Neo-Cons: Abbreviation for Neo-Conservatives; aka Kristolites, after their ideological mentor, Irving Kristol. A quarter-century-old political movement made up of a willing coalition of disillusioned Kennedy-Johnson Democrats, smarter-than-thou Eastern intellectuals, and unregenerate Wilsonian imperialists.

Theo-Cons: Abbreviation for Theocrat-Conservatives; aka True Believers, Holy Rollers. A quarter-century-old political movement made up of a sanctimonious coalition of disillusioned Jimmy Carter Democrats, holier-than-thou televangelists, and unregenerate anti-Darwinians.

GOP: Abbreviation for Grand Old Party; aka the Republican Party. A major American political movement onc　 e characterized by secular conservative policies favoring decentralized federal government, free-market economics, fiscal restraint, and a restrictive view of presidential power to commit American lives and resources to foreign military ventures. Born Ripon, WI, 1856; died Washington D.C., circa 2001-2006 (though a party by that name, principally operated by Neo-Cons and Theo-Cons, continues to appear on the ballots of fifty states and the District of Columbia).


What forty-and-under readers need to know is that until recent years the Republican party was anything but the party of war hawks. National defense hawks, yes: President Eisenhower’s cautionary words about "the military-industrial complex" have largely been ignored by GOP lawmakers whenever the Pentagon comes calling. But as to committing American troops to battle overseas, until George H. W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 1991, no Republican president since William McKinley in 1893 had initiated a war; nor, until Richard Nixon in 1969, had any Republican president opted to carry on a war initiated by a Democratic president.

The conservative view, tracing back to a Republican Senate’s rejection of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations treaty in 1919, is that even if George Washington’s warning against ‘foreign entanglements" is impracticable in today’s world, the Wilsonian vision of the United States as peace-keeper for the planet is the road to imperial ruin and war without end.

That view, as we know, runs counter to the version of history laid out by patellar Liberal pedagogues Arthur Schlesinger (both Senior and Junior) who hold that but for "a little group of willful men" blocking Senate approval of the League, world peace and harmony would have reigned through the 20^th century, the "willful group," as Wilson described them, being Senate Republicans led by Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge.

So goes the politically correct line Americans have been taught from grade school through graduate school since the mid1920s. But Lodge, as World War I historian Thomas Fleming tells us in The Illusion of Victory, was "willful" onl　 y in that he held to a "conservative philosophy rooted in the Constitution," which led him to object to a treaty that would "oblige the United States to fight foreign wars at the behest of the League of Nations."


Excerpt of debate between John Yoo, former Justice Department legal counsel, and Professor Douglas Cassel, Notre Dame Law School, December 1, 2006:

Cassel: If the President deems that the he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there’s no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law of Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he can do that.

Meet John Yoo, architect of the legal framework used by Alberto Gonzales when he went before Congress to justify warrantless wiretaps and by Dick Cheny when he posits the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to prisoners in the war on terror.

A Korean American whose parents emigrated to the United States when he was three months old, Yoo, with his Harvard-Yale law pedigree and grounded view of an all-powerful Chief Executive, would have been a perfect fit for a White House slot during the Kennedy-Johnson years. As it was, arriving in Washington forty years later, he would find a comfortable niche as the Neo-Con authority on bugging and torture in the Bush-Cheney administration.

It was the forty-year-old Yoo, then serving as counsel in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, who wrote the post-9/11 memorandum assuring the White House that "the president’s broad military power to use military force to defend the nation . . . would allow [him] to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to preempt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters" (emphasis supplied).

Repeat: whatever actions he deems appropriate . . . and there you have it, robust as even a Dick Cheney could ask for, Article 48 translated from the German; an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, as Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor scathingly noted, that makes "a state of war a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens."

Blank check; yes, that’s exactly what John Yoo intended. The fact that Sandra Day O’Connor proved to be soft on terrorism merely shows how right Yoo’s professed intellectual idol Robert Bork is when he says our courts need a purgative and the country as a whole is slouching toward Gomorrah.


Two questions come to mind: First, unless six years of Bush-Cheneyism have Orwellized the word to mean its exact opposite, how does an authoritarian advocate of one　 -man rule come to call himself a conservative? The idea of a limited, rather than a "robust" executive authority—a principle rooted in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers—lies at the heart of modern conservatism, dating back to the Roosevelt '30s.

Second, has it occurred to others who call themselves conservative and yet support the Cheney-Yoo notion of unlimited presidential authority that the powers assumed by this administration will automatically transfer to the next? Or has the possibility of a President Hillary operating as a "strong, robust" executive never crossed their "conservative" mind?


SOURCE:
Victor Gold
Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP
Sourcebooks, Inc. 2007