NeoCons' Greatest Weakness

In reading the various of writings of what passes for an intellectual elite among conservatives and neo-cons, it becomes obvious that they are a frightened minority in the country. They want what they want, oh so badly, but, because, it is so antithetical to everything this country stands for, and to what a majority of the country aspires, they can never state what they truly wish, only what they oppose or, at best, propose intermediate steps that seem innocuous. This leads to them having to work in half-steps and code, and, while masking their aims from the public, it often leads to miscommunication (compounded by their allies incomeptence) amongst themselves.

This cycles back to the media, and their current posture of sucking up to everything, however egregious, spouted by the conservatives (speak no truth to power?) and jumping anything out of line from the liberal side. For the public to decide among the various ideologies and programs present to them by the various sides (the monolithic(ish) conservative line and the 2,482 lines propounded by the left), the public must know the truth about them, and the media long ago abandoned truth for propaganda and gossip.

Glenn Greenwald, having healthily survived his migration to SALON, lays into neoconish shadow speak. Well worth the read.

Many neoconservatives lack the courage of their convictions this way about many topics -- they hint at their extremist ideas without having the courage or honesty to expressly state them. That practice is consistent with the founding principles of neoconservative theory. Neoconservatism does not believe in the virtues of democratic debate, but instead views itself as the vanguard of a superior elite which formulates wise policy in secret and then deceitfully packages it in digestible Manichean form to the idiot masses (that is how we travel from a long-standing, pre-9/11 desire to invade Iraq for all sorts of geopolitical reasons to a marketing product "justifying" that invasion based on the claim that 9/11 Changed Everything, Saddam was connected to those attacks, he would give his Bad Weapons to the Terrorists, and Freedom is On The March).

This sort of intellectual cowardice and deceit is illustrated by another example. Several days ago, Mark Levin, writing at National Review, complained about a New York Times article reporting on U.S. actions against Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, claiming that the Times "gives up more of our strategic secrets." After excerpting part of the article, Levin -- following the "kill-the-traitor" code which Frank Gaffney has been urging -- concluded as follows:

Oh, do I long for the good old days when Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, punished such acts of betrayal. And no, I am not joking. This is a wholly gratuitous assault on our national security by the reckless Times corporate management. There is simply no public interest in disclosing any of it. For all the liberal talk about the need to build coalitions and work more closely with other countries, when we do the Times and media outlets like it are the first to try to destroy those relationships. The Washington Post did the same with black sites in Europe.

As usual for neoconservatives, Levin is brave enough only to talk in code. He "longs" for the day when our government "punished such acts of betrayal" -- by the Times and Dana Priest of the Post -- but he stops short of specifying what he means. What punishment would he like to see, and against whom?

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The fact that an idea is radical or held by a tiny fringe does not prove that it is wrong. But when advocates of such ideas are too afraid to express their ideas honestly and out in the open, that is a pretty compelling sign that even they know how rancid and repugnant those ideas are.