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Opinions/Editorials Title: Neoconservatism - The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel I got an e-mail the other day from one of my readers. He wanted to tell me that radio talker Mark Levin had been trashing me the night before on WABC. The reader suggested I call up the program on the internet and give it a listen. “I’ll have my dog listen,” I replied. “She’s the only one in the house who can hear that high-pitched voice.” My reader thought that was funny. It’s even funnier than he could imagine. There is, at the moment, a great debate raging between us traditional conservatives and the pretenders, such as Levin, who are known as “neo” conservatives. And somehow, I ended up in the middle of it. The debate centers on an article in the American Spectator by a certain Jeffrey Lord, who had a minor job in the Reagan administration that he seems to have parlayed into a career. The point of Lord’s screed was to prove that the small-government conservatives attracted to the presidential campaign of Texas Congressman Ron Paul are actually liberals, which is absurd, and anti-Semites, which is ludicrous. To that end, Lord cites an exchange between Paul and television entertainer Ben Stein, in which Paul calls for abandoning the idea of nation-building in the Mideast. Stein proceeds to accuse Paul of anti-Semitism. Paul demands an apology. Stein refuses to give him one. This proves Paul is an anti-Semite, at least according to Lord. Lord then proceeds to employ the example of my attacks on Levin as evidence of anti-Semitism: “There’s no need to expand on the obvious. But suffice to say, when a Paul supporter like Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine repeatedly zeros in on conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, always dismissing the Jewish Mr. Levin as a neocon this or a neocon that, to these Protestant ears, fairly or unfairly, Mulshine seems to be conjuring the ghosts of Ron Paul’s favorite, John T. Flynn.” Now, that is funny. Usually, when this sort of idiocy comes up, it is in the form of some reader, who — despite the fact that Mulshine falls in the phone book between such names as Mulrennan and Mulvaney — makes the mistaken assumption that I am Jewish and castigates me for pursuing the goals of the Elders of Zion. In fact, I’m as Irish as Paddy’s pig — and much better looking. But if I state, as I have on occasion, that Levin’s colleague, Sean Hannity, is as dumb as a Dublin doorknob, that does not make me anti-Irish. Similarly dismissing Levin as what he is — a high-pitched Howard Stern minus a sense of humor — does not mean I am denouncing Jewish people. It means I am denouncing stupid people. And you would have to be stupid to be sticking by what the neocons call “national greatness conservatism” long after the pursuit thereof has so clearly worked against the economic and foreign policy interests of the United States. I’ve been inveighing against neocon foreign policy for years. But it’s not because of ethnic prejudice. It’s because I have spent a lot of time studying asymmetrical warfare up close. In doing so, I learned the Golden Rule of Counterinsurgency Warfare: Be on the side of the insurgents. That was Ronald Reagan’s policy and it worked like a charm. He kept the commies on the defensive, while limiting our offense to military advisers behind the scenes. As for the aforementioned John T. Flynn, Lord tries to turn him into a lefty. In fact, he was a right-winger who believed that Woodrow Wilson had made a mistake getting us into World War I and that we should not make that mistake again in World War II. The American right held that view until Pearl Harbor. And as for candidate Paul, back in 2007, I got his home number from Murray Sabrin, the Ramapo College professor and longtime libertarian who is the son of a Jewish resistance fighter from Poland. When I used to call the congressman back then, I found him to be among the most dry and unemotional politicians I have ever interviewed. If such a man had addressed a brownshirt rally in Munich in the 1930s, those brownshirts might as well have been pajama tops. So dies the neocon movement — with neither a bang nor a whimper. Just a high-pitched squeal. MORE: Read about the supposedly anti-statist Levin's defense of socialized medicine here. Go to the bottom of it for my expose on how Hannity managed to adopt a Stalinist slogan with his "Enemy of the State" award. Go here for my piece on how Levin made the amazing assumption in his book that monarchy and feudalism are based on the idea of equality. COMMENTS: If you take people like Levin or Hannity seriously, please do not comment here. This blog is for conservatives and we have high standards. People who take talk radio seriously have the entire rest of the blogosphere in which to amuse themselves.
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