Conservative Donnybrook

I have posted a working definition of neoconservatism.

I tried to be as objective as I know how to be.

Now I will stop holding my nose and tell you what I really think. Neoconservatism is a philosophy grounded in Marxism. (The founders of neoconservatism were formerly committed radical leftists.) It retains Trotskyite allegiance to the State as the ultimate authority. (God is the state, the state is God.) Continue Reading »

I ran across this article in the New York Times this morning. According to this report, China is yanking the export licenses of 750 toy manufacturers in response to a growing problem with safety issues. In the past few weeks, it seems that there is a new toy recall due to health hazards stemming from lax regulation of the Chinese manufacturing industry.

This comes in the wake of a number of toy recalls in recent months. According to this report in the New York Times, in the past year Chinese products have been recalled 467 times, accounting for 6o percent of all product recalls in the United States. Examples include Thomas & Friends railroad toys coated in lead paint, a fake eyeball toy filled with kerosene, toy drums and a toy bear that were coated in lead paint, and an infant wrist rattle which presented a choking hazard. Chinese imports account for 70-80 percent of all toy sales in the United States. Continue Reading »

Neoconservatism is an American political philosophy espousing some tenets of traditional conservatism which introduces, or carries over, several distinctions derived from various Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies. 

Neoconservatives tend to be fairly committed to restrictions on abortion, opposed to redefinition of marriage to recognize the validity of homosexual unions, in favor of unrestricted ownership of firearms, etc. These beliefs are shared with other conservatives. 

Neoconservatives are not opposed to government expansion in principle, although they may selectively oppose certain instances of it. They see bureaucracy as a natural development of governance, especially on as grand a scale as a nation the size of the United States, and therefore do not seek to hinder its growth. They are statists.

Neoconservatism advocates an interventionist, aggressive foreign policy. Central to this is the doctrine of American exceptionalism. Neoconservatives view America as one of, if not the only, remaining superpowers with a concomitant responsibility to act to resolve crises and support perceived national interests.

At the outset of the Iraq war I, like many conservatives who supported the invasion, felt that Iran should be next on the to do list. Four years on in Iraq and I still believe our actions there were warranted and necessary. Our best intelligence at the time told us, and had been telling us even through the Clinton years, that Iraq was a threat to possess weapons of mass destruction. We made a decision based on our best intelligence. How else can serious foreign policy decisions be made if not utilizing intelligence?

The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found does not bother me for two major reasons. First, the attacks of September 11th were acts of war that had to be answered by our country. Intelligence told us al-Queda was responsible and intelligence told us al-Queda was in Afghanistan and being strongly supported and trained by Iraq. So when we found training facilities, like the one found at Salman Pak (where among other terrible things, al-Queda terrorists were trained to hi-jack airplanes), all questions as to whether Iraq had definitive ties to al-Queda and to September 11th were answered. Second, Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer. The al-Anfal campaign alone claimed up to 200,000 lives in the north of Iraq. Who truly knows how many thousands more were murdered, including family members, under the orders of Hussein? These two taken together are more than enough justification for our actions in Iraq. Continue Reading »