Necon’s Don’t Exist
Originally Posted: November 5, 2007
Wikipedia may well have to edit its version of events leading to the modern Neocon. According to them they a draw the line back to Barry Goldwater, however there is a fatal flaw in that analysis …more on that later.
For most of us the so called ‘Neocon’ rhetoric is attributed to the phrase “axis of evil” (originally ‘axis of hatred’) which was an invention by a Canadian Speech Writer, David Frum, working for George Bush and used in his State of the Union address on January 29th, 2002. Before this speech, the word Neocon was a casual slang term for New Conservative (a contradiction in terms).
Karl Rove and his opponents cemented the term into infamy associating it, to the frustration of libertarians, with a mix of irreconcilable ‘military expansionism’, ‘social conservatism’, and ‘market economics’. The new millennium began with the new malcontent misfit, socially inept ugly cousin … the Neocon. Now the tired old socialists, losing in almost every arena, had a target. And Karl Rove carried the target with the suggestion that there was something behind it, but like the man there was just air to swing at … nothing of substance.
In fact, I would say that Karl Rove pretty well epitomizes, embodies, and is even the single person who could be called a Neocon. Carl Rove was a political operative from his teen years, hob knobbing his way around America’s endless political process from a Southern Conservative (aka corrupt, anti-ideological/anti-intellectual) stand point for years before being sucked into the hind light by the Bush family. So would those pundits who use this word please use his name instead? Then you would actually be describing something.
Back to Barry Goldwater who was an old guard conservative, beholden to no-one and out on the fringes of legitimacy like Ron Paul is now. He was marginalized and set to the wilderness by Nixon and the ‘lefty’ Republican’s of the 70’s. The old guard don’t exist anymore. To attribute him as Wiki and others do, to the Neocon philosophy, and describing Neocon’s as basically a ‘low tax’, ‘small government’, ‘moral conservative’, ‘isolationist’, with an ‘expansionist foreign policy’ is silly. Find 10 people like that and put them in a room and you should be put in the Guinness Book of World Records for arranging the largest gathering of popular morons. Not impossible, but it would be way too much work.
I have one respite. I can watch state owned television and have Peter Mansbridge deliver a compelling range of world views where strange concoctions like Neocon’s are rarely mentioned except for the odd un-Liberal. If I want to get a more politically correct range, I can turn to CTV. In the US however, to have any hope of getting a picture of what is going on in the greater world, you have to sample Fox, the Liberal Stations (CBS, ABC, and NBC) and then apply a layer of PBS to get past the ‘No Spin Zone’.
