I meant to post on this much earlier, but Allen McDuffee has an excellent piece on the continuing influence of neocons in Washington. It’s a story as old as think tanks themselves: take a simplistic idea, pay a few well-connected sociopaths to pimp the idea, give the sociopaths titles like “D. C. Searle Senior Fellow”, and voila — Kaplan opinion pieces, appearances on CNN, in short you have a ghastly mess.
There’s a whole new generation of neocons:
“These younger neoconservatives have generally received their first internships and jobs, and published their first articles in the old network of friendly think tanks and publications built by the older generation of neoconservatives.”
And it won’t be long until Luke Russert and Jenna Bush and Andrea Koppel tell us what serious people these new neocons are!
JCT
Ah yes, just what this country needs — 20-something, Bill Kristol wanna-bes. Should really add to the current level of “discourse”.
stuckinred
It’s inspiring that these young neo-cons return from their military service to take up the call of their warrior elders.
Jade Jordan
OOOPS Andrew Koppel died recently. You meant Alma Brown.
DougJ
@Jade Jordan:
I meant Andrea Koppel. I corrected it.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
And it won’t be long until Luke Russert and Jenna Bush and Andrea Koppel tell us what serious people these new neocons are!
Didn’t Not Jenna just come out in favor or HCR(or HIR)? And, IIRC, I think she basically endorsed single-payer, though I am not 100% positive on S-P.
TenguPhule
We’re going to need more RAID(tm).
TR
I can’t wait for them to lecture us all about how welfare recipients are unable to make it on their own and have to rely on the government to make ends meet.
Violet
@Jade Jordan:
Do you mean Ayla Brown, Naked Senator Brown’s daughter, the one he tried to pimp out?
Sad how I know her name because I watched her underwhelming performances on American Idol during whatever season she was on.
abo gato
Arrrggghhh….I’m reading this book, “The Passage” a post apocalyptic kinda thing that I am liking a lot, so far. One passage that made me scream out loud was when they mentioned that the governor of Texas was Jenna Bush…..then the other character said he liked her a lot when she was First Lady…….aarrrrgghhhh…….would that be worse than her being a talking head, for real?
Jared
Jesus. This post-and the article linked therein-made me think, very quickly, of Jamie Kirchick. I’m still trying to get my toes to uncurl.
Brien Jackson
What’s wrong with Andrea Koppel?
valdivia
Ha I think this is where I can drop this link.
http://twitter.com/SexAndTheNeocon
enjoy!
DougJ
@Brien Jackson:
She’s married to a neocon whack job and she got her short-lived job at CNN by being Ted’s daughter.
Brien Jackson
@DougJ:
I don’t know anything about her personal life, but I always thought she was a good model for a journalistic career.
kdaug
Threads like this – not this in particular, but in the most general sense – it why the established media is the walking dead. The people see through the shit now. The zeitgeist has changed. The worm has turned.
I see this same meme echoed across the ideological spectrum. In a sense, it reflects a fracturing of the information flow, where each ideology gets it’s information from it’s own preferred sources. It’s the “liberal media”, or the MSM, or whatever the hell Palin calls it. But it’s the same general idea – people are sick of being handed down their truths from on-high. The nepotism just seals it.
Is it good for us to self-segregate into the informational equivalent of gated communities, only tapping into people who generally agree with our worldviews? I don’t know.
Is it better than having our ideas transmitted down from sycophantic, squirt-gun royalty?
You bet your sweet ass.
New Yorker
@JCT:
This reminds me of how I was a 22-year-old straight out of college in 2002/2003 during the run-up to the Iraq War, and while I recognized what a monster Saddam Hussein was, I thought an invasion would lead to endless guerrilla war with jihadists and an explosion of sectarian violence, and thus I opposed it.
Funny how I knew more about Iraq than an alleged “expert” like Bill Kristol. When do I get an op-ed with the Washington Post or a regular guest spot on the Sunday talk shows?
suzanne
Ugh. Jenna Bush. I hate all the morning shows, but if I’m ever over at my mother’s house in the mornings, she’s reliably watching the Today show. Jenna Bush is so painfully bad on that show. For a talking head, you’d think she’d at least be able to, you know, TALK. She sounds like a half-asleep highschooler, all strung out.
Cacti
Wingnut welfare is the only kind that isn’t morally wrong.
Just ask them.
Toast
Are you talking about movement conservatives or neoconservatives? The latter refers to those who are squishy on economic and domestic policy but ultra-hawkish far-right on foreign/military policy. The term has a specific history. Sadly, many started using “neoconservative” to mean “really, really conservative” and I find that confusing.
PeakVT
Joke Line took a hard shot at some of the neoconservatives recently.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
The neocons have had 30 years to dig into and route all the cables through their bunkers at AEI and Heritage Foundation, among others. Then hardwired straight into the wankers of our national press. It will take awhile, and though it is still their town, the currency to power, which is credibility, took a big big hit with Iraq. Maybe dems can maintain there current occupation long enough to do some nation building of their own in our own little Vatican City on the Potomac.
bago
W00t! Made the front page of wonkette again!
http://wonkette.com/416155/brave-lonely-teabagger-protests-hippie-solstice-parade
Napoleon
@Brien Jackson:
But of course this is coming from you.
gbear
Hopefully some of these young neo-cons will appear on Chris Matthew’s show and get eaten alive as thoroughly and painfully as Kevin James. So hard to watch but so satisfying to watch everyone laughing at him while he freaks out by the end of the clip. Tweety is not going to suffer young fools on his show.
Uloborus
@Brien Jackson:
Does it matter? The system pimps itself. Like taking Eric The Viking seriously.
Mike G
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/10361711.stm
Does this mean the neocon Borg will declare that the government of Israel “hates Israel”, is “anti-Semitic if not Nazi-sympathizing” and “craves another Holocaust” because they fail to recognize the terrorist potential of allowing nutmeg through the blockade?
Will Dave “Pancake Rachel Corrie” slither back to declare that Netanyahu “wants Israel pushed into the sea” because chocolate will now reach Gaza? I can’t wait.
Svensker
@Mike G:
I think you’d better learn how to wait. Cuz it ain’t happening.
Kyle
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
The Village People are authoritarian followers. Neocons didn’t have credibility because their ideas were so wonderfully sound, they had “credibility” (in air quotes) because they had, and still have, hard-wired institutional power and money influence in DC and use it to bully and intimidate.
The value of ideas in Washington isn’t objective credibility as you or I understand it in terms of prescience, accuracy and predictive power; DC’s synthetic “credibility” is a product of money and political influence perpetuated by the careerist cowards and systemic parasites who feed off the rotting carcass of our political-media complex.
fucen tarmal
a buddy of mine in college turned up as a think tanker for aei. i use buddy in the loose sense that he was always around me and my friends, and me specifically. though officially heterosexual, every one claimed he had an absurd crush on me, i thought it was more that, in relative terms i openly mocked him less than everyone else…the kid was nervous, twitchy, awkward and every conversation was spattered with references to specific tv show episodes no one else ever could recall…
long story short, he shows up on booktv giving a talk for some aei global denial book he had written. so i sit there for about 20 minutes half listening to the far out logic trying to tell if it was this kid from college. then he relates some point to a flintstones episode and i knew it had to be…
that is one village global warming skeptic i take responsibility for, had i been as much of a prick to the kid as he probably deserved, he would have moved back home with his parents, and wouldn’t have been heard from again.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Kyle: Just let them try and gin up another Iraq, and see how the public responds. Their credibility before was “air” but that was before they got their way, and pushed the country into the mother of all clusterfucks, Iraq. That loss of “air” credibility become actualized and will return with time, but now and for the foreseeable future, no matter what the media wankers give them, it would not put the Iraq genie back in the bottle.
They are currently personal non grata with the public at large. If they get back real power, they can do what they want because they have power, but the public will not jump on the bandwagon like Iraq.
Ed Marshall
For all the problems identifying neo-conservatives, this is supposed to be the new line up: Max Boot, Dan Senor, Jamie Fly, Rachel Hoff, Abe Greenwald and Daniel Halper. You can try and puff up this group of dunces all you want, they aren’t J-Pod or even Bill Kristol (much less Irving). These guys are a half step up from Pamela Geller.
TaMara (BHF)
@bago: You’ll understand if I pass on this recipe, won’t you?
Kyle
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
And yet, the party that took us into Iraq still seems to drive the agenda in Washington (or effectively obstruct stuff they don’t like); they are supposedly poised for major gains in the mid-terms. If the neocons were as thoroughly repudiated as they deserve, the Repigs would be slashed and burned and reduced to a vestigal lump in the sisterfuck redneck states.
And the noisiest political faction in the country, the teabaggers, overwhelmingly votes for them. The hideously-expensive Iraq clusterfuck is never mentioned in their whiny-ass titty-baby rants against ‘big government’, since war spending apparently doesn’t come from taxpayer’s money but is delivered in the claws of eagles nesting on the slopes of Mt Reagan. The idiot-“patriotic”, reflexive flag-waving, support-the-troops, terrist-lover, shut-up-that’s-why response to any discussion of withdrawal from Iraq continues unabated on the fucktard political right.
The neocons may temporarily have a lower profile compared to the Chimp Assministration days, but they haven’t been repudiated by the establishment and like most right-wing ideas backed by big money, their ideology is near-impossible to kill. You’d think that Nixon’s criminal garbage crew could never show their face in public again, but look how many of them were back in power under Bush.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Kyle: We are talking about the neocons here, as opposed to the GOP proper. The neocons only have one issue, and that is conducting foreign policy more often than not through the muzzle of an M-16 assault rifle. Many of them are quite moderate or even liberal on other issues. Their product is war, and that is not a popular notion with the public at large right now, so their credibility is low in that regard. I guess i don’t credit the media that pushes the right wing agenda as having that much influence as other people do.
maus
@bago: Hahahaha. I should have gone just to laugh at the dude, but I hadn’t seen Teabaggers there before. Scientologists sure, but not Teabaggers.
@fucen tarmal:
Yeah, some people don’t deserve to possess self-esteem. When you’re that worthless, coddling is only going to produce a Limbaugh or Beck.
JCT
@New Yorker: Yes, well the real difference was that you had common sense, the neocons seem to live in some parallel universe where up is down, the Sunni and Shia are BFF and would never fight each other and the Israeli govt (especially in the hands of Bibi) is always right.
I guess that depends, “who’s your daddy?” No offense, but I suspect my beagle knows more about Iraq than Bill Kristol.
DougJ
May I say that I’m sad that no one wrote “I quite agree” as a comment?
JCT
@stuckinred:
+1
I once asked one particularly vile 20-something Iraq war drum banger on another forum why he hadn’t put his precious ideals up to the real test and enlisted. It was hilarious, after he finished huffing and puffing that he had to finish law school first (probably via Phoenix Online from mommy’s basement) — he started bragging that he was so “buff” that the Airborne would be lucky to have him and topped the whole thing off by stating that he *did* sign up for selective service and had… wait for it, a Draft Card! And did I even know what that was? (Besides the fact that my brother was actually, you know *drafted* into the Vietnam war). The best part was that the entire thread erupted into such ridicule about this budding Neocon and his dangerous draft card that the little asshole begged the webmaster to wipe his original post.
This is all par for the course.
New Yorker
@JCT:
Oh, I know. My father was an NYPD cop, not Irving Kristol, thus I didn’t qualify for the welfare program for rich right-wingers known as “nepotism”, and I’m cool with that. It gives my accomplishments more weight.
@gbear:
Damn, for a moment there, I was horrified by the thought that the dude from “The King of Queens” was a rabid wingnut.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@DougJ:
I quite agree.
that will cost you 4 nickels. We ain’t fucking communists around here, well, most of us.
DougJ
@JCT:
Also “officially heterosexual”, I presume.
JCT
@New Yorker: I can never decide who is the best poster child for wingnut welfare (nepotism), Bill Kristol or that waste of protoplasm, Jonah Goldberg.
And as an adopted New Yorker, hats off to your dad — I grew up in LA and my Asst. DA father told us from a very young age that the police were not necessarily our friends, such was the LAPD. Every interaction I have had with the NYPD in the 25 years I have lived here has been professional.
JCT
@DougJ:
That’s a good question, actually. I used to like to bait him by asking if his Ann Coulter blow-up doll was lonely since he started wetting himself while extolling the wonders of Sarah Palin after McCain picked her. Maybe I was way off base….
It’s a funny thing, usually I just ignore clowns like that guy, but these 20-something warmongers who would never actually enlist really push my buttons.
Michael Bersin
There’s neo-conservative and then there’s neo-conservative:
Ambassador John Bolton at Missouri Boys State: Q and A, part 2
srv
Rahm is all over the news again, reclarifying Biden, Obama and putting his parachute on for November.
someguy
The stuff about the supposed “dual loyalties” of neocons is so much claptrap.
Their only loyalty is to Israel. I don’t know where people get the “dual” crap from.
New Yorker
@JCT:
Kristol is much worse than Goldberg because people in Washington and in the media consider Kristol a Serious Person, whereas I think everyone considers Goldberg more of a court jester. Nobody in the Village took “Liberal Fascism” seriously, but a lot of people took Kristol seriously on Iraq, and look where that got us. John McCain took Kristol seriously on Caribou Barbie, and now I read Andrew Sullivan’s panicked posts about how she’ll win the presidential election in 2012.
El Cid
In the 1970s, just to mention a time period with proponents still alive & involved, you had the Committee On the Present Danger / Team B assholes making up fantastic nonsense about how the Soviets had 80 billion trillion weapons and were about to kill us so we needed to get ready and get a shitload more nukes and blow the fuck out of lots of brown people.
George Bush Sr. Daniel Fucking Pipes. Paul God-Damn Fucking Wolfowitz. Echoed by the best and brightest of both fucking worthless party establishments so they could lie about Soviet nuclear capabilities and build the fuck out of our nuclear programs and clear their poor little hearts of bitterness out of our lack of funtime winning in slaughtering several million Indochinese without victory by going on to slaughter the fuck out of Central Americans and Southern Africans and paying a bunch of Islamic warlord drug dealing terrorists to liberate Afghanistan from their awful Communist regime into the warlord Islamic fundamentalist narco-barons our liberation brought them.
These worthless bastards never fucking leave. They’re kept around and promoted so that in between some giant foreign war catastrophe that makes us somewhat pull back they can begin pimping the next new fraudulent bunch of bullshit to get us to slaughter the fuck out of some foreigners to save ourselves. Assholes.
Ash Can
We just need to stop leaving overripe, half-rotted politicians sitting out.
GregB
I just wanted to comment on the caption.
As odious as the beliefs of the neo-cons are, referring to them as cockroaches is really not right.
I just helped my nephew move his girlfriend into her new apartment. She’s a Rawandan political refugee who’s parents and family were killed in the genocide.
The Hutu’s term for dehumanizing ethnic Tutsi’s was cockroach.
Please consider some other term. Especially with political sub-group that is often seen as largely Jewish.
My two cents tonight.
Chuck Butcher
@GregB:
Since this isn’t Rwanda and they ain’t Tutsis maybe you ought to relax – a lot. WTF does Jewish have to do with anything other than your related by some 4th degreeness? Jeepers, if I call a group rats does that harken back to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda?
Joseph Nobles
Rahm down after midterms? Source is the Telegraph.
sunsin
@El Cid:
Comment, from of all people in the world, Rudyard Kipling:
Mesopotamia (1917)
They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?
Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide –
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?
Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?
Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends,
Even while they make a show of fear,
Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends,
To confirm and re-establish each career?
Their lives cannot repay us – their death could not undo –
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shall we leave it unabated in its place?
asiangrrlMN
I wish I could be as sanguine (a word I like almost as much as exsanguination) as some of you about the neoconservatives being ignored the next time they cry out for a war, but I am not. Why? Because people are stupid and have short memories. That’s it, and that’s all.
ItAintEazy
@JCT: I vote for Bill Kristol, only because of this Irving Kristol anectdote:
Yutsano
@DougJ:
Hmm…sounds like the type of idiot the Dawg loves to make wet their pants when they run into a 6’7″ 275lb gay Marine. It’s very entertaining to watch.
Ruckus
@El Cid:
These worthless bastards never fucking leave. They’re kept around and promoted so that in between some giant foreign war catastrophe that makes us somewhat pull back they can begin pimping the next new fraudulent bunch of bullshit to get us to slaughter the fuck out of some foreigners to save ourselves.
Assholes.
A properly worded and succinct description is a thing of beauty.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: He better be careful. An “officially heterosexual” man just might enjoy being made to wet his pants. I’m just sayin’.
Bill E Pilgrim
Here’s a post that argues that the liberal wing of the Democratic party has been unfairly critical of Obama, that he’s bent over backwards to give progressives all they want, but they simply refuse to recognize all he’s done already.
John Cole? DougJ? Mike Kay?
Nope, Ross Douthat.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: How fortunate for me he’s rather choosy about his partners. Plus this guy is talking so far out of his ass he needs a 50 foot pole to help wipe it. You do raise a valid point however.
I hate to wuss out hon, but ten of fifty hours at work are done and I’m beyond spent. Night.
@Bill E Pilgrim: That is one beautiful swing and a miss. Do we even bother to point out that most of these problems can be addressed with a mere increase in taxation? Notice how Ross the Wunderkind won’t even come close to an obvious answer because it so goes against his ingrained dogma. Oh and he can stop giggling about how Obama is teh fail now. He still enjoys a rating in the mid to high 80’s among Democrats.
Damn you, I was just about to go to bed. Now I’m worked up. Thanks.
Mike G
@El Cid:
And these assholes whose mendacious military-contractor-enriching lies led to pissing away an extra trillion on useless weapons in the 80s, now rusting in the desert, to face down a phantom omnipotent Soviet military — what are they gasbagging about today? The deficit and the national debt. Fuck them.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Yutsano: Happy to help.
Hi A.G, hi all, bye all, out to the day I go….
asiangrrlMN
@Bill E Pilgrim: I hate you because I had to read that swill. His last line is enough to make me want to take one of my rusty garden implements and….yeah.
@Yutsano: I wussed out before you did for once!