Use Of The Tern ''Neocon'' Is Good Sign For Bush
By Isaiah Z. Sterrett (04/27/04)
THE DIFFERENCE between liberals and lemmings is becoming increasingly unclear. Left-wing columnists, especially, have a mysterious gift for writing exactly the same things as their colleagues. If one writer decides to start shrieking about a certain issue, so will all the others. It is a perpetually hilarious phenomenon.
For the past few weeks, the liberal argument has consisted of calling President Bush and members of his administration ''neocons,'' or ''neoconservatives.'' Neoconservatism, of course, is the movement which calls, in part, for an activist foreign policy aimed at spreading freedom throughout the world. (Just from that definition, you can see why liberals don’t care for it.)
A website called IslamOnline featured an editorial recently which proclaimed that we went to war in Iraq because of racism. ''Perhaps,'' wrote the author, ''[this] explains why ‘the axis of evil’ slogan was so popular with Washington neocons.''
Salon.com, in a column entitled ''The Neocon Conundrum,'' said that ''a sense of gloom about Iraq'' has increased lately, as have ''neoconservative calls to ‘stay the course’—even if it’s a course to nowhere.'' Striking a decidedly similar note, syndicated whiner Molly Ivins wrote that ''we can conclude that bringing democracy at the point of a missile is a lot trickier than the neocons believed it would be.''
In a truly racist op-ed piece, Maureen Dowd wrote that Colin Powell had been ''used'' by Dick Cheney’s ''Pentagon neocons.'' They’d forced Powell, she wrote, to abandon his beliefs and support a war based on ''bogus intelligence.''
Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine that Bush was wrong for filling his Cabinet with ''neoconservatives''—people, according to Klein, ''who had big ideas about how the world should work.'' Evidently Klein prefers small ideas that do nothing but protect the status quo.
The reason liberals are insisting that we call conservatives ''neoconservatives'' is that the word ''conservative'' no long frightens the American public. Adding that prefix—which means ''new''—makes the whole concept much scarier.
The most successful step toward demystifying conservatism was taken by Gov. George W. Bush in 2000. One of his favorite slogans was ''compassionate conservatism,'' and it was intended to hinder liberals’ ability to call him mean, as they had succeeded in calling every other Republican in the history of the universe.
Ronald Reagan, it should be remembered, has been called mean. So has Phyllis Schlafly, Rush Limbaugh, and everybody else who likes low taxes. But not George Bush! They said he was a stupid cowboy, but never was he labeled mean.
So now, having observed a president who is both conservative and completely non-mean, America has learned that conservatives are good people, after all. Because of ''compassionate conservatism,'' voters are no longer alarmed by the c-word.
This presents a tremendous problem to liberals. If they can’t call conservatives mean, and they can’t call their opponents conservatives, what in Sam Hill are they supposed to do?
We know they can’t make a reasonable argument. Lately they’ve been trying to tell us that Bush caused the 9/11 attacks. Republicans, of course, used the same argument against Roosevelt in the months after Pearl Harbor—or, wait, actually, they didn’t. Imagine: the party out of power supported America.
They also want us to believe that there’s some sort of cosmic connection between Iraq and Vietnam, even though the two nations are in different parts of the world, involve different problems, have been fought with vastly different numbers of casualties, and have lasted very different amounts of time. Luckily, I don’t really worry about this particular notion. Ted Kennedy said it, so surely it was the booze talking. (Or maybe he still has water in his ears.)
Clearly this argument thing isn’t going to work for liberals. Their only choice is to find another name to call conservatives. At the moment, it’s “neocon,” but what next? At some point, they’ll either have to argue, or be shunned from political debate forever.
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