Bret Stephens and the neo-neocons

The New Neo Posted on by

It is often said that there is nothing new under the sun. Commenter “Steve G” proves it by helpfully pointing out a WSJ article by Bret Stephens in which the author coins the phrase (that is, he believes he coins the phrase): “neo-neocon.”

Stephens isn’t referring to me, of course. In fact, unless he’s a devoted reader of the Right side of the blogosphere, there’s no particular reason for him to know that I even exist (although Google would have gotten him there). He uses the term instead as a pejorative to refer to people who demand a level of righteousness from Hamid Karzai that they don’t require from other third world leaders:

In the matter of Hamid Karzai (this would be the feckless, warlord-backed, corruption-tainted and dubiously re-elected president of Afghanistan), it’s wonderful to observe how he has single-handedly created a new designation in the American ideological lexicon: the neo-neocon.

Who are the neo-neocons? They’re a bipartisan, single-issue group that has recently discovered the virtues””nay, the necessity””of clean, orderly, democratic governance.

Stephens goes on to excoriate the group he calls “neo-neocons”—on the Left, those who championed Arafat as Palestinian spokesperson; and on the Right, practitioners of morally neutral realpolitic. He himself leans more in the latter direction regarding Karzai; his problem with neo-neocons on the Right is that those who were in favor of the similarly compromised Musharraf but are critical of Karzai are inconsistent hypocritics.

Stephens goes on to say:

It is not Mr. Karzai’s fault that NATO insisted for years that the Afghan National Army be no larger than a constabulary force, leaving it in no position to join the battle against a resurgent Taliban. It is not his fault that foreign aid organizations consistently botched the delivery. Much less is it his fault that the former government of Pakistan essentially ceded its frontier provinces to the Taliban, which promptly turned them into havens of militancy.

None of this means that Mr. Karzai is a saint or even much of a statesman. But neither is he a despot, a fanatic, a sybarite, or an uncouth bigot””qualities that typify the leadership of countries for which the U.S. has also expended blood and treasure in defense of lesser causes. Our failures in Afghanistan so far have mainly been our own, and they are ours to fix.

That sounds quite reasonable to me. In Afghanistan, we are faced with the usual problems of nations that have little tradition of democracy and civil liberties, which also lack the educational levels that must go along with democracy if it is going to be anything other than an empty promise. I’ve written before about these choices, and the difficulty inherent in them (see this and this), and my conclusions actually somewhat resemble those of Stephens.

Karzai is no angel; it does appear that the elections in Afghanistan were seriously compromised. But remember that if Karzai is no angel, Afghanistan is a far cry from heaven. The real question is whether there are better alternatives available to the country at this point, and the answer appears to be “no.”

Dunn’s done

The New Neo Posted on by

Controversial White House Communications Director Anita Dunn—who was only in her position as an interim replacement anyway—is leaving the White House and going back to her previous job as partner in the consulting firm of Squier Knapp Dunn, while remaining an administration consultant.

Pity. Now who will Glenn Beck have to kick around? Somehow, I don’t think he’ll lack for candidates.

Widgets at rest

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ll be happy to hear that the Amazon widgets have reached what I hope will be their final form: stationery and unobtrusive.

There’s a plain Amazon search widget near the top of the sidebar, for the minimalists among you. Then, if you scroll down, you’ll find three larger ones, interspersed at intervals and containing recommendations. But these widgets won’t move, so they’ll no longer distract you nor give you headaches, although every now and then I may fiddle around with some of the selections.

A big thank you to all who have used them so far.

The rise of the Right

The New Neo Posted on by

Fareed Zakaria asks whether the Right’s star is rising around the world. Let’s hope so (and note, his piece appeared in Newsweek, which is not exactly National Review 2).

In it, Zakaria also offers a succinct summary of one of the most basic problems with health care reform as proposed by President Obama (I could quibble about his numbers or the urgency of the crisis, but his general point is well put):

There are two great health-care crises in America””one involving coverage and the other cost. The Obama plan appears likely to tackle the first but not the second. This is bad economics but also bad politics: the crisis of cost affects 85 percent of Americans, while the crisis of coverage affects about 15 percent. Obama’s message to the country appears to be “We have a dysfunctional health-care system with out-of-control costs, and let’s add 45 million people to it.”

While I’m recommending articles to read, there’s always Victor Davis Hanson. Here he imagines what Obama coulda, shoulda , woulda said, if he were a better president (sigh).

Spambot of the day: flattery may get you somewhere

The New Neo Posted on by

Fortunately, this blog has a pretty decent spam-blocker. So only a couple per week of the pesky little things escape its pincher grip to actually be deposited in the comments section.

They tend to rather resemble one another. But one that came through today had a certain extra je ne sais quoi:

Can you provide more information on this? So far the info in your post is awesome . In the mean while I think im gonna stick around and read about 2 of your posts.

I love the casualness of the “gonna”—nice touch, spambot!—as well as the odd specificity of the plan to read 2 posts, a precision negated by the wishy-washy qualifier “about.” Make up your mind, bot!

I thought I’d write a little post about spambots and how they use flattery as a technique to sucker us poor bloggers in. And then I realized that the whole thing had a familiar feel—and I discovered that yes, I’ve passed this way before. Back in my first months of blogging, I wrote a piece on the subject, and nothing much has changed, except the amount of time I have to give over to the task of weeding out the bots (fortunately, a lot less than it used to be). So rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s an only slightly edited version of the original:

For those of you who don’t know what spambots are, a spambot comment (or, to be technical, a UBS, an unsolicited bulk comment) is an automatically-generated message sent out to many blogs at a time and deposited, like little turdlike droppings, in the comments sections of blogs. Spambots masquerade as real people making real comments.

What is their purpose? To make money for somebody, in this case increasing Google rankings and/or persuading you to click on a link and thereby inflate the hit counter of a commercial blog, or a blog front, and maybe even order something (although that must be extra-rare).

The spambots are very friendly. Whoever designs the spambot programs know that we humans are suckers for praise. So the spambots give out a sentence or two that sounds enthusiastic and is apparently music to the ears of many a lonely blogger who’s been waiting in vain to receive a comment or two: “You’ve got a great blog here! I’ve bookmarked it. Hope you visit mine, http://lawnmowers.blogspot.com. It’s all about lawnmowers and other cool stuff like that.”

I once clicked on one of these spambot sites out of curiosity, despite knowing that the comment was spam and would probably lead me to a dummy site and make money for the spambot designers (my lips are sealed as to the URL of the site, but let’s just say the blog had something to do with recipes for a certain dessert). It consisted of two posts—that was the whole blog—each with a short list of recipes.

But that blog had a very active comments section. There were over fifty on one of the posts, as I recall. So it was clear that the spambot had achieved its aim of getting a fair number of people to the site (note how I’m anthropomorphizing the spambot; it’s hard not to do so, they seem so pesky and duplicitous). Quite a few of the commenters on the spam blog, however, were not pleased; they posted little messages on the order of “You effing a-hole spambot, get off my blog and never come back”

But a large number of the commenters seemed touchingly grateful. They said things like, “So glad you liked my blog! Come back soon. Thanks for the recipes.”

At first I thought these might be second-generation counter-spambots, like in some sci-fi movie, evolving to make war on the original spambots and kill them with kindness. But no, they seemed to be real people with real blogs, seduced by flattery into thinking that finally, finally, they’d found a grateful and appreciative reader in the spambot, which of course they took to be a real person.

I’m not meaning to mock these people. I well remember the times when I was getting a grand total of five readers a day on this blog—and three of them were me, because I didn’t know how to block my own IP address; and the other two had reached here in error. So I know what it’s like to plod away in isolation and hope to be discovered. But I like to think that even in those days a spambot wouldn’t have fooled me.

Important notice: if this blog ever goes down

The New Neo Posted on by

My blog’s been down for about an hour and a half—ye olde server problems. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen too often. But every now and then it does, and it can be quite frustrating.

I will be busy for a few hours right now, and I plan to post here later in the day or even tonight. But I wanted to take a moment just to mention that, if in the future you should ever find you can’t reach this blog for any significant amount of time, go to a back-up blog I set up a while back at http://backupneo.blogspot.com . I’ll be posting there in the interim if there are any significant problems here.

So, please make a note of that, just in case.

Crossing the health care reform bridge

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Steyn says it well:

If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.

That’s the reason that what happens next in the Senate is paramount. Yes, contact your Senators and let them know what you think. But does anyone really believe that most of them will be swayed by a write-in campaign from their constituents?

I don’t. A few undecided moderates perhaps, but only a few (if any). Nearly all the rest will vote Party line, and the real drama will be in what strategies Reid can devise to get past the problem of the filibuster (it’s unlikely there would be sixty votes because of Lieberman, and probably a few others). If Reid is creative enough and ruthless enough, he will do it, and the bill will pass.

Is Steyn correct that then there will be no going back? I fear he may be, but I’m not sure. It really depends on how dreadful the results of the bill are. If they’re bad enough, and an overwhelmingly Repubican Congress is elected as a result (and I mean overwhelmingly), repeal could happen.

But once this bill or something like it takes effect, the present system of private health care insurance and choice will over the next couple of years be essentially destroyed. Repeal of the bill would then require reconstruction of the private system in some new and (we can hope) improved fashion—rebuilding the burned bridge, to use Steyn’s metaphor.

Conservatives and moderates may not get that opportunity. And I’m not at all sure I would trust any Party in Congress to accomplish the feat in a competent manner. To use another metaphor—best to avoid making an omelet out of these particular eggs, because you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The deed is done: health care bill passes

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise here: the House has just passed the bill America doesn’t want. Now we will be treated to a bunch of self-congratulatory speeches, and then the real fight begins in the Senate.

I decided a few days ago that this was going to pass, and earlier today I wrote:

I suspect that Pelosi will manage to wrangle enough compromises and simultaneously threaten enough Blue Dogs that it will squeak by, giving the rest of them cover to vote “nay” once the requisite 218 “yays” are reached.

That appears to be more or less what happened; the final tally was 220 in favor and 215 against.

Before the 2008 election I was very worried about the possibility of a post-election government that would be undivided, with Congress firmly in Democratic control as well as a Democratic president. The American people were angry, and they wanted to show their displeasure for Bush and the Republicans.

Well, they sure showed them, didn’t they? And now the Democrats have shown the people what they think of them. Promises, promises—of transparency, bipartisanship, posting bills 72 hours before voting—all were merely hooks to haul in the gullible. After that, we’ve got promises, schmomises—it’s all about power.

[NOTE: I thought it might be a good idea to reprise part of a post I wrote on October 8, 2008, not long before last year’s election. Here an excerpt:

That brings to mind the sort of thing I’m most concerned about this election””what Democrats (or any one party) can do with power. It’s not so much the possibility of an Obama Presidency””although that would be bad enough””but the possibility of an Obama Presidency plus a Congress so strongly Democratic that it might even be filibuster-proof. That combination could do very serious damage indeed…

We are seeing that tonight, and if this bill does pass the Senate and become the law of the land I fear we will see much more of it, up close and personal. But there’s also this, from the same post:

One possible silver lining is that, if history repeats itself and Democrats get this sort of control again, it would also give them the disadvantage of having to own whatever they might do. Theoretically, at least. We saw in the recent bailout vote that even though Democrats had the majority and didn’t need the Republicans to pass the bill, they tried with some success to pin its initial failure to pass on Republican recalcitrance. But if the Democrat majority becomes even more overwhelming, that approach will become more difficult, and they will be forced to take responsibility for their actions or inactions, having no big bad Republicans or evil Presidents to blame.

The Democrats certainly own this one.]

[ADDENDUM: This is a day late and a dollar short, don’t you think?]

Your Permanent Record Card

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who are (like me) of a certain age may well remember the Permanent Record Cards of our youth.

Ah, the fear and trembling inherent in just hearing the threat: if you continue to [fill in the blank with some reprehensible behavior or other, like talking out of turn in class], it will go down on your Permanent Record Card!

And then, of course, your life will hardly be worth living. You will never go to college. You will never get a job. No one will ever love you, especially your parents. You will have to wear that mark of Cain on your forehead and that Scarlet Letter on your chest for life, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not be able to wash away the reeking stench of shame.

So my question is: where is it? You can get hold of your FBI files, and even your KGB and Stasi files, so why not those Permanent Record Cards?

Waiting for the miracle: health care “reform”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d planned a long post on what’s happening today, as the Pelosi Congress wheels and deals and tries to pass its gargantuan health care reform bill that, if implemented, would radically change this country in ways that promise to be very negative (and if even half of this is true, extremely negative).

I’ve only read bits and pieces of the approximately 2000-page bill. But most of what I’ve read, combined with most analyses of it that I’ve seen, have convinced me that this is—if not the “worst bill ever,” as the Wall Street Journal declared it the other day—then certainly one of the top contenders for that honor.

But really, is there that much more to say at this point? Virtually all of us here have been following this in some detail for a while. Now what we do is wait to see how the vote will go.

I suspect that Pelosi will manage to wrangle enough compromises and simultaneously threaten enough Blue Dogs that it will squeak by, giving the rest of them cover to vote “nay” once the requisite 218 “yays” are reached.

Then we’ll wait some more, while the Senate ponders its own bill, and perhaps stops this monstrous juggernaut and puts a more reasonable plan in place.

So I decided instead to write about waiting. We’re all waiting, and so is Nancy Pelosi. What follows are the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting For the Miracle,” rewritten in her voice (notice how little I had to change to make it fit).

Enjoy it—if you can:

WAITING FOR THE MIRACLE

People, I’ve been waiting,
I’ve been waiting
night and day.
I didn’t see the time,
I waited half my life away.
There were lots of conversations
and for sure I had me some,
but I was waiting
for health care reform,
for the miracle to come

I know you really hate it,
but, you see,
my hands were full.
I know it must have hurt you,
to have heard my load of bull,
to have to stand
beneath my window
with your placards
and your drum,
and me I’m up there waiting
for health care reform,
for the miracle to come.

Ah I don’t believe you’ll like it,
you won’t like the result.
We’ll lie to pass it quickly,
then you’ll watch as we exult.
The leaders say “just trust us,”
but if you did, you’re dumb,
when you’re waiting
for health care reform,
for the miracle to come

Waiting for the miracle,
there’s nothing left to do.
I haven’t been this happy
since the end of World War II.

Nothing left to do
when you know
that you’ve been taken.
Nothing left to do
when you’re begging for a crumb.
Nothing left to do
when you’ve got to go on waiting
waiting for the miracle to come.

And now, if you want to wash that bad taste out of your mouths, here’s the original: