"The Attack of the Cheneys." The Nation, on what the neocons are up to....
A bit long, but thought provoking, I thought. Just a bit:
" ...It turns out, however, that being disastrously wrong on the most significant foreign policy questions of the era is no barrier to continued influence in American politics. Even though their bong-hit theories about transforming the Middle East at the point of an American gun retain about as much popular appeal as E. coli, the neocons continue to impact US foreign policy debates through an entrenched network of think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Hudson Institute), publications (The Weekly Standard, Commentary, National Review), supportive editorial boards (the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal) and, of course, Fox News.
With the continuing decline of the Scowcroftian realist faction of the GOP, there are currently no close competitors for control of Republican foreign policy, even though neocons are far from loved by conservative grassroots outside the Beltway. This much was clear at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where Liz performed her usual "stab in the back" act, accusing Obama of "usher[ing] Al Qaeda-trained terrorists onto American soil." The audience gobbled it down like chum--then went into a full-on frenzy when Liz introduced her dad. But despite the wild applause for the Cheneys, the big winner of CPAC's presidential straw poll (with one of the highest totals ever) was Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who represents a more populist-isolationist strain of conservatism and is a longtime critic of Dick Cheney and the neoconservative faction.
But while Paulite isolationists may disdain the role neocons play in the GOP, they lack the organizational tools to challenge it. A parallel can be drawn here to neoliberalism's control of Democratic economics. No matter how much inequality their theories generate, Robert Rubin's acolytes always seem to show up in positions of authority. "The problem for knowledgeable Republican foreign policy realists like Colin Powell, Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel is that the neocons are able to dismiss their concerns and policy recommendation as 'me-tooism' of the 'liberal' foreign policies of the Democratic Party," says Tom Shachtman, co-author of The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons From Nixon to Obama. Shachtman suggests that the neocons greatly benefit from the news media's tendency toward sensationalism. "Their far-out, deliberately argumentative and provocative stances are, they know, much more attractive to media outlets than the stances of the realists," Shachtman says. "The media's current mantra is, 'Let's you and him fight,' and so if a foreign policy moderate is reluctant to utter fighting words, any media outlet that is scrambling for ratings will find a neocon to do so."
