WaPo: Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy

[unschooler]

At a moment when his conservative coalition is already under strain over domestic policy, President Bush is facing a new and swiftly building backlash on the right over his handling of foreign affairs.

(snip)

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a bid for president, called the administration's latest moves abroad a form of appeasement. "We have accepted the lawyer-diplomatic fantasy that talking while North Korea builds bombs and missiles and talking while the Iranians build bombs and missiles is progress," he said in an interview. "Is the next stage for Condi to go dancing with Kim Jong Il?" he asked, referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the North Korean leader.

(snip)

Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan administration arms-control official who is close to Vice President Cheney, said he believes foreign policy innovation for White House ended with Bush's second inaugural address, a call to spread democracy throughout the world.

(snip)

Bill Kristol and colleagues associated with his Weekly Standard have been agitating for several years about what they see as inadequate troop levels in Iraq, an incompetently managed war effort and a failure to move aggressively enough to defeat the insurgency.

(more)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801373_pf.html

[Hekate]

1. Poetic justice would be a Repub revolt with torches & pitchforks...

...at the WH gates.

But I'll settle for the Repub pols tearing at each other in a feeding frenzy like the sharks they are.

I'll take butter and salt with that. :popcorn:

Hekate

[whistle]

2. What foreign policy is than? PNAC, that's what...

...the neo-conservatives are delighted, those followers and corrupters of the Leo Strauss idea of political philosophy.

<snip>
Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

By Jim Lobe, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2003.

Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.
<.....>
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.

Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.
<.....>
Rule One: Deception

It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."

This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (St. Martin's 1999).
<more>
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/

[rfranklin]

3. Sounds like the Nazi philosophy of governance...

How the hell can you have respect for democracy and total contempt for the electorate?

[whistle]

4. According to Straussian rules, the electorate are nothing but the

...ignorant masses who are to be kept from the truth for their own good. It is all quite noble in principle, totally corrupt in its application. Straussians are just a pack of greedy thugs who wear the deceptive cloak of nobel high purpose while they grab as much as they can for themselves. They are like jackals with voice boxes. Smell like jackals as well, that rotting smell of putrid corruption. Visualize that and it is easy to understand how Straussians have total contempt for the electorate.

[Kellanved]

8. Actually it is

One of the very few valid Nazi links:
Leo Strauss was a student of Carl Schmitt, the high law scholar and intellectual quartermaster of the third reich.

[C_U_L8R]

5. If conservatives had brains

they'd be angry about a lot more than the republican foreign policy.

WAKE UP AND START THINKING FOR YOURSELVES !!! geez !!!!

[BOSSHOG]

6. He's not killing enough people or destroying enough property

The brilliant minds and the shallow think tanks of the right wing want more destruction and blood shed and bush just ain't providing. Obviously there is someone near the inner circle who is talking something akin to restraint, like, we can't afford another war front.

[unschooler]

7. And apparently not spending enough of the taxpayers' money.

Sheesh! You'd think anyone calling himself a "conservative" would be annoyed by the pricetag of this disaster, but the neocons just want him to send more troops, invade more countries, spend and kill, spend and kill.