Conservative Hypocrisy on Iran
Like most Americans, conservatives have expressed outrage over the murder of Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan (here is one example among many). But how seriously can we take this outrage when many of them have advocated policies, up to and including American invasion of Iran, that would kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians? Let’s say McCain had won the election and made good on his promise to “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” and Neda had been killed by an American “smart” bomb. She would go unmourned and unremarked in America because then she’d be just another bit of “acceptable” collateral damage. If they truly care about the Iranian people, they shouldn’t have rooted for their destruction by the thousands for the past eight years.
As Adam Horowitz notes, while the U.S. cheers on Iranians fighting a government that makes its points with billy clubs instead of persuasion, it does the exact opposite when it comes to Palestinians.
Iranian Intifada
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/06/iranian-intifada-is-celebrated-in-the-us-while-palestinians-are-still-ignored.html
Truth from a conservative publication? How unheard of. The American Conservative?…Sounds a little fishy. Let’s dig a little deeper. What has ever happened now, that the truth in any form can if ever modestly see the light of day in a purportedly ‘conservative’ magazine? Could we be witnessing, from deep within the fossilized conservative psyche, the extreme manifestation of a desperate effort at regrouping in the wake of the abysmal failure of conservative ideology in our time at the grass roots level and at the election polls? Hmn… who knows what shennanigans these good folks might be up to now that they are bent on embracing the truth in any form. We will just have to wait and see. I can’t say I didn’t halfheartedly hope this day would come.. Lordy, lordy.
QED, anyone? I did suspect something mystifying was going on here, and just came across ‘The American
Conservative Crackup. Why I quit Pat Buchanan’s magazine’, by Alexander Konetzki online, from the Washington Monthly (May 2007). Quite sobering reading of the actual conservative pedigree of ‘The American Conservative’.
Can there be anything left to say but, “Oh, drat!”?
R. Oliver,
About what on God’s green earth are you babbling?
Konetzki is a self-described progressive and something of a blowhard, as is quite obvious both from his own writing and comments others have made in response thereto.
If I accurately make any sense of your ranting, you seem to be surprised that someone from the conservative movement, now in the wake of its obvious self-destruction, is proffering any sort of truth. The problem with this tirade of yours is that, as Konetzki himself noted, TAC has never been part of the “conservative movement”, but always on the outside.
It seems that Kara Hopkins is nothing more, nothing less than the stereotypical wool-dyed neanderthal conservative, the only kind we all know and love so well, congenitally incapable of anything but the outrageous disregard for the truth, the vulgar cronyism and the objectionable, unethical mistreatment which Mr. Konetzki so eloquently describes in his article as having been subjected to at TAC.
The term ‘conservative hypocrisy’ is thi very paradigm of semantic redundancy as conservatism itself is intellectual hypocrisy. It has been a signal displeasure to talk shop with you, sir.
Mr Oliver,
Notwithstanding the dense prolixity and snideness wherewith you responded to me, you have said absolutely nothing here, except for half-truths.
Nothing in Mr. Konetzki’s post suggests that he endured “objectionable, unethical mistreatment”, particularly at Kara’s hands. Though I’ve met her only briefly, I’m rather sure that she’s no “stereotypical wool-dyed neanderthal conservative”; Alexander’s piece explicitly tells us otherwise.
Around which part of the following were you incapable of wrapping your feeble mind?
“As a Daughter of the American Revolution whose ancestors sailed to Plymouth Colony aboard the Mayflower, Kara is deeply patriotic and, like Scott, skeptical of government—sort of a modern, feminist Edmund Burke. She’s a devout Protestant, but she doesn’t wear her faith on her sleeve at the office. She considers abortion the sacrifice of innocent life, but feels the same way about the Iraq War, and she seems much more willing to rally with anti-warriors than pro-lifers.”
Given the complete vapidity of your closing lines, that your are so intrinsically incapable of analyzing Konetzki’s self-pity–drenched tirade is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, more charitable, I venture, than you, I rather enjoy this shop-talking.
Cheers.
My good man, get a life somewhere.
Alas, I am bested!
We all have a degree of pettiness to expiate, Mr. Origer. I bid you Godspeed.
I thank you kindly, Mr. Pot.