VDH gets his history wrong: Neoconservatives? Let us be frank. This appellation is no longer a descriptive term of so-called “new conservatives,” those members of the eastern intelligentsia who were rather liberal on some domestic hot-button issues (tolerant of open borders, quiet about abortion, indifferent to gay marriage, etc.), but promoted a proactive neo-Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy (whether in the Balkans in taking out Milosevic or in trying to replace Saddam Hussein with democracy rather than a Shah-like proconsul).
Instead, face the ugly fact: “Neocon” is now a slur for “Jew.” General Zinni (who once boasted that 600 to 2,000 Iraqis were eliminated from the air in his Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign) is now ubiquitous on television hawking his new book, criticizing the war (on Memorial Day, no less), and being praised in the Arab news as he talks about “Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith” and all those who purportedly got us into Iraq.
That’s just bizarre. How does this make sense when Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are usually described as neocons, considering that none of them are Jewish? As for Zinni, he never made any reference to the ethnic or religious backgrounds of those he was criticizing. First Mowbray, now Goldberg and Hanson… National Review is running a serious risk of making itself a laughingstock on this issue.
Neocon is a slur for a fake conservative, Victor.