of poverty. The Great Depression radicalized many immigrants, and introduced them to the new and revolutionary ideas of socialism and communism. The Soviet Union’s break with Stalinism in the 1950’s led to the rise of the so-called New Left in America, which popularized anti-Sovietism along with anti-capitalism. The New Left became very popular among the children of hardline Communist families.

Opposition to the New Left and Détente with the Soviet Union would cause the Neoconservatives to emerge as the first important group of social policy critics from the working class. The original neoconservatives, though not yet using this term, were generally liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Second World War. Multiple strands contributed to their ideas, including the Depression-era ideas of former New Dealers, trade unionists, and Trotskyists, particularly those who followed the political ideas of Max Shachtman. The current neoconservative desire to spread democratic capitalism abroad often by force, it is sometimes said, parallels the Trotskyist dream of world socialist revolution. The influence of the Trotskyists perhaps left them with strong anti-Soviet tendencies, especially considering the Great Purges targeting alleged Trotskyists in Soviet Russia. A number of neoconservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz were Shachtmanites in their youth while others were involved in the Social Democrats, USA, which was formed by Schachtman’s supporters in the 1970s.

The original “neoconservative” theorists, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were often associated with the magazine Commentary, and their intellectual evolution is quite evident in that magazine over the course of these years. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the early neoconservatives were anti-Communist socialists strongly supportive of the civil rights movement, integration, and Martin Luther King. However, they grew disillusioned with the Johnson administration’s Great Society. Some neoconservatives also came to despise the counterculture of the 1960s and what they felt was a growing “anti-Americanism” among many baby boomers, in the movement against the Vietnam War and in the emerging New Left.

According to Irving Kristol, former managing editor of Commentary and now a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the Publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Interest, a neoconservative is a “liberal mugged by reality.” Broadly sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic goals to spread American ideals of government, economics, and culture abroad, they grew to reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish these objectives.

As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals further to the right in response, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism. Admiration of the “big stick” interventionist foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt remains a common theme in neoconservative tracts as well. Now staunch anti-Communists, a vast array of sympathetic conservatives attracted to their strong defense of a “rolling-back” of Communism (an idea touted under the Eisenhower administration by John Foster Dulles) began to become associated with these neoconservative leaders. Influential periodicals such as Commentary, The New Republic, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator, and lately The Weekly Standard have been established by prominent neoconservatives or regularly host the writings of neoconservative writers.

Academics in these circles, many of whom were still Democrats, rebelled against the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. Many clustered around Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat derisively known as the “Senator from Boeing,” but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront charges of Soviet “expansionism.”

In his semi-autobiographic book, “Neo-conservatism”, Irving Kristol cites a number of influences on his own thought, including not only Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss but also the skeptical liberal literary critic Lionel Trilling. The influence of Leo Strauss and his disciples on some neoconservatives has generated some controversy. Some argue that Strauss’s influence has left some neoconservatives adopting a Machiavellian view of politics. See Leo Strauss for a discussion of this controversy.

So long, buttmunch!

And yet you support killing civilians with the bombs and tanks that are used to go in to these countries where these “terrorists” are located.

You can’t have it both ways here – violence just leads to more violence, it doesn’t slow it down or stop it all together. If you keep attacking, you’re just going to create an environment where people are taught to fight back instead of educating them to using words instead of weapons.

http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1002

No wonder your party remains less than credible on national security…

I’m sorry, I don’t see the difference – death is death. I’m certain that civilians that have been killed during “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” can’t tell the difference either.

I would also like to point out that I would be just as hard on Democrats, don’t get me wrong. People just need to stop with this “they have a gun, so I’ll get a bigger gun” mentality to solving the worlds problems.

On the other hand we can continue to give everyone in the world the finger, push people around until the fall in line, help big oil continue to supply us our drug, debate steroid use in baseball, favor corporate interest over public interest, create more debt then ever and on and on and on and on…

I might be starting to get behind this chickenhawk argument. Next time someone passes a tax increase, I can just say “Hey, I didn’t support it” and refuse to pay. And you’ll back me up, right???

Same argument, my friends: same argument.

Oh, and since my father, both grandfathers, and 3 of my uncles have already spilled blood for this country, I think my family’s earned the right to speak on military matters.

But how can you hold one group of people to a different standard as another? … how can you logically say that the only way to deal with Al-Qaeda is to  blow them in to tiny pieces .

Easy. Their mission statement is “Die Infidels! Die!” I have no problem with us as a country using “any means necessary” to make sure that doesn’t happen. If they want to live, fine: STOP KILLING CIVILIANS.

Al Qaeda is everywhere. We can devote resources to chasing them around the world, or we can defend our homeland so that they can t attack here.

We tried that for 20 years. How’d that work out?

But how can you hold one group of people to a different standard as another? If you are promoting that the way to resolve our difference is diplomatically, then how can you logically say that the only way to deal with Al-Qaeda is to “blow them in to tiny pieces”.

That seems to be a tad bit hypocritical, if you ask me.

What culture you come from doesn t matter: NOONE willingly chooses Despotism. That you would even THINK that is a plausible scenario shows just how out of the mainstream you are.

Sure no one wants to live under a realm of despotism, but the point is who are you to decide that a nation needs to be democratized if you don’t even live there? Would a country be any better if it was being bombed each night and had no food, water, or electricity while ushering in this new regime?

The long-term approach is to approach foreign policy with respect for Arab people and their economies. Stop supporting dictators who starve their people and destroy their economies. Then, when a zealot like bin Forgotten comes around looking for recruits for jihad, maybe the people say “You know what, the west isn’t so bad. Go jihad somewhere else”.

There’s more to the military than firing a gun. If you really support the Iraq War and you really want to help your country, go visit your local recruiter and get the 4-1-1. The military has thousands of jobs that don’t require you to be a macho, gun-toting crack-shot.

While it’s true that you aren’t legally required to join the armed forces if you support the war, you really aren’t doing your country (or your conscience) any favors by cheering on the war without backing it up with some kind of service.

I know this is putting it pretty harshly, but either sign up or shut up.

So the answer is to democratize the Middle East? Have you gone door to door and asked the people living there if that is what they want? Or are you just assuming that just because we live like that that others will too?

Unless you live in the Middle East, then who are you (or anyone else) to determine what the people who live there want?

Part of the reason that fundamentalism and extremism exists is because of this style of thinking.

It has nothing to do with  hatred .

It does have everything to do with hatred – do you think anyone will turn around and say “hey, maybe these people aren’t all bad” if you keep referring to them as “monsters”? (I’m not singling you out – I’m using “you” in the general sense)

France hates our ever-living guts but they re not blowing us up and it s because they re not under the thumb of a Totalitarian regime having hatred indoctrinated into their society.

Why do you feel that France “hates our ever-living guts”? Just because they didn’t agree with Bush’s policy? I know plenty of people over in France and they don’t hate Americans – they may disagree with the approach, but they don’t hate anyone.

I’m so sick of the ignorant French bashing that exists in the political climate today. It serves nothing other then dividing America from the rest of the world even more.

And, for that matter, so can New Yorkers – it’s just like singling out that one driver that cut you off by saying that all drivers are bad.

I’m sorry, this just happens to be one of my biggest peeves – it just screams of arrogance.