Krauthammer licks his wounds…

… and pouts that people are calling him names. He’s not a “neoconservative,” he tells fellow loser Rich Lowry. “Neoconservative is an ‘epithet.’ Today [he continues] it’s usually meant as a silent synonym for ‘Jewish conservative.’ And when it is meant otherwise, I would ask you whenever you hear the word [to] challenge the person to describe and explain to you what a neocon is.”

Poor Doc. I don’t blame him for ducking the neocon label — it’s as closely identified with failure as “Bush” is. Moreover, Dr. K’s tawdry taunt comes off as somewhat  insincere, considering how, ten years ago, he had no time for explanations, brushing off Bush’s critics as “navel gazers” because they insisted on applying constitutional principles his illegal, unconstitutional wars.

Down is up.

Well, then, who are the “neocons”? To begin with, Krauthammer and a small group of other well-compensated neocons are the “conservatives” appointed by the media on the Left — because, as we will see, they both speak the same language, the dialectic. The Left loves them because the neocon wrecking crew has been wrong on virtually every foreign policy issue for the past ten years, conveniently making conservatives and Republicans look as dumb as the neocons are.

But wait, are we ducking the good doctor’s “challenge”? No way. He  smugly assumes that his critics are as dumb as those poor misled  conservatives who were duped by neocons like Cheney, Bush, Lowry, McGurn, (Michael) Novak, and other Christians who cheered on the criminals who plundered the country, ruined the conservative movement, and delivered the government to the Obamanites. But he’s wrong.

The Doctor wants definitions? Let’s start with Aristotle’s “limits.”

Like their Trotskyite forbears, neocons defy constitutional limits on presidential power (e.g., their embrace of the “unitary executive”). Neocons defy metaphysical limits on government  and  employ the dialectic (traditionally known as “lying”) to stay in power, regardless of principle or party.  They deny religious limits on government, a principle which is unique in history to Christendom; this denial opens the door to totalitarianism. William Kristol’s baptism of Obama (also not a Jew, Doc) as a “born-again neocon” reflects another of their intellectual indulgences, the denial of Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction. They only criticize power when somebody else has it.

Neocons accept the dictum of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: they evade rational discussion, and demand action in the service of the ideological demand to change the world — thus George W. Bush’s mission to “rid the world of evil”  (oops, there’s that denial of metaphysics again). They are not religious fanatics — often, they are not religious at all. They were to dupe several million anti-Catholic Dispensational Evangelical Christian Bush supporters  (who haven’t a clue about metaphysics but who want Armageddon now) into supporting the Iraq war as “God’s will.” Neocons embrace the Manichaean hubris of self-deification: their cause is perfect good, while every enemy (and critic) is “another Hitler,” sheer evil. But the dialectic keeps rotating Hitlers — Saddam, Osama, Ahmadinijad, and now Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Neocons also falsify history: for them, it’s always 1938; disagree with them and you’re Neville Chamberlain. “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas  have very bad consequences. The neocon’s self-divinization permits torture, lies (falsely attributing that right to Socrates and the “noble lie”), murder, death squads, empire, defiance of responsibility, hubris as virtue, power lust (libido dominandi; Augustine, City of God, Book I, Preface), lust for fame and glory (superbia vitae: 1 John 2:16), and collateral damage — major league, big time.

Thus speak the neocons. And one last note, an essential: the neocons are always wrong; and they never, ever apologize.

 

 

 

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2:27 pm on January 26, 2013