neocon terrorism

From a blog I read regularly comes an interesting article , the Nashua Advocate.

http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/

"An ADVOCATE EDITORIAL

We imagine some members of our readership will require a bit of a primer on "true conservatism"--particularly the youngest among them--as this particular manifestation of political consciousness has been largely extinct from the Washington landscape since 1993.

So, consider the ethos (or, as you like, the bathos) of the archetypical "true conservative," as observed through the lens of the "small-government" political positions he or she might be presumed to take in our modern political climate:

1. Limited deployment of the U.S. military abroad, coupled with a vehement opposition to "nation-building";
2. support for the notion that civil suits are to be decided, in all factual- and damages-based particulars, by citizen juries, not government-appointed judges (no damage caps, either);
3. tax cuts only to the extent that cutting taxes does not balloon the federal deficit;
4. separation of Church and State, to the extent that eroding this wall permits the government expansive new powers of intrusion into both religious and secular matters;
5. an end to pork-barrel government spending, including unnecessary and counter-competitive corporate welfare and excessive expenditures for out-moded, last-generation, Cold War-era military equipment;
6. an end to government subsidies of failing corporations, in favor of free-market economic Darwinism;
7. the favoring of state, rather than federal control over criminal justice administration issues, including such statutes as those which govern the use of the death penalty, the availability of medical marijuana, and the allowance of physician-assisted suicide and gay marriage;
8. the privileging of learning, achievement, accomplishment, and intellectual excellence over the hegemony of style, beauty, demagoguery, and unearned gravitas (opposition, therefore, to non-academic talk radio, "tele-bimbos," and glorification of the "leisure class"; also, a strong belief in the power of the "expert"--the notion that one ought to defer to the learned, whether it be in the fields of science [see: global-warming], medicine [see: abstinence education, stem cell research], education [see: creationism over Darwinism in school textbooks], or the law [see: removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube per Florida statute and the orders of thirty-one state and federal judges; allowance of continued ballot-counting in Florida in 2000, per traditional conceptions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Separation of Powers Clause, as well as all extant conceptions of Florida statutes, as interpreted by the primary arbiter of Florida statutes, the Florida Supreme Court]; spite for the notion that "anecdotes" can or should be used to push political policies);
9. opposition to policies which entrench unearned wealth across generations, such as abolition of the estate tax and so-called "legacy" admissions to college campuses;
10. ecstatic interest in and belief in the constitutional doctrine of "separation of powers," and a strong commitment to the anti-establishment, anti-government themes which undergird the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution;
11. opposition to all indiscreet, impolitic, and impolite politics, such as push-polling, propaganda, focus-grouping, voter intimidation, and voter suppression--that is, a belief in the expansion and wholesale cleansing of the franchise to better allow U.S. citizens to express displeasure with their elected officials (as per the fundamental importance given this precept by the Founding Fathers) and to better receive honest, accurate, and unmuddled information from (and about) their elected representatives.

Today's conservatives are not true conservatives, nor are they truly, as we have so often referred to them here, "neo-conservatives."

To be a "neo-conservative" (or "neo-con") is to consciously reject established principles of conservatism in favor of--or so you might submit were you a self-proclaimed "neo-conservative"--their better: for example, military colonialism; runaway government spending; politics-as-marketing; the abolition of the estate tax; the teaching of creationism in the nation's schools; opposition to affirmative action but support for "legacy" admissions; pork-barrel spending for military and corporate interests; expansion of corporate welfare and government subsidies for failed global conglomerates; support for the erosion of the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, and the separation between Church and State; promotion of monopolies in business at the expense of the free market; federal control over state prerogatives such as the decriminalization of marijuana, euthanasia, gay marriage, and the death penalty; contempt for the learned experts of academia and their hard-won knowledge and degrees, coupled with great affection for the "mob rule" and "junk expertise" of talk radio hosts and cable-news talking heads.

Neo-conservatives are not "remaking" conservatism, in other words.

They are, quite literally, pooping all over it.

Nor is neo-conservatism generally considered a popular phenomenon in America; few "average" Americans claim to be neo-conservatives, as the designation is largely limited to those in politics, the military, and (in rare instances) the academy.

So how do we term the tens of millions of self-proclaimed "conservatives" who embrace neo-conservatism in their policy positions--as witnessed most recently by the Terri Schiavo affair, which had even former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan calling progressives "lovers of death"--but who demonstrate, nevertheless, an inexplicable empathy for so-called "true conservatism" in their construction of a political self-image?

Well, we can start, improbably enough, with the "X-Games."

That's right, the darling of ESPN in the 21st Century, the so-called "X-Games": an Olympics-sized collection of "extreme sports" which desperately crave mainstream recognition and legitimacy (in many instances, even inclusion into the less-than-extreme, Greek-inspired Olympics) while drawing, in their substance and style, from radical--even extreme--developments in the culture of modern sport.

Thus, "downhill inline skating."

Thus, skateboarding, surfing, waveboarding, snowboarding, snowmobiling.

Thus, "bicycle and motorcycle stunting," "roller hockey," "superpipe skiing," and "Ultracross."

So, isn't it obvious?

The modern Republican Party is made up of what we might call "ex-conservatives," meaning both that they are extremists (while still considering themselves "conservatives") and also that they treat true conservatism as though it were an ex-girlfriend of sorts--someone you remember with some fondness, some bitterness, and some, let's face it, self-deluding nostalgia.

For X-cons, or ex-cons (as The Nashua Advocate hereby dubs them) true conservatism is both insufficiently extreme and also an icon of the distant past to which, inexplicably, they find themselves forever drawn. [Out of, one imagines, a strange, even perverse sense of self-loathing, coupled with a persistent tendency toward self-glorification].

Welcome, then, to the era of the "ex-con."

Indeed, when Terri Schiavo finally dies--when Terri Schiavo is finally granted her wish to die with dignity--the war between ex-cons and America truly begins.

posted by News Editor at 3/25/2005 "
http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/