Letters to the Editor
GlennGreenwald
Published Letters: 2095 Editor's Choice: 18
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Zack:
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What they’ve done is define “America” (and "Americanism") in terms support of Bush policies, so from their viewpoint anyone who disagrees with them is ultimately “anti-American.”
Yes, just as anti-Likudnik policies = "anti-Israel" and "anti-semitic."
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Dan D:
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush was effectively an empty vessel waiting for a few intellectuals to come fill him up. It was just a question of which right-wing ideologues got to him. It could just as easily have been the theoconservatives or the libertarians.
I don't really agree with that. Neoconservatism long ago decided to form an alliance with Christian evangelicals because the former's willingness to package their agenda in moralistic terms fits so perfectly with the latter's worldview. One of the key tenets of neoconservatism is that it always needs to figure out how to attach itself to prevailng power by molding its appearance to fit the biases and predispositions of leaders. As Irving Kristol wrote:
“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
One of the aspects of neoconservatism that makes it so uniquely pernicious is that it is consciously and deliberately deceitful. They see themselves as vanguards of an intellectually superior elite who have an entitlement -- even an obligation -- to use concepts for the lower masses (such as religion and morality) to manipulate them into passivity. As Drury notes (in the article to which I linked), that's just basic Marxism (religion as opiate of the masses), and these former Trotskyites simply converted those tactics into their new (really old, just slightly re-packaged) ideology.
I think there is a real question what would have happened - who would have had a claim to Bush's mindset - in the absence of 9/11. But 9/11 was the perfect tool for neocons to use to convince Bush that he had an evangelical calling to defend the forces of Good from the forces of Evil - and it just so happened that the "Forces of Evil" were the same list of countries and groups which neocons long wanted to exploit American power to attack and destroy.
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Unmask911:
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am the gentile CAMERA here to call BS on your mention of covert anti semitism. Get off it. Israel's behavior belies any such tired, mendacious attribution.
Learn how to read. When text is indented, it means someone is being quoted. The sentence that referes to "covert anti-Semitism" is Selzer's, not mine.
I know that, as a member of that tiny and elite club of those who Have Discovered The Single Hidden Truth That Explains Everything, you have special privileges, but attributing statements to people that they didn't make isn't one of them.
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David:
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's so funny how no commenter ever puts someone like "Unmask 911" in his place, when they regularly do just that when they disagree with comments posted here. And yet, people on the Left get all indignant when their side is accused of indulging anti-Semitism. Is there an honest commenter on this site willing to admit that there's a problem here?
I've done it many times and so have others here.
The difference is that Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb and all your other comrades meet regularly with the President and work in the highest levels of the White House.
People like "Unmask 911" meet with nobody but themselves and have no influence anywhere.
Therefore, the former merit much commentary, which the latter merits almost none.
Your comment is the same type of idiocy that tries to equate Ward Churchill and Ann Coulter even though nobody ever heard of the former while the latter sells millions of books to the followers of the political movement that runs the whole country.
Yeah, let's stop talking so much about neoconservatives and Dick Cheney and talk more about Unmask911.
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David:
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Coulter's success merits attacking her, but it doesn't negate the fact that anti-Semitic thought, and virulently anti-Israel sentiment perilously close to classic anti-Semitism, is today found among the Left and it seems to bother no one.
Who? Who specifically "on the Left" is anti-semitic, and what have they said to make you think that accusation is justified?
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Lisa:
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Who are these "right-wing Israeli groups" you reference in today's update? You ask him to identify all the supposed anti-Semites "on the Left" ( March 14, 2007 12:44:00 PM EDT), yet aren't your references are just as opaque?
I was extremely clear and specific in my references. As you acknowledged, AIPAC is one example. The right-wing Jewish ideologues at the American Enterprise Institute -- the Michael Ledeens and Michael Rubins -- are additional examples, as are Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard and various commentators at his father's magazine, Commentary, all of whom have, at one time or another, to varying degrees, called for war with Iran or more generally for militaristic posture towards Iran.
I have written many posts highlighting exactly whom I mean when I reference right-wing pro-Israeli factions. David, by contrast (like so many other like-minded comrades), constantly references supposed "anti-semitism" on "the left" without every identifying who they mean (or, when pressed, identifying totally obscure people for whom there is no evidence that they are even on the "Left," such as "Unsmask 9/11").