Huckabee: Conservative or What?

Those looking for evidence of a continuing strain in the libertarian-social conservative alliance would do well to consider the right's decidedly lukewarm reaction to Mike Huckabee. Jennifer Rubin has a good summary of the debate at the National Review.

Rubin suggests that "most Americans know him for his remarkable effort in losing 110 pounds and his success as a marathon runner," which surprises me, as I'm not sure that most Americans know anything about Huckabee at all - if they did, he'd probably be more of a star. At any rate, Rubin goes on to explain the Arkansas governor's appeal to social conservatives:

He says without hesitation: “On the social issues, my political viewpoint is based on my core values and spiritual convictions. While I am deeply pro-life, I also believe that our commitment to life doesn’t stop at birth, but instead to do everything possible to help all children have what they need to realize their full potential.” Maggie Gallagher [last seen 'defending marriage' at the conservative summit - ed.], president of the Institute of Marriage and Public Policy, counts herself as a “fan” of the governor’s efforts to reduce “family fragmentation” and out of wedlock births and unnecessary divorce. He signed bills outlawing same sex marriage, requiring parental consent for abortion, and mandating notification by abortion providers to prospective parents that the unborn baby may feel pain. He also signed one of three state covenant-marriage laws, allowing couples to elect to marry under conditions that permit divorce only after appropriate counseling and when there has been a “total and complete” breach of the relationship.

But on the other side of the fusionist coin: while Governor Huckabee initially looked good to economic conservatives, signing a $70 million tax cut and a "Property Taxpayer's Bill of Rights," things quickly deteriorated.

By the end of his second term he had raised sales taxes 37 percent, fuel taxes 16 percent, and cigarettes taxes 103 percent, leading to a jump in total tax revenues from $3.9 billion to $6.8 billion. The Cato Institute gave him a failing grade of “F” on its fiscal report card for 2006 and an only marginally better but still embarrassing “D” for his entire term. Both as a governor and now as a presidential candidate Huckabee has declined to sign a “no tax” pledge. Recalling that Huckabee has said that he would only raise taxes if his arm were twisted, Grover Norquist of ATR responded: “He has a history of allowing his arm to be twisted and twisting other’s arms.”

He was not the poster child for smaller government. During his tenure, the number of state government workers in Arkansas increased over 20 percent. Under Governor Huckabee’s watch, state spending increased a whopping 65.3 percent from 1996 to 2004, three times the rate of inflation, and the state’s general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion. As Grover Norquist quipped, “We like chubby governors and skinny budgets. Not the other way around.” The massive increase in government spending is due in part to the number of new health programs and expansion of existing ones, including ARKids First, a state program to provide health coverage for 70,000 Arkansas children. Spending on ARKids alone increased 69 percent over a five-year period.

All of this, plus Huckabee's promotion of personal health initiatives like one requiring students to have their Body Mass Index measures, has seriously damaged the governor's standing with economic conservatives. Charles Murray - last seen at the conservative summit defending "small government" - put it bluntly:

“They are bad in principle, they’re a waste of money, they are of the same muddle-headed mindset as the Compassionate Conservatism of the Bush administration. That a person who advocates them might be taken seriously as a Republican candidate for the presidency just 20 years after Reagan left office is deeply depressing.”

All of which adds up to a dilemma for the conservative movement, especially considering Huckabee's considerable charm and campaigning skills.

As Darryl Hart recently observed in the latest American Conservative magazine, conservative evangelical leaders are in danger of being outflanked from the left by a new generation of religious activists motivated by issues like poverty, the environment, and health care. W. James Antle III, writing in the American Spectator, suggests that Huckabee, with Sam Brownback, is at work forging a "new religious right," which would take up those same concerns. As such, it would seem like Mike Huckabee represents an opportunity for the religious right to guard its left flank. I suppose Huckabee doesn't need to win a presidential nomination in order to do that, but the fact that a candidate with such potential is essentially being called a non-starter by the economic right suggests, once again, that the fractures in the right's fusionist coalition are real, and have real effects.

Labels: 2008, American Conservative, American Spectator, Darryl Hart, fusionism, Jennifer Rubin, Mike Huckabee, National review, Presidential election, social conservatives, W. James Antle III

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:48 AM 0 comments

  This Week in Conservative Organs: We Can Work It Out

This week finds our organists caught up in a strange mixture of giddiness and dread, as they claim a couple of victories even while they realize that there's a chance that they might fall apart before too long. It seems there's plenty of time for fussing and fighting....




We begin with Larry Kudlow of the National Review, who wants to tell us the Good News about "the Goldilocks economy." (I don't know what this means but it calls to mind the Wolf's lines in Sondheim's great musical, Into the Woods: "There's no possible way/To describe how you feel/When you're talking to your meal!") He begins by telling us the story of Dubyalocks's recent triumphant visit to Wall Street:

President George W. Bush became only the second sitting American president to visit the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As he moved from trading post to trading post, floor brokers and assistants stopped their work and started to cheer.

Huge cheers. Loud applause.

George Bush has apparently managed to find the last place in New York City that isn't full of people who hate him.

The reason these good hardy Wall Street folk don't hate Bush, Kudlow points out, is that the stock market is doing pretty good. To hear Kudlow tell it, everyone should be equally bullish, considering the jobs picture:

The most accurate employment gauge, called “adjusted households” (which the Bureau of Labor Statistics created in order to combine the non-farm payroll survey with the civilian-employment household survey), shows nearly 3 million new jobs annually over the past three years — all since Mr. Bush’s supply-side tax cuts of 2003.

Or is it all bull? There's no doubt that the economy has been adding jobs. But as the Center for American Progress points out:

Job growth is the weakest for any business cycle. Despite the 2003 tax cut, job growth has averaged only 1.5% since then—the lowest growth of any recovery of at least the same length. Monthly job growth since March 2001 has averaged an annualized 0.6%.

This is what Kudlow calls "carping." Kudlow does not like carping, because it harshes Kudlow's buzz. And nothing seems to harsh that buzz more than carping about inequality:

And the president (or anybody else) shouldn’t fret about so-called wage stagnation, or inequality. Hourly earnings for non-supervisory wage earners averaged $16.76 in 2006, a near 20 percent gain from the last business-cycle peak in 2000 and a 64 percent increase from the $10.20 cycle peak in 1990.

Comparing the first five years of the Bush economic expansion with the first five years of the Papa Bush/Clinton cycle, average hourly earnings are 44 percent higher today in nominal terms and 9 percent higher in inflation-adjusted terms. Washington economist Alan Reynolds has written voluminously on the absence of wage inequality since the tax-reform bill of 1986. This is a faux issue.

Of course, as people like Jonathan Chait have pointed out, Alan Reynolds is what you might call a "faux economist." American Progress, by contrast, observes that "The gap between productivity growth and wage growth is wider today than ever." The Economic Policy Institute further illustrates this "unprecedented income inequality:"

Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis through the third quarter of 2006 show that a historically high share of corporate income is going into profits and interest (i.e., capital income) rather than employee compensation. And a newly released Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of household incomes shows that a greater share of this capital income goes to the richest households than at any time since the CBO began tracking such trends. In other words, our economy is producing more capital income and that type of income is more likely to go to those at the very top of the income scale. Together, these dynamics are contributing to a uniquely skewed recovery.

Indeed: huge cheers. Loud applause.

ALSO at NRO, the Editors get a big kick out of the way Senate Republicans gummed up the Iraq resolution process, suggesting that "under Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republicans have quickly gotten the hang of serving in a minority that can successfully frustrate Harry Reid’s partisan maneuvering on the war in Iraq." No hint of irony here in that what McConnell blocked was Reid's attempt to get a bipartisan majority on the Iraq issue. Meanwhile, Terence P. Jeffrey rejects Steven Malanga's argument in City Journal that Rudy Giuliani is both electable and a true conservative. He is neither, Jeffrey says. Jeffrey quotes America's Mayor himself:

Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes,” Rudy Giuliani once said. “But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”

Indeed, says Jeffrey. Likewise, a politician who tolerates gay marriage is more likely to tolerate the destruction of human civilization. Touche!

AND... Demonstrating once again that there is no creature on earth more persecuted than a conservative college student, Bridget Johnson recounts her days of torment with the hairy legged-feminists and unfeminine-looking professors at the old alma mater. "Every bit the granola-breath nightmare I'd been warned about by fraternity guys," she says it was. And nobody knows from the nuances of feminist theory like fraternity guys. Johnson's point is that we shouldn't be all excited over gender milestones like the first woman Speaker or the first woman President. Teh war on Islamofascism - that's what should revv our engines! We shouldn't view political women differently from political men, as long as they can PWN the bad guys.

The argument would certainly be more convincing if it weren't accompanied by K-Lo's interview with Mary Sheehan Warren, "founder of Elegance in Style," who "offers advice on the right way to dress." Title of the interview: "Pretty Pelosi." Sample line: "Do Republican gals still wear pearls?"

ROUNDING OUT... Peter Kirsanow says Republicans have to stop apologizing for their conservative views when they talk to blacks, Mallory Factor praises South Carolina governor Mark Sanford as an example of how Republican statehouses can avoid raising taxes, Andrew McCarthy demands that the Bush administration release the dossier about all the bad stuff Iran's been up to, so's we can finally get our war on, and Thomas Sowell reveals the New York Times's Great Conspiracy to Destroy Marriage as We Know It. Foiled again!




This week the Up-is-Downism Award returns to its natural home at the American Spectator, thanks to the efforts of Quin Hillyer, who quite literally asks us to imagine: what if up really was down?

We're talking about the troop surge. Really. What if attacks, bombings, injuries, deaths, all decline precipitously in Iraq in the next two years? [...]

What if, meanwhile, the American public finally starts giving President George W. Bush credit for the economy that has been doing so splendidly for about four years now?

What if, as seems increasingly likely, the jury in the Scooter Libby trial decides that Libby is not guilty? What if, on the other hand, Harry Reid's questionable real estate transactions continue to stink to high heaven, and what if, as expected, Democratic Rep. William "Cold Cash" Jefferson of Louisiana is indicted and then convicted for various financial misdeeds? What if, in short, it is the Democrats and not the Republicans who get blamed for having a "culture of corruption"? [...]

What if somebody of the high caliber and brilliance of the SEC's Chris Cox, or with the combination of communications skills and genuineness of Tony Snow, steps in to the presidential race and unites conservatives around him? [...]

What if Karl Rove re-establishes his reputation as a political genius and designs a stunning political comeback for the president?

Indeed, Quin: what if reality really didn't bite?

ALSO AT THE SPECTATOR, a trio of articles considers the prospects of Rudy, Romney, and Huck. The Spectator's founder, wingnut extraordinaire R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., is moved to rhapsody by the God-like Giuliani, who singlehandedly pulled New York City out of the Great Depression, ended street crime down to the level of hot dog vendors overcharging you during parades, beat the terrorists on 9/11, and stopped the Green Goblin from throwing that tram full of people off the Queensboro Bridge.

Meanwhile, John Tabin takes a somewhat more sober look at Mitt Romney, last seen bombing at the conservative summit (Tabin reports that the summit performance was so bad as to prompt one attendee to refer to him as "our Kerry.") Mitt's cleaned up, found Jesus: he did much better speaking before the right-wing Republican Study Committee last week, and Tobin suggests that "one thing Romney has going for him is that he's made a much more concerted effort to woo conservatives than the frontrunners ... If he can learn to be more consistent on the stump, Romney's efforts to shore up the right may well pay off."

Finally, W. James Antle III (the Spectator has a gift for ingenious writer names) examines Mike Huckabee, who, with fellow social-con candidate Sam Brownback, may be forging a "new religious right." This neo-theo-conism endorses certain "fiscal heterodoxies" (thus exposing itself to broadsides from the Club for Growth) as it seeks to move beyond the old sex-based enthusiasms of the religious right to a prioritization of poverty, health care, and other social needs. Antle III is intrigued, if a bit skeptical:

The new religious right that Republicans like Huckabee and Brownback are trying to build is in many respects admirable and appealing. The moral implications of the Christian faith are obviously broader than single-issue politics and sex, something an older breed of organized religious conservatives sometimes seemed to forget. But four decades of activist government have taught us the pitfalls of effecting social change from Washington; those consequences won't be ameliorated simply by putting more faithful bureaucrats in charge.

AND... Bernard Chapin, who "is currently at work on a book concerning women," interviews Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism, which, like many conservative books, has a subtitle beginning with the word "How". Sommers talks about the distinction between "gender feminists," who hate men, and "equity feminists," who "embrace equality and individual rights." If you're reading this post, you're probably a "gender feminist."

Sommers repeats the common right-wing claim that our universities are run by Hairy Scary Feminists seeking to indoctrinate the youth, and she argues that "gender feminism thrives on the myth that American women are the oppressed 'second sex.'" As in so much conservative cultural criticism, she seems to operate from the assumption that conservatives are actually the oppressed identity group, overrun by the tyranny of the liberal elites. In fact, let's try a little thought experiment. Read the following statement by Sommers:

One of the things I say in my lecture is that American women -- as a group -- are not oppressed. In fact, they are among the most favored, privileged and blessed group of human beings in the world.

Now substitute "conservatives" for "women." Hell, given the way the right has tried to re-frame the culture wars, substitute "white men" for "women."

Now repeat ad nauseum.



The truth rears its ugly head at the Weekly Standard, where Fred Barnes makes the unpopular point that "it wasn't for want of conservatives that the GOP lost in 2006." Actually, Barnes notes, the GOP lost big amongst independents, while conservatives voted Republican in the same numbers as ever. This doesn't mean Republicans should abandon conservatism, he argues - but they should remember that "the Republican party is a center-right party. And the problem in 2006 was that the center did not hold."

Meanwhile, Noemie Emery provides a nice summary of the right's emerging Dolchstosslegende:

If Iraq is stabilized this side of chaos, the congressional Democrats will be remembered as the people who fought to prevent it, who tried to kneecap the commander and demoralize the armed forces, and all in all make the mission more difficult. If, on the other hand, the surge is seen to fail, they will be the ones who made it more difficult, demoralized the armed forces, kneecapped the commander, and telegraphed to the enemy that our will was cracking, and we would shortly be leaving.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't, damned for just existing. And the party that created the greatest foreign-policy disaster in American history gets off scot free! You've got to admire the neocon's mental agility. They're like tiny little mental gymnasts.

Finally, at the paleocon American Conservative, Darryl Hart forecasts a leftward tide in the evangelical movement, as its concerns shift from sex to social justice, and as the Falwells and Dobsons give way to the Wallises and Rick Warrens. Meanwhile, Daniel McCarthy considers the "failure of fusionism," but suggests it's misguided to assume that libertarians will end up joining the left. And, ending this week's TWICO on a note we can all enjoy, Andrew J. Bachevic vitriolically condemns the neocons, arguing that the "surge" that was supposed to save Iraq was really designed to save neoconservatism itself. And he pounds Frederick Kagan to a bloody rhetorical pulp. Referring to him as "a lesser light in the neoconservative constellation," Bachevic thunders:

That in places like AEI and the editorial offices of The Weekly Standard Kagan himself has emerged as the man of the hour testifies to the depth of neoconservative desperation. Kagan’s insistence that his surge will do the trick postpones the neoconservative day of reckoning. Believe Kagan and you can avoid for at least a bit longer having to confront Iraq’s incontrovertible lessons: that preventive war doesn’t work, that American power has limits, that the world is not infinitely malleable, and that grasping for “benign global hegemony” is a self-defeating proposition.

All together now!

Labels: American Conservative, American Spectator, conservatives, National review, TWICO, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:54 AM 0 comments

  This Week in Conservative Organs: Exile on K Street

As Republican ex-staffers scramble to secure whatever lobbying jobs are left, our conservative organists this week take up the burden of advising the newly minoritized GOP legislators as to just what, exactly, they should do with themselves for the next two years.



The National Review Online offers a "symposium" on the key question: "How can the GOP show some constructive leadership during the Democrats' first 100 legislative hours?"

Veronique de Rugy, "a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute," suggests they start by "reforming the supplemental spending process."

The increased reliance on supplemental spending is problematic because the lack of detail in supplemental budget requests — combined with their expedited approval process — leaves little room for congressional oversight. In addition, the reduced budget discipline for supplemental bills attracts earmarks and other projects that wouldn’t be funded on their own merits. [...]

Addressing the supplemental-spending shell game that Capitol Hill and the White House have been playing for years would save taxpayers roughly $100 billion per year.

Would Republicans magically manage to pass such reforms without Democratic support? I have no idea. Maybe the Democrats would go along. After all, why wouldn't they want to give the GOP's main domestic priority a boost:

That would make it easier for the GOPs to try to make their tax cuts permanent.

Former Congressman David McIntosh suggests that Republicans "should boldly propose ideas to further reduce taxes and eliminate unnecessary and wasteful government spending." McIntosh also insists that the GOP "vigorously oppose proposals that increase the size and scope of the federal government." To McIntosh, the minority is an opportunity for the Republicans to once again become "the party of ideas." No doubt the Republicans would find it refreshing to be just the party of ideas again, as those ideas haven't served them very well when they've been the party of power.

Grover Norquist, having helped drown the GOP majority in a bathtub, suggests the Republicans do only one thing: "Lose." Lucky for them Norquist is such an expert at that!

For the next two years conservatives will not be able to pass any useful legislation through the House of Representatives. Memorize that sentence. Place it on your PC screensaver. Use it as your message on your answering machine. A discreet but easily accessed tattoo would be helpful. [...]

Republicans in Congress need to use the first 100 days and the next two years to lose. Propose House rules that keep the present GOP requirement for a 3/5 vote to raise taxes. And lose. Propose House rules that term limit committee chairmen — the old GOP rule only applied to Republicans. And lose. Propose a tax cut. And lose. Heck, get denied an actual vote. Have a procedural vote. And lose. Propose an end to earmarks. And lose. Write welfare reform part three. And lose.

You know what? I agree with this.

I know, I know - it's all part of a clever strategy to make the Democrats look bad. Professor John J. Pitney Jr. has more:

To the limited extent that they can offer amendments and alternatives, they should force the Democrats to show whether they are as “moderate” as the conventional wisdom has depicted them.

Indeed. And what are these radical, loony ideas that will descredit the Democrats? Er... the minimum wage hike. And pay-as-you-go budgeting. I can hear the strains of the "Internationale"...

ALSO AT NRO: David Hogberg [note to self: name jokes are the lowest form of humor] darkly predicts that whatever the Democrats do about health care, they'll just end up making it cost more; Donald Luskin just knew that the Democrats were only pretending to care about the deficit; and K-Lo advises Mitt Romney: "Say it loud: I'm Mormon and I'm proud!"




You read this stuff and there are some articles that just seem to deserve special acclaim for diving boldly through the looking glass. It's so perverse it's almost unanswerable. Starting today, I'll be conferring a special award to teh most awesomely l33t mind-bender of the week.

So the inaugural Up-Is-Downism Award goes to R. Emmet Tyrrell, founder and still champion at the anti-Clinton scandal sheet, theAmerican Spectator. R. invites us to sympathize with the dilemma now facing President Bush, as this gentle uniter finds himself thrown to the ravenous Democratic wolves. Some excerpts [subtext in bold]:

The story here in this great city is that President George W. Bush, leader of the vanquished Republicans, is reaching out [middle finger extended] to the triumphant Democrats on Capitol Hill. [...]

What the Republican base might find reassurance in is that this is not a New Bush. He came to Washington believing in this sort of collegiality. He thought he experienced it in Texas with a Democratic legislature. He imagined he would experience it in Washington. My guess is that one of his greatest disappointments as president is that there has been so little consensus in Congress and so much partisanship. [No doubt Karl Rove was equally disappointed.] [...]

Mr. Bush spent most of his adult life as a businessman, not as a politician. For about two decades, as Mr. Bush was working in [failing upward through] the private sector and the likes of Nancy Pelosi and the Clintons were politicking, a growing partisanship was overtaking politics.

Okay, I just have to stop for a moment and catch my breath, make sure everyone's paying attention here now, because this next part is just absolutely delicious. Ready? Ok.

The Clintons and their cogenerationists were the main reason for it.

Ohhhhhhh MAN that's some good stuff. Oh yeah, sorry - the subtext:

[Says the rag that made its entire name and reputation with a series of vicious Mellon Scaife-funded partisan slanders on the Clintons!!]

Okay, it goes on, but I think we've seen more than enough to declare a winner.

ALSO AT THE AMSPEC, Quin Hillyer outlines conservative resolutions for the new year: support the 'surge,' embiggen the military, kill the nanny state, take a bite out of crime, and be really, really ethical. Meanwhile, "The Prowler" begins the political deathwatch for Republican Senators Warner and Sununu, and Pia de Solenni says there are two kind of women: women who want to get married and thus end up having lots of lonely premarital sex (and here she coins the phrase of the week: "sex without context"), and women who don't care about other people and thus remain happily chaste. (She also earns bonus points for using examples from Sex and the City without even knowing the characters' names, referring to Samantha only as "the promiscuous blonde.")




AT THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Fred Barnes wishes President Bush would shut up about Social Security and start talking up Health Savings Accounts. Any deal that Bush could make on Social Security would be unacceptable to conservatives ("Were Bush to approve a substantial tax increase without any compensating reform, he would sever his last solid link with conservatives"). But now everyone's talking about health care, and here conservatives have a chance to get in at the ground floor. Plus, it wouldn't require horse trading!

To extend their use, Bush doesn't need the approval of Democrats, most of whom oppose HSAs. Legislation passed in the lame duck session of Congress made it easier for companies and individuals to sign up. All that's required of the president is to mount the bully pulpit to spread the good word about HSAs and promote their use.

You know, this is actually legitimately dangerous. Conservatives can never kill the great liberal innovations like Social Security. But they can kill health care reform before it starts. That's exactly what Barnes is advocating.

MEANWHILE AT THE STANDARD, Louis Wittig is baffled by Al Jazeera English, which seems almost as fair and balanced as Fox News, if only they wouldn't talk about Arabs so much; and Victorino Matus says "Saddam got off easy:" why, they didn't even desecrate his body!

ZIPPING THROUGH... At the neoconeriffic Commentary Gabriel Schoenfeld frets that the election of Keith Ellison and the existence of a handful of Democratic congresspeople with less than 100% ratings from AIPAC mean that the Democrats are turning into the Hate the Jews Party. Meanwhile, Joshua Muravchik, who once almost ended up on the Ali G. show, manages to argue that: 1)Borat is a great movie because it's mainly about making fun of people in the Third World, and 2)Criticizing Israeli policies is more anti-Semitic than singing "throw the Jew down the well".

FINALLY, the paleocons at The American Conservative feature a special liberal guest star: Glenn Greenwald, who wonders why none of the talking-head war cheerleaders have been made to answer for their foolishness:

Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.

ALSO, Steve Sailer demonstrates the dark side of communitarianism, denouncing free market social Darwinism but also American cultural diversity. It seems that people - especially brown people - just don't like each other very much. Proposed solutions: martial law, IQ tests, or universal Christian fundamentalism. Take your pick.

AND FINALLY, Tom Piatak reviews Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, whose title is something like Why 9/11 Was the Liberals' Fault. Piatak's a little taken aback by D'Souza's fondness for sharia law, but his reaction is less interesting than D'Souza's thesis, which goes like this:

1. They hate us for our freedoms
2. Liberals are the ones who use freedoms
Ergo,
3. They hate us for our liberals.

It's nice to see the conservatives and the terrorists have something in common. Whatever gets your rocks off.

Labels: American Conservative, American Spectator, Commentary, conservatism, conservatives, National review, TWICO, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:24 PM 2 comments

  This Week in Conservative Organs

At the Buchananite paleocon American Conservative, Scott McConnell warns that the neocons may be down, but they're not out. Despite animosity between the two conservative camps, McConnell feels a "twinge of remorse" recalling the promise the neocon movement showed when it emerged in the 60's:

For decades, The Public Interest was a penetrating and groundbreaking journal. Commentary in the 1970s—when it turned hard against the countercultural '60s—was brave and forceful. Nathan Glazer may never have written anything void of wisdom. To see the movement that spawned this grow into something bloated, stupid, and ultimately dangerous to America is to see the terminus of a vital part of our intellectual history.

Certainly they're in rough shape now:

A main dilemma for the neoconservatives is their relationship to Bush’s lame-duck presidency. [...] Veteran pamphleteer Joshua Muravchik recognized the larger problem, that the current neocon brand—now defined by Bush, the Iraq War, and American global hegemony—has become broadly unpopular.

And so it gets ugly: Michael Ledeen blames the ladies, Perle says he's "damn tired of being described as an architect of this war," and David Frum gives us this gem, which says a lot about the way the neoconservative movement works:

'I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas.'

That's right: Bush is dumb.

But don't bury the neocons just yet:

Despite the obituaries now being written, neoconservatism will not soon be over with and certainly won’t disappear in the way that American communism or segregation have. The group has always been resilient and tactically flexible.

But who will be their patron now?

[I]f Bush has failed them, what options remain? Joe Lieberman has less national appeal than Henry Jackson did [no kidding! -eds.].

Maybe there's one hero left:

John McCain is another matter, and if Americans can be persuaded that the solution to their Middle East, terrorism, and other diplomatic dilemmas lies in more troops and invasions, neoconservatism will have springtime all over again.

With all the problems their agenda has run into, what should we expect from the next wave of neoconnery?

[O]ne can look forward to neoconservative agitation on two fronts: a powerful campaign to draw the United States into a war to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential and an equally loud effort in support of maintaining Israeli dominance over the West Bank and denying the Palestinians meaningful statehood.

In case you doubt them, consider this:

Perhaps most importantly, neoconservatism still commands more salaries—able people who can pursue ideological politics as fulltime work in think tanks and periodicals—than any of its rivals. The millionaires who fund AEI and the New York Sun will not abandon neoconservatism because Iraq didn’t work out. The reports of the movement’s demise are thus very much exaggerated.

Elsewhere

Also in AmCon, William S. Lind argues that the midterm election results may have made an attack on Iran more, not less likely. Why?

The Bush administration ... will be tempted to do what small men have done throughout history when in trouble: try to escalate their way out of it.

A little problem: this time the Iranians "have 140,000 American hostages, in the form of U.S. troops in Iraq." All they have to do is cut our supply line, and we could lose an entire army.

It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover.

The only hope? Since the Democrats won't do it on their own, the Joint Chiefs should force their hand by speaking out publicly - compelling the Democratic Congress to pre-emptively forbid an attack on Iran.

And: Doug Bandow likes David Kuo's book and thinks Christian politics might not be so good for Christianity; and Gerald Russello suggests that, "In pushing for limitations on habeas corpus, conservatives are ignoring their own best traditions."

At Neocon Central - The Weekly Standard - Irwin Stelzer grinds his teeth in anticipation of the 110th Congress's economic populism, while Joshua Livestro sees a Christian revival in, of all places, the Netherlands (and introduces us to perhaps the most frightening phrase of the year: the "corporate prayer movement").

Finally, the venerable National Review treats us to this Ford-related "flashback:" a column written by William F. Buckley Jr. in September of 1974. Shorter version: "Nixon was a damn liberal but we defended him because he bugged the left. Maybe Ford will listen to us."

Labels: American Conservative, conservatism, conservatives, National review, TWICO, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:12 AM 0 comments