Congratulations to Ed Crane and Bill Niskanen, who have been surrounded and engulfed by a growing army of neocon political hacks in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades now, for finally (!) recognizing that neocons are FDR social democrats on domestic policy and Woodrow Wilson interventionists on foreign policy who have an extreme intolerance for dissenting opinions. Had Cato remained in San Francisco, my guess is that they probably would have recognized these truths at least 19 years ago. Better late than never, I suppose.
I would be curious to know what Ed and Bill think of the routine neocon practice of invoking the sainted Lincoln to “justify” the bombing of cities and the killing of civilians during their wars of conquest and imperialism. Unfornately, Ed sounded remarkably like Harry Jaffa, the high priest of neoconism, when Walter Williams asked him his opinion of Lincoln on the Rush Limbaugh show last year.
Cato benefactor Steve Forbes is a huge Lincoln idolater, and Cato’s legal scholars seem oddly hostile to governmental decentralization as a means of enhancing liberty. They seem to think that an even more powerful federal judiciary is needed to protect us from “grassroots tyranny.” David Boaz has even joined forces (editorially) with the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center in supporting bans on the Confederate flag, and Tibor Machan has waxed eloquently on Cato’s Web site on what a great man Lincoln was. Check out the brilliant article on Cato’s “libertarian centralizers” by Gene Healy .
2:18 pm on June 25, 2003
