The neocons are renowned for their courage on the battlefield. There is no keyboard they are afraid to finger. No pen they won’t commandeer. When the battle cry is sounded, they unhesitatingly push the “on” button at their computers and saddle up for battle. Off with the loafers and under the desk! “Caution to the wind! Bring in a wine spritzer, dammit, I’m off to waaar!”
While this Institute and this column most definitely do not take a position on any candidate and in fact your correspondent views voting itself with disdain in today’s corrupt US political system, it is impossible to avoid viewing with extreme amusement the collective neocon hysterical breakdown over the possibility that voters of the Republican Party – a party neocons crashed en masse starting in 1972 and especially 1976 – may be sending as their nominee for president a man who has committed the cardinal sins of:
1) Stating the obvious that the Iraq war was brought to us by the liars of the neoconservative movement and has been a total disaster for the rest of us who are forced to pay for their fantasies of world domination.
2) Suggesting that he might actually speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin to see if US/Russia differences can be worked out without a potentially world-ending nuclear war.
3) Though arguing that he is hugely pro-Israel, nevertheless suggesting that if the US is to play a role in the Israel/Palestine issue (this Institute would argue that it should not), the US side should, in the interests of any chance of success, take a neutral role in the process.
4) Wondering why on earth Obama listened to idiotic neocon advice and overthrew Libya’s strongman leader only to see the red carpet laid down for ISIS.
5) Suggesting that it may be a good thing that Russia be bombing ISIS into oblivion and that we might want to just sit back and let that happen for once.
These positions are mortal sins in the Church of the Neoconservative and the only penance is an intense round of Stalinist self-criticism and ultimately political exile because one is never trustworthy again once one violates the neocon commandments. There is no purgatorio in the neocon Inferno.
So in Politico today, Michael Crowley writes that the “Neocons Declare War on Trump.” How do they propose to prosecute their war? As usual, with their well-known bravery. They are planning a mass exodus from the Republican Party to support their sister-in-arms Hillary Clinton, who as president plans to change the official motto of the United States from “In God We Trust” to “We Came, We Saw, He Died.”
Tomorrow the neocons plan to launch their version of a nuclear missile – the dreaded “strongly-worded letter” – to warn Republican voters that if they continue to flirt with the foreign policy apostate Trump, the neocons will take their toys and go home to the Democratic Party. Republican voters at that point are supposed to wail and gnash their teeth at the prospect of supporting a party without bloodsucking neocons calling the shots.
Leading the strongly-worded letter campaign is Dov Zakheim, who as George W. Bush’s Comptroller of the Pentagon somehow lost track of a trillion or so dollars. It’s a safe bet Zakheim is not spending his retirement from government service in a double-wide trailer somewhere. Top military officers will retire, screams Zakheim, if under Trump the US abandons the neocon vision of “American exceptionalism.” Perhaps so. And what would they do without enormously well-paid positions in the military-industrial complex to retire to?
The neocons are gambling that the American voter’s fury at Washington does not extend to their foreign policy adventurism. They are gambling that another PNAC-style harshly-worded letter will awaken America from its temporary dalliance and shock it back into its abusive relationship with the soft-skinned and well-perfumed keyboard warriors who eagerly send America’s sons and daughters to be slaughtered in wars that achieve nothing but the ascendance of new “bad guys” used to justify ever-more wars. And all of it pays very nicely for them.
Will voters again try to kick that football? Or will they kick the neocons instead?
Daniel McAdams is director of the The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity. Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
