Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States “on the right side of history.” ~Roger Cohen

Has ‘neocon’ really become such a thing?  He says it is used to describe Paul Berman et al., but when did this happen?  Examples would be useful at this point, and Cohen provides none.  There may some people who use the term indifferently these days to mean “crazy militarist,” but then they are actually making more sense than they realise.  On foreign policy, especially when it comes to the Near East and Russia, the differences between Tomasky’s “mainstream liberals,” liberal interventionists and neoconservatives are far more of degree than kind.  

Here’s Tomasky:

We recognized further the difference between a comparatively low-risk air war, as in Kosovo, and the far more momentous decision to commit 140,000 troops to the ground, and we understood that the latter was not to be undertaken lightly (especially when the top military man in the country was saying we’d need at least 300,000 soldiers to do the job).  

Kosovo was, in his words, a “proper, balanced and admirable” kind of intervention.  Proper and balanced, it would seem, because that aggressive war posed few risks to us.  Why it was admirable will always remain a mystery.

The neocon taste for American empire is not the liberal hawk’s belief in the bond between American power and freedom’s progress. ~Roger Cohen

But the neocon “taste for American empire” (a characterisation that many neoconservatives would, of course, actually vehemently reject) is bound up with their equally ideological belief in “the bond between American power and freedom’s progress.”  Neocons were once “liberals mugged by reality,” but now they are people who would like to mug reality–and strafe it and bomb it–in the name of liberalism (broadly defined).  They don’t prattle about democracy and liberal revolution for their health–they actually think that our hegemony and other peoples’ freedom are compatible.  No, really!  One thing both groups do have in common is that they are profoundly, impressively wrong.

(Needless to say, I completely reject the idea that there was something high-minded or noble about the interventions of the ’90s.  Low-risk imperialism is no less morally repugnant.)

Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply U.S. power to Israel’s benefit. ~Roger Cohen

It has nothing to do with conspiracies, but, in point of fact, prominent people who still call or have called themselves neoconservatives have said that we should exploit Iraq’s oil (it was going to pay for the war and reconstruction, remember?), bomb Iran (see Norman “I hope and pray that we will bomb Iran” Podhoretz) and apply U.S. power to Israel’s benefit (“This is our war, too,” said Kristol the Lesser of Lebanon).  The thing is that these are compliments to such people, which is why it never ceases to amaze me that they become offended when it is pointed out that this is what they support.

I suppose it would be taking the latest Coulter book a bit too seriously if I pointed out that women’s suffrage in virtually every Western country was initially quite favourable to parties of the center-right and helpful for conservative politics generally.  This came as something of a surprise to some of the progressives who had pushed for women’s suffrage, evidently failing to notice that there were a great many women who actually held views that put them on the right.  Even today, the GOP, which I suppose still has to count as our center-right party, typically wins among married women and loses among unmarried women.  The reasons for this really should be plain already, and I have already spent too much time on this.

Fallows, who knows more about Burma and China than most, wrote in his PostGlobal piece on the idea of an Olympic boycott over Burma:

I am constantly amazed, and I think most Americans here feel the same, by how little overt anti-Americanism I encounter in China. (Japanese expats here might tell a different story.) But those who were here when the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade say that the rage against Americans then was physically frightening. All at once the mood turned angrily hostile. (I have not met anyone in China who thinks that bombing was an “accident.”) The potential for nationalistic reaction against “disrespect” toward China is great. Again, the point: the prevailing outlook by average Chinese toward Americans seems positive, and about the only thing that could change it would be something perceived as a slap at national dignity.

This makes a lot of sense.  It makes even more sense when you consider that Chinese nationalism is already probably going to be rising as the Olympics approach.  This has happened before at previous Olympic Games, the most infamous of which was actually the first Olympiad held in Athens, which was followed shortly afterwards by a reckless irredentist war on behalf of the Cretans that Greece lost.  More to the point, an American boycott of the Beijing Olympics would be exactly as effective as the boycott against the ’80 Games was, which is to say not at all, and would have even less of a justification. 

Boycotting the Moscow Games was meaningless moral preening in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan, a perfect example of the futility of U.S. foreign policy under Carter, but at least you could understand it as a protest.  It’s not at all clear what message a boycott sends this time.  It will amount to saying: “Hey, China, we know that you can’t fully control this military dictatorship in Burma, but we’re going to punish you anyway to feel better about ourselves!”  Indeed, that’s usually all boycotts and sanctions are ever good for–the self-satisfaction of having made a gesture.  In the real world, they usually either provoke the target regime to worse behaviour or exacerbate poor material conditions for the people. 

We saw how irrationally our own people behaved when allies refused to join in an aggressive invasion of another country–imagine how we would respond nowadays if someone boycotted an Olympics hosted here, and then cube that.  That gives you an idea of how foolish and counterproductive a boycott would be.

Here’s something on the lighter side.

The Republicans have bigger problems than an insane-looking convention logo.  My home state’s senior Senator, Pete Domenici, who was a sure thing for re-election, is preparing to announce his retirement.  By doing this, he has thrown open another Senate seat and probably given the Democrats the inside track on picking up four seats without their having to break a sweat.  Throw in probable losses in New Hampshire and Minnesota (it can’t help Norm Coleman that the crazy blue elephant will be plastered all over Minneapolis next summer), and a tough race in Oregon, and it will be a very bad scenario for them even without the possibility of Democratic presidential success.  Losing 5+ Senate seats in back-to-back elections is pretty much unheard of.

The disappointment with Thompson is growing.  Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator refers to his campaign’s offerings as “a themeless pudding” and goes on to say about Fred’s campaign style:

Platitude follows upon platitude upon platitude, until you start to give the sense that you’re a creature that would look utterly ungainly if you tried to actually implement real policies — a platitudinous platypus, perhaps, unsure if you actually have the right equipment to swim in the rough political waters.

“On prosperity, I have a real novel approach, a real creative approach,” he [Thompson] said in Coralville the other night. “Let’s continue doing what works and quit doing what doesn’t work in this country. Tax cuts work.” ~The New York Times

Maybe he was being ironic.  It wasn’t “creative” or “novel”–it was the tried and true methods of yore!  Good one, Fred!  It was probably hard for the audience to tell, since half of them must have been asleep by this point.  Read the whole article to get a sense of the “magic” of Fred Thompson on the stump.

Thompson wasn’t done:

Turning to what he said would be a second priority of a Thompson administration, he said, “High, high, high on our lists of concerns for anybody who would think about becoming president of the United States is the security of this nation.”

One might even call it a “top” priority.  There are multiple lists of concerns?

As an early anti-Thompson blogger, I have to say I never expected Thompson to be so very dull in his campaigning.  I assumed that he would argue for policies I didn’t support, and he was probably going to reprise his preposterous role as the good ol’ boy who is just one of the guys, but I don’t think anyone fully realised that the “laziness” rap against him would mean that he was also going to be so unenthusiastic about his campaign while he is speaking to a crowd.  The Thompson boom never made any sense.  It hadn’t occurred to me that it would all unravel this quickly.

Also, he seems to be in denial about how poorly he has done since announcing:

He bristled at the notion that his campaign had had anything but a strong beginning. And he suggested that “the pundits” were holding him to a tougher standard than his opponents because, he said, he was defying the rules by getting in so late.

Yes, those lousy pundits!  How dare they expect candidates to know things and be able to speak about them!  They even want to see policy positions–who do they think they are?  It’s an outrage, and we shouldn’t have to put up with this uncivilised pestering of our noble candidates any longer.

Maybe he really does think he’s the new Reagan, and we’re living in the ’80s again:

Still, Mr. Thompson at times seems to be looking for his sea legs. In an interview with Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa on Wednesday, in talking about Iran, he referred to the “Soviet Union and China.”