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Break Up the Nest

Kudos to Senators Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R, Tn.) for attempting to really drain the swamp.  Their bill, S. 2672, would move “90% of the positions in 10 Cabinet-level departments out of D.C.”  What a great idea: break up the place!  The thought occurred to me some time ago as the Trump-collusion imbroglio was gaining steam and I was reading Geof Shepard’s “The Real Watergate Scandal” on my Kindle.  Come to think of it, a real state depression in DC wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the country.

Blackburn and Hawley.

All those minions scurrying about DC have created a world all their own.  The progressives of the late 19th century assured us that the halcyon days of good government would be upon us if only more power was deposited in the hands of degreed professionals who were educated to treat all of reality as a matter for “science”.  In other words, people like themselves.

Ironically, they ignored the implications of the “science” of people both as individuals and in large groups.  People are simultaneously self-serving and altruistic, and not in equal measure – usually to the detriment of altruism.  As a collective, they create a distinct society with its own norms and expectations.  It’s a world unto itself.

The skyline of Washington, D.C., including the U.S. Capitol building, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and National Mall, is seen from the air, January 29, 2010. (Saul Loeb/AFP)

A trip into the world of the Watergate scandal sheds light on the brave new world of this administrative state.  Let’s examine 3 prominent characters in the now bastardized but popular version of the story: Clark Mollenhoff, Mark Felt, and Bob Woodward.

Mollenhoff was a DC reporter and well-connected lawyer and friend of presiding judge John Sirica (Sirica is another of these networked DC folks).  Not only was he well-connected, he got a position in the first year of the Nixon White House.  His ambition to have direct access to Nixon and be Nixon’s premier sage was thwarted by learning that he would have to work under Haldeman and Ehrlichman.  The job didn’t last much longer than a year.  He becomes another of the disgruntled operatives – one among many thousands populating the District – roaming about looking for outlets for their scorn.  In clearly improper, if not illegal, ex-parte meetings with Sirica, he would fill that coveted role of “sage”.

Clark Mollenhoff

Mark Felt, ex-Associate Director of the FBI, is another example of a person with stymied high aspirations.  Passed over for the FBI directorate – it was handed to L. Patrick Gray – he simmered as second fiddle.  He willingly became an espionage agent for Bernstein and Woodward as “Deep Throat”.

Former FBI official W. Mark Felt arrive at federal court in Washington 9/18 for the continuation of his trial on charges of approving illegal break-ins during the Nixon Administration.

Finally, what about Bob Woodward?  He made his name in DC circles as an aide to Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  His connections would be useful in his second career as WaPo muckraker.

Carl Bernstein, left, and Robert Woodward, who pressed the Watergate investigation, in Washington, D.C., May 7, 1973. (photo: AP)

What to make of all this?  The country is governed in a bog-like slough of cliques, the excessively ambitious, and self-serving inter-relationships.  If you’re an outsider from Ashtabula, beware!

Trump, does this sound familiar?

Forget all that stuff about rule by the people.  Progressives bequeathed to us a government of an unaccountable nomenklatura.

That’s right, Blackburn and Hawley, we have no realistic recourse but to break it up!  Break it up, and do so quickly.

 

RogerG

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Not Making Sense

The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)

We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools.  Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement.  The stories don’t make much sense.

As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence.  Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”.  What?!  “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one.  As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before.  It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.

The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.

Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long.  The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37.  Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.

Ditto for news stories.  Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled.  Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”.  The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs.  Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires.  The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades.  Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing?  Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.

Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?

Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.

Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex.  But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California.  It’s a global phenomenon.  What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento.  Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento.  Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.

The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies.  They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia.  PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses.  Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia.  After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over.  Astounding!

A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids.  Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications.  I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda.  Mmmm, something to think about?

RogerG

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The Order of the Day: Lies, Lies, Lies

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a May interview in Iowa Falls. (Daniel Acker/For The Washington Post)

I remember a conversation with a friend and colleague who appeared to be apoplectic about Donald Trump’s lies during the campaign and up to the aftermath of the inauguration (when the exchange ended). Wow, looking back on it, over-stating crowd sizes seems awfully pale when compared to the whoppers coming out of the mouths of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Lena Dunham, Jussie Smollett, and the adolescent Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian School. They have in common a desire to exploit ritual identity-victimhood, the central tenet of being “woke”.

Whew, let’s take ’em one at a time. Warren’s angle is to peddle a Native American heritage that doesn’t exist for professional advancement. She compounds the error by spreading a tale of losing a job for being pregnant, also fully debunked. At least the second tall tale takes advantage of something that she quite clearly is: a woman.

Former Vice President Joe Biden campaigns for president in Davenport, Iowa, on June 11, 2019. (Photo: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

After Warren, we have Biden. This guy is famous for his whoppers. The one that should be most irritating is his rendition of the traffic accident that killed his wife and daughter. He bellows that they died at the hands of drunk driver. Sorry, Joe, not true. The authorities at the time said alcohol wasn’t involved and even more interestingly concluded that Mrs. Biden was the cause of the collision when she strayed into the truck’s path. What’s more galling is Biden’s sliming of the other driver as one who “drinks his lunch”. The man’s family demands a retraction. This is more than a mistake on Biden’s part; it’s evidence of a Biden character flaw.

If that’s not enough, along comes the mouth of the lefty celebrity community, Lena Dunham. She claims in her book that she was raped in college by, what else, a white College Republican. The only problem: it ain’t true. In fact, her publisher had to shell out a settlement to the innocent accused. Is there a congenital connection between being woke and lying? One wonders.

The fictions continue with the little Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian. It just so happens to be the place of part-time employment for Karen Pence, and, of course, being a place of traditional Christianity – the LGBTQ agenda is an awkward fit there.

Karen Pence at Immanuel Christian School. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

Well, anyway, the little girl came home with a story of abuse and physical assault by, what else, some white boys. The only problem – you guessed it – it ain’t true. At the time, for our woke press, it was a two-fer: racism, racism everywhere, and the VP’s wife is a functionary of the white racist machine.

Do you see a pattern here? I do. The woke folks are so enthusiastic about their lefty social engineering that they’ll defame anyone and anything to get there.

I can’t stop here. Does the slander of the Duke lacrosse team remind you of anything? How about the alleged rape culture at U. of Virginia, courtesy of Rolling Stone, and subsequently and fully discredited? The despicable and wild tales of Kavanaugh’s youth? Come on, let’s call them what they are: lies. Don’t be a bit surprised that more deceits lay in store after the completion of the investigation of the investigators of Russia-gate and whistleblower-gate.

I’ll ask once again: Is there something congenital between being woke and lying? One wonders.

RogerG

* You can read about many of these episodes in Kevin Williamson’s recent piece in National Review.

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Polling, Sh-polling

The mania for polling says more the about the interests of the media than it does about the views of the public.  They are used to inflate clicks on websites, sell air time, bloat premium subscriptions, peddle print copies, and cater to biases in newsrooms. They are also used in the manner of an arsonist to destroy clear thinking.  The particulars of an issue get sabotaged in a frenzy over polls.  All of sudden, facts are less and less relevant.

The media fixation is a manifestation of the old newsroom maxim: If it bleeds, it leads.  In the case of the impeachment talk, the hemorrhage is the bringing low of a prominent person by making news of a series of questions thrust to a random sample of people who may be poorly informed, uninterested, caught up in the hysteria of the moment, and/or willing to answer flippantly.  The thing may be scientifically sound but still be rubbish.

I say this not in regards to any current event, such as the current dust-up over impeachment. Polling has always bugged me.  Why?  Basics first.  The general public isn’t as obsessed with the news as those who are employed to exploit it for fame and reward.  As potential voters, most people don’t take something seriously till they have something serious to do, like cast a ballot.  Till then, they are at the mercy of media hype while, at the same time, they have more pressing concerns at home, like getting by in the world.

Secondly, since polls are of people with more important and immediate burdens, they are snapshots of loosely formed opinions.  It’s for this reason that election polls get more accurate on the state of play as election day arrives.  The person has a crashing deadline, an election, to motivate more thoughtful consideration.  It’s like a student who studies more intensely a day or two before a test.

So, what do the polls indicate about the impeachment of Trump?  Nothing much, other than a mass of rough-hewn opinions-of-the-moment.

The lesson for the public is clear: Watch the facts; ignore the polls.

RogerG

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Biased Assumptions

Why are we experiencing mass shootings and a spike in suicides, up 30% since 1999?  I can’t help but wonder that a deep dissatisfaction is running like an undertow in our times.  Are we quickly approaching a dystopia rather than a utopia?  If so, our modern life has undermined a key tenet of progressivism.  No longer can it be said that life is getting better, also known as “progress”.  In some ways, our times may be beginning to stink up the place.

Why the decline?  Well, something called solipsism has taken the place of knowledge of our past and a grounding in our civilization.  Solipsism is the philosophical core of radical individualism.  All reality is interpreted through the individual.  Subjectivism runs rampant, and any notion of moderation and objective standards takes a back seat.  We are encouraged to have no historical and social understanding and are free to create our own “truth”, not unusual among the fringe who are intertwined in cloistered social media hubs.  All-too-often, it is the alienated tutoring the alienated.

How did we get so atomized?  How did solipsism take root?  Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of our media and schools.  Both spread the secular gospel.  Radical individualism is hard to avoid in the movies and tv, but it’s reinforced by the schools.  C.S. Lewis saw it happening in British schools in the 1950’s.  He wrote about it in his book, The Abolition of Man.  In a chapter entitled “Men Without Chests”, he reviewed a British textbook teaching literary interpretation:

“I do not mean, of course, that he [the student] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial.  The very power of Gaius and Titius [pseudonyms for the authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake.  It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.  The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”

The problem lies in the fact that the student will unknowingly possess assumptions that “will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

A continuous pounding of the bias will set the stage for a desperate loneliness as we become more unhinged from the roots of family, church, and our cultural inheritance.  The social setting is lost, and young people find themselves disconnected in a miasma of their thoughts.

And thus we have Al Qaeda, Nikolas Cruz, the El Paso and Dayton shooters. Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction?

The El Paso shooter at the Walmart.
The Dayton shooter in a bar on the evening of the killings.

RogerG

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Killings and Diseased Discourse

“Beto” O’Rourke at the scene of the El Paso shooting.

The two murderous rampages over the weekend are more than evil deeds.  They have become, like most everything else, fuel to feed the unrelenting push to, in a modification of Eric Voegelin’s immortal phrase, immanentize progressivism’s eschaton – to bring to life the left’s dream of the better world.  It’s like all that happens in the world is forever on the event horizon, ready to fall into the left’s interstellar black hole.  Evil deeds can’t just exist to be fought against; they must be recruited for a partisan political agenda.  The events’ magnitude and sorrow, therefore, is cheapened by a horde of demagogues.

El Paso after the August 3 shooting.
Dayton after the August 4 shooting.

The airwaves are saturated with demagoguery.  Fingers are pointing at Trump for super-charged rhetoric.  Speaking of super-charged rhetoric, have you attended a Pelosi or Schumer presser, heard the bombast from AOC+3, seen “Beto” before a mike, or been verbally accosted by the rest of the herd running to seize the Democratic Party’s brass ring?  If Trump is to blame for El Paso, then Bernie is to blame for the 2017 shooting of Republican congressmen; or the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich are responsible for the Unibomber.  Anyone can play this game.  And it is a game: something far removed from mature thinking.

The Unibomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, after his arrest, 1996.
The 2017 shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders activist.

A favorite of the mob is, you guessed it, “gun control”.  Large numbers – 300 million guns in private ownership for instance – are contorted to serve the desired end, which is to make gun ownership as difficult as it is in Maduro’s Venezuela.  Their list of banalities includes “universal background checks”, bans on “military guns”, and various forms of gun confiscation.  What any of this has to do with straightening out the crooked timber of humanity escapes me.  What any of it has to do with addressing the causes of these incidents also escapes causal reasoning.  They do, however, serve a political end while advancing certain political careers.  In my book, it’s shameful.

The federal government’s powers could be expanded in the manner of Australia and New Zealand and initiate gun confiscation, but still completely miss the point.  And the point is the mental isolation of some of today’s young men, typically in the 20-25 age cohort.  Could our modern society be a breeding ground for alienated youth?  Parental absenteeism in the pursuit of careerism and material wants, or as a consequence of marital breakup and casual amours, have disturbing developmental effects on children.  In addition, the buffer of other civil institutions such as neighborhood associations and church aren’t what they used to be.  These factors are the ignored elephants in the room as the media chases the demagogues and their rantings.  The fact is, a very few of these young people – and some older adults – would be dangerous whether an AR-15, machete, or spoon is available.

Trump-hatred overwhelms all.  Could we just stop the hokum and take an adult look at how we are raising the next generation?  It could be that all we have to do is draw back the state in order to allow room for civil society to breathe.  Yes, and that’s no doubt a tall order in today’s atmosphere of smothering hyperbole.

RogerG

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Speaking of the Danger of Government Dependency

Former deputy Scot Peterson being led away in cuffs.

Scot Peterson is being charged with felony child neglect and 11 other counts.  He’s the sheriff’s deputy who was assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  He stayed out of the line of fire as staff and students were cut down by a murderous teen.

The lesson is clear.  If the leading lights of the Democratic Party have their way, certain legal gun owners of today will find themselves criminals.  In the end, after we are disarmed, we may find ourselves one government worker’s emotional disposition away from death.

The Peterson episode illustrates the danger of a disarmed public and the threat posed by dependency on government employees for your simple right to breathe.  That’s the promise of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s presidential field, and the rest of the party’s shoguns (no pun intended).

Who knew that politics would come to have such threatening implications?

RogerG

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Disinformation Within Disinformation

Adams Schiff (D, Ca.), Chairman of the House Intelligence (?) Committee, and key champion of impeachment.

Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”?  I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing.  Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017.  I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”.  Enough; please, enough!  Put it to bed.

The reason is obvious.  This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign.  The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.

The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”.  But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”).  It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss.  From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser.  Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.

Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates?  The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project).  It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.

Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addresses pro-freeze demonstrators on Capitol Hill, 1981 or 1982 (?).

Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe.  Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets.  Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.

Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us.  Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual.  Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor.  The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.

Jeremy Bird, a former Obama campaign organizer, who assisted the Left-leaning parties’ effort to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015. (Melina Mara/Getty Images)

We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand.  The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous.  The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians.  Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar.  Maybe that’s true.

The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump.  But there’s a fly in the ointment.  They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins.  Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.

They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.  The winner was falsely covered in mud.  Shockingly, it happened to be Trump.  If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

The place of storage for the collusion plot if Hillary had won? (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”)

The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element.  The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner.  For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.

A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor).  The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers.  The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

John F. Kennedy

RogerG

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A Little History to Soothe the Savage Beast

Jerrold Nadler (D,NY) on MSNBC, Jan. 09, 2019

The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage.  Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.

A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story.  It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power.  Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?

Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control?  If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.

Examples abound.

Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake.  For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned.  Belief cometh before proof.  So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.

But what of Eric Holder?

AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.

Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation.  17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder.  The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media.  That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes.  These aren’t “contempt of court”.  If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.

And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases.  Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.  The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).

The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends.  How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?

By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want.  But they don’t want.  They want power and that means Trump’s scalp.  This isn’t about the truth.  It’s about naked, raw power.

In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information.  Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing.  Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name.  Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters.  Go figure.

In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice.  Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life.  In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.

RogerG

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Neocons

Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Tucker Carlson on Fox News lately gave his audience another dose of his skepticism of American military “adventurism” – bashing our ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and future ones in places like Venezuela – and couldn’t resist another wack at his favorite whipping boy, “neocons”.  But what are “neocons”?  His definition appears to be a cartoon.

First, his variant of “neocons” has more to do with his need for a label to affix to advocates of something loosely called “nation-building”.  “Neocon” is readily available as it had most recently become the buzzword bogeyman for peacenik groups of the early 2000’s like Code Pink.  To understand Code’s orientation, they couldn’t have chosen a better word than “pink”.

Oh, Tucker’s no pinko.  He’s just got an antifa rendering of “neocon” implanted in his head, or Mick Jagger’s “My Sweet Neocon” on an endless loop.

That’s the cartoon translation of the term.  The reality is quite different.  To be blunt, neocons were liberal idealists of the 60’s who were mugged by the realities of the 70’s.  I’m old enough to remember it.

Many were part of JFK’s “best and brightest”, rolling up their sleeves to conquer society’s worst social problems.  Along came LBJ’s Great Society and within a decade things unraveled.  Crime, family breakdown, out-of-wedlock births, a drug epidemic, lifestyle diseases (AIDS, Hep C, Syphilis, Herpes), etc., hit the roof.

In the international arena, the hopes of “peaceful coexistence” with the Soviets, welfare for the Third World (foreign aid and the Peace Corps), bountiful negotiations, and UN-love were dashed by a Soviet arms buildup, Soviet/Cuban adventurism, the UN General Assembly’s descent into demagoguery, the fall of Saigon, and the frantic attempt by populations to escape the ravages of communism’s advance.  Remember the Boat People and the Killing Fields?

A Cambodian man walks past one of the many killing fields sites.
A group of boat people escaping Vietnam aboard their sea vessel, 1978 or 1979.

On the intellectual side, a grand rethink began. Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground”, James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows”, George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty”, Charles Krauthammer’s writings, and publications like Commentary Magazine laid out the devastation and what to do about it.  In a nutshell, they advocated a return to older values and institutions.  Sounds like the “con” part of “neocons”.

Internationally, these ex-liberals realized that John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” wasn’t a mature foreign policy.  They pressed for a military build up and a stance against the communists and other anti-American actors who would turn the world into their personal playground.  No more American self-doubt.  Sounds like Reaganism … and it is.

Ronald Reagan delivers his historic speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987.

There’s something to be learned from all of this.  Don’t let cable news personalities be your sole window to the world.  Sometimes they get it horribly wrong.

RogerG