Sarah Palin: The End of the Affair
It now appears to be official that the neocons have turned on Sarah Palin, as illustrated by this exchange between Peter Wehner and Daniel Larison. Wehner, an old-line Straussian, is always a good weather vane for where the neocon party line is heading. Lately, he has been out in front tacking “moderate”, among the most vocal to repudiate Glenn Beck and now also warning against a government shut-down.
We should bear in mind that a week is a long time in politics. This week, it does indeed appear that the establishment will get its nominee yet again, but we shouldn’t assume by any means that Palin is down and out just yet. Back in 2009, when it was so confusing to see the neocons jump on the Tea Party bandwagon, I ultimately concluded that this is what it must have been like to see the Humphrey Democrats turn sharply against the Vietnam War in 1969.
If the neocons are in fact moving dramatically away from the Tea Party conceit and back to the moderate conceit, it is an incredible testament to their abilities to stick with a party line. Yet that can’t be the whole story. Bill Kristol, having been one part Henry Higgins and two parts Lenin in the rise of Sarah Palin, has yet to make his move. At a minimum, we can assume that Kristol’s core operatives such as Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb will be with Palin for the long haul.
This may or may not mean that there is a serious rupture in the neocon ranks. I have long believed that the reason David Frum has been so stubborn in his domestic heterodoxy of late, while also being as stubborn as ever on foreign policy, is because, given his family background among other things, he cares far more deeply about Israel than an operator like Kristol, and therefore knows what a disaster it would be for Sarah Palin to become the face of support for Israel in American politics. We already know that others, notably David Brooks, were aghast at what Kristol was cooking up through her from the beginning.
It would not be surprising if the realization of a looming disaster has now spread far more widely in the neocon ranks. At the very least, their increasing anxiety about the weakness of the Republican field shows how much their panicking now that they’ve made their bed.
“Yet that can’t be the whole story. Bill Kristol, having been one part Henry Higgins and two parts Lenin in the rise of Sarah Palin, has yet to make his move. ”
Succinctly put.
Incidentally, she’s off on the obligatory pilgrimage-cum-kowtow to Israel. Can’t be President ’til the bodysnatchers get a close look at you.
This kind of “article” would never be written about any other politician.
It just proves the opposite of what you claim to believe.
Republican Presidential politics aside, it is important to identify all the players here, what their real agendas are, and where the ‘average’ person regardless of formal religious affiliation or political sympathies fits into that world.
The neocons believe they are a tribal and intellectual elite who know things we mere peons to not, and are entitled to rule and deceive in order to realize their vision. Fundamentalist rapture ‘Christians’ are useful idiots to these people, and any apparent ‘shifts’ in doctrine are simply telling the rubes what they want to hear in order to win.
The Palin types are hoping for the world to end so they will be saved, and support the neocon line because they believe it leads to the fulfillment of end-times prophecies. The ironic notion that a benevolent, loving, all-powerful Creator of the universe needs such people to manipulate geopolitics in a destructive way in order to achieve His will is, sadly, lost on them.
The missing third party is the boogeyman for the two prior entries, in the form of the dark Twelver Shiite Iranian Muslim, who awaits a sort-of Jesus to start a sort-of Apocalypse so there can be a sort-of Rapture. In other words, a third class of paranoid schizophrenia with marked delusions of grandeur and megalomania.
And what is the role for the rest of us, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jew, leaning to the left or the right on policy foreign or domestic? We are the nameless, countless extras in this surrealist DeMille move, inundated, engulfed, incinerated, doomed, damned, and otherwise left behind in the final climactic wargasm. Lovely.
That any such believers are treated in any way other than being mentally ill is ludicrous.
But Palin has just parachuted into Israel. I have to wonder if she`ll be brainwashed into becoming a reliable mouthpiece for the AIPAC lobby, or as Pat Buchanan once put it, their “Amen Corner”. The US has never fought 3 simultaneous Wars before; I wonder how long before Palin follows the neo-con line in calling for yet a 4th, unfunded War — this one in Iran!
How interesting it is for us “caveman non-thinkers” to observe your worldview, where the politicians, and the media, are entirely responsible for shaping public opinion.
Where smart guys such as yourself should be given the right to borrow money from our grandchildren, to support “objective news” from SOROS-controlled “National Public Radio”, to support putting pictures of Jesus and Mary upside down in a glass of urine, and that repudiating Glenn Beck (with SOROS money) is the highest calling of a “moderate thinker”.
Old English saying: Oh wad power, the gift ta gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us…
The Tea Party in Israel? This has to be Palin’s attempt to con her bigoted Evangelical followers for votes in 2012. Read more @imeanwhat http://bit.ly/hY7pFD
Sarah Palin is no NeoCon – I’ve campaigned or was a delegate for Pat Buchanan in ’92, ’96, ’00 and Ron Paul in 2008. Being that Buchanan basically coined the NeoCon terminology I think I know who is and isn’t. Kristol threw in his hat for Palin in 2008 for one reason and only one reason, to create a new Dan Quayle, then destroy just like in the past. Didn’t work, Sarah is the biggest threat to the NeoCon establishment bar none. She recently dumped Randy Scheunemann, her last connection to McCain in favor of non-interventionist Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
So Jack Ross’s theory is done. What say you, Jack?
YES SHE WILL. Palin 2012