Yeah, that No Child Left Behind Act is sure an achievement.
Aren’t reporters supposed to, like, know things?

So, this is the new strategery? ‘Everything sucks and Bush is horrible because he is a Liberal! Next time we have to elect people even FURTHER to the Right and maybe they will only be half-as-Liberal as GWB.’

Aren’t we coming off years and years of hearing about what a great conservative Georgie is?

But Richard. It isn’t “liberal� to appoint minorities who suck at their jobs.

Bradrocket. Baby. Women are not, not, minorities. I trust I’ll only have to say this once.

am not suggesting that any of these appointees — including Bush’s former White House counsel, Harriet Miers — are what is pejoratively known as affirmative action hires.

No, they’re what is known as nepotism hires.

I am suggesting, though, that Bush has not only diversified his Cabinet and staff but obviously got enormous satisfaction in doing so.

The only reason he “got enormous satisfaction” from hiring those folks is because they were his buddies. Does this Richard Scrotum really believe that Bush would hire just any old qualified woman/Hispanic/African/American/homosexual/space alien? If so, then I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell him.

or his frequent mention of the “soft bigotry of low expectations� to appreciate that the president is a sentimental softie, what was once dismissively called a “mushy-headed liberal.�

Oh, pig’s fat arse. Bush is less liberal than Hitler, and probably a good deal less sentimental too. Especially with Hitler dead and all.

But if you don’t think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire, then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good — rid the world of a really bad guy and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region.

Dickie, baby, that was not a reason: that’s what we in the trade call an excuse. Something dreamed up after the fact when the chunks of “liberation rhetoric and body language” were well and truly swirling round the S-bend of this complete cockup of a war.

but it appealed to Bush and it showed in his rhetoric and body language.

Oh, puh-leeze. What Bush’s body language showed, more than anything, was that he got a weeny hardon from the unearned adulation that came his way after 9/11, and another from talkin’ tough. Put the two together, and the Doofus In Chief was sniggering to himself the whole time with his hand in his pants.

Of course, now that it’s plain to even single-celled life forms that the Iraq war is a complete tragedy, and that the Bush administration is a collection of lying, corrupt, incompetent sacks of shite, now, he’s putting on the fake sincerity and earnestness.

Which shows, clearly, that he’s cranky that people don’t love him any more, he’s scared that he’s gonna have to pay for what he’s done, and he just wants it to go back to the old days.

The whole mien, then, looks like someone with very bad haemarrhoids (damn, I can’t spell that fucking word) (and I don’t care).

Of course, the whole point about “neo-liberalism” was that it was all about reducing the role of the government…

Well, since QtA mentioned it…

Regarding the woman/minority thing, yes and no. Technically, yes, in the overall population number of industrialized nations, woman hold a small lead over men. Usually 1 or 2 percent.
However.
When you break down actual birth rates and the split of children, young adults, and the middle aged, you tend to find an almost even split, if not a 1 to 2 percent favoring of males to females.

This all changes thanks to the “over 65” demographic, for two major reasons. The first one being that woman average a 3 year longer life span then males, but also that males tend to be the ones killed off in major conflicts.* Those two influences combined are enough to create the illusion of a consistent favoring of females in the populace.

*In terms of percentages, by far one of the the hardest hit Allied nations in WWII was Australia, which lost something to the order of 30% of an entire generation of young males, creating a population stagnation that is still being felt today.

ummm…. that’s the problem when these two catchphrases (liberal, conservative) are used to define the opposite ends of the political spectrum. neo-conservatives truly are a subset of neoliberal ideology (or post-modern capitalism, or late-stage imperialism, whatever).
wolfowitz is a paragon of neoliberalism: before his tenure, teh world bank had overseen, in tandem with the imf and other transnational institutions, teh “structural readjustment programs” that have crippled nation states all over the South (sorry, da souf). is wolfowitz’s neoconservatism really an impediment to the continuation of this? (i mean, his horny incompetence was, but not his principled disagreements in policy) .

Basically I think this Cohen clown is just repeating that right wing propaganda line from last year about how “Bush is really a liberal” and therefore we right wingers can distance ourselves from him. The Editors had that propaganda line as a contestant in his “dumbest right wing blogging circle jerk of 2006” contest. Perhaps this is evidence of transmission of right wing blogger ideas to the mainstream?

I’d also like to mention that that article sounds like itwas written by a bored teenager.

“Contrast it to the position of the so-called foreign policy realists, exemplified by the first President Bush and his trusted foreign policy sidekick, Brent Scowcroft. It was their decision — cold realism at its best — to end the Persian Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power and not to intervene when Hussein later decimated rebellious Shiites in the south. Realistic? Sure. But also sickening.”

Fascinating — is encouraging people to revolt against Saddam and then not coming to their aid when they do so and Saddam surpresses them what passes for “realism” these days?

I have edited Richard’s first sentence so that it makes more sense.

Years ago, someone coined the term “wanker.â€? I was never sure what it meant, and it has since fallen into disuse, but whatever the case, I’d like to revive (and mangle) the term and apply it — brace yourself — to myself.

Stupid, stupid piece. However, I think Cohen was sickened by Bush I abandoning the Shiites. At least I was. Of course, based on how banal & vapid the rest of the article is, your read may be correct.

Speaking of percentages of men & women, I remember a conversation with a co-worker who thought women outnumbered men by 7 to 1. I don’t know whether he was living in a porn fantasy, didn’t understand ratios or was incredibly stupid. He was the company’s IT guy so it could’ve been some tragic combination of all three.

If Australia still has more women then men, I should head over there. Probably pretty easy to get laid. I hope my wife wouldn’t mind…

*In terms of percentages, by far one of the the hardest hit Allied nations in WWII was Australia, which lost something to the order of 30% of an entire generation of young males, creating a population stagnation that is still being felt today.

That was WW1. We were a bit more reluctant in WW2 to offer up our men to be squandered in some fat fool of a general’s board games.

It isn’t “liberal� to appoint minorities who suck at their jobs. And look at Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzales.

This made me smile. Everyone conservative knows Affirmative Action is really about hiring undeserving minorities who take jobs away from deserving whites. Bush just gave this discriminatory policy a flair by hiring undeserving minorities who do and say anything for him, and screw the public in the process.

I heard Richard Viguerie on TWO separate occassions on Air America put forth that “the problem with George Bush is that he governs like a Democrat.”

“Neoliberal” is a word used in other countries.

By “neoliberal,” people in, say Latin America, were describing those people we might describe as Milton Friedman-style “supply siders,” although really more than that.

So, in Latin American terms, “Liberal” was often used to refer back to 19th century and early 20th century philosophies that government should not regulate or hold back the Market, thus the “Liberal” meaning freeing the market from government restraints.

This was a disaster, and this philosophy went away in Latin America. For example, though there were also huge problems, Latin America’s greatest growth periods were when their governments were hugely intervening into the economy (Import Substitution Industrialization).

Thus the return of a bunch of lunatics preaching that in these poor, anti-developed countries, what really, really needed to happen was that they yield all their government authority over to Reaganite lunatic market fundamentalists.

This is also why so many people hate the World Bank and IMF, because these were used primarily as tools by the US and Western investors to force countries into destroying their economies to favor those aforesaid US and Western investors. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina destroyed the choke-hold of neoliberal, anti-development policies via the IMF & WB, Kirchner by abandoning the US-advised neoliberal policies and postponing debt repayment, Chavez by also abandoning those policies and supporting Argentina & Bolivia in leaving the WB / IMF controlled loan system.

“Neo-Liberal”: a return to the crazy market fundamentalist policies of yesteryear.

The good news is that the neoliberals have been rejected throughout nearly all of South America and much of Central America. Asia never played that game because they were able to avoid this US-backed insanity. Africa is still largely trapped in it or rebuild from the Reagan-era “Lost Decade” in which they too were forced into “Structural Adjustment Programs” which reversed the development of many of their nations.

No, Bush is not a conservative in the Benjamin Disraeli mold, but he’s the quintesential modern conservative: happy to intrude into private lives, but keeping their actions secret at all costs, hungry for power, winning elections through fear mongering and appeals to bigotry, idiotic good vs. evil foreign policy, screwing over minorities and the poor, giving over the U.S. Treasury to pirates under the guise of privitazation. I could go on. He’s a true conservative, all right.

Richard Cohen is an idiot, but you already knew that.

This part is hilarious:

Whether by design or not, Bush has also managed that feat. A female education secretary is one thing, but a national security adviser — the uber-macho post — is something else, and that went first to Condi Rice.

I mean, it would be one thing if he put a woman in charge of some sissy girly crap that no one cares about, like educating childen. But he gave command of our NATIONAL SECURITY…to a GIRL!

It’s always fun to check in and see what the libtartds have to say. As usual, you people are just full of useful info. Or full of something.

When was the last time “conservative” actually meant “reduce the size of government”? I’m pretty sure that was Barry Goldwater.

In my entire lifetime, “conservatives” have always been about “reduce taxes on the rich, reduce social welfare programs, and spend all our money on the military”. Oh, yeah, and “pander to the Moral Majority crowd” or “oppose abortion”, but that’s a later development.

I have never actually seen a true “conservative” in the definition used by Cohen, and I grew up in Arizona in the very shadow of Goldwater.

It’s clear this Cohen fella is a nitwit with the kind of incoherent mind the Bush administration would hire. Was he for or against the war that has wasted BILLIONS? I’m guessing he was all for it.

Dorothy is right. Either the definition of “conservative” must have changed, or the people who dominate the so-called “conservative movement” in America are just incorrectly labeled. Since they self-refer as conservative, we must accept that they have changed the meaning of the word. This is fair and reasonable, it is their label for themselves, and words change meanings all the time. The key here is it cannot have two meanings. We have to insist that when they use the term “conservative” we understand what they are saying, or no effective communication occurs.

“Conservative” as applied to politics in the early twenty first century means an authoritarian, theocratic, very highly millitarized and bigoted worldview. It means rolling back civil liberties, operating government in secrecy and applying a narrow, obsolete, puritanical description of “morality” as a basis for interfering in the lives of citizens. And to try to say otherwise is simply to defy observable reality…

mikey

this cohen column (and the above-referenced viguerie quote) are just doltchschloss by another name. if you think you won’t be hearing this shit on the rightosphere for the next 30 years, you are an idiot. bush was never a conservative see, and a real conservative will save us all. and bush’s failure wasn’t conservatism, just his own. see. does it all make sense now?

George W. Bush. He’s more liberal than you might think.

Ah yes. The dochschlosslied. The Jews liberals lost WWI Vietnam Iraq because they stabbed us in the back. And even though GWB is ostensibly an Aryan he is under the thumb of the Jews neo-cons liberals.

I used to think that when neo-cons referred to certain liberal Jews as “self-hating”, given the neo-con embrace of the dochschlosslied, etc., that allegation was just so much projection. But now, given that Richard Cohen liberal wanker has been held up as an example of such a self-hating Jew, I see that, as has occurred elsewhere (i.e. the neo-con critique of foreign policy realism is spot on), the neo-cons have identified a problem (self-hating Jews) correctly — they just are part of the problem (e.g. they are more like the “realists” they disparage than we moonbats, whom they disparage as closet realists when they don’t disparage us as dirty hippies … they are self-hating than we moonbat Jews whom they call “self-hating”) they’ve correctly identified.

Dorothy is right. Either the definition of “conservativeâ€? must have changed, or the people who dominate the so-called “conservative movementâ€? in America are just incorrectly labeled. – mikey

Indeed. The so-called conservatives of today are hardly conservative. I know from conservatives. My dad’s maternal grand-parents were conservative. And ya know? they actually wanted to conserve things! (they believed in limitted government — the one area in which they thought the feds had a big role was conserving the environment! — they also were hard-line anti-Communists, but thought the Vietnam war was a crock cooked up by the military-industrial complex — which phrase was first used by GOP-Pres. Eisenhower)

As my (raised blue-collar liberal, but now moderate) mom points out (thinking of the politics of they who gave my dad the money for the engagement ring he gave her and whose politics my dad — who’s now a moonbat — parrotted when my parents met) the so-called conservatives of today are not conservative but reactionary. Which, of course, does not make them liberal. So Cohen’s argument is still a bizarre (though expected and not original to Cohen) take on the dochschlosslied.

Indeed, the blame the neo-cons (for not being real conservatives) for the Iraq debacle exactly echoes the dochschloss trope of post-WWI Germany (blame the Jews) … so why are people who seem to be Jewish embracing it? While I think the presence of real conservatives in our body politic is sorely needed (someone needs to stand for the old verities and keep us from throwing out babies with bathwater when we liberals push for progressive programs), as a Jew I do fear the return of Paleoconservatism — it threatens to be just like the return of Paleoconservatism (over the Junker dominated “neo-conservatism” of fin-de-siecle Germany) was in Germany. As someone on these internets pointed out a long time ago (in intertube time) — GWB is not Hitler. He is like the German leadership in WWI. Which means what we have to fear as the American Hitler is what may take the place of BushCO on the right.

And they already are blaming us liberals … and tools and wankers like even the liberal Richard Cohen are enabling this. For shame!

[…] stupid was your latest column? So stupid that none other than DoughBob Loadpants thinks your onto something: Bush, The Liberal […]

“Neoliberal� is a word used in other countries.

Yes, and you do a good job defining the term in that sense, El Cid.

However, neoliberal was also a term that was thrown around in this country during the 1980s by people who would shortly thereafter become the backbone of the DLC and run kicking-and-screaming away from the “L-word” altogether.

Gary Hart, I think, was frequently associated with neoliberalism, in this sense, as was Even-the-Liberal New Republic.

Less a coherent philosophy than a vaguely technocratic rejection of traditional Democratic liberalism packaged as an updating of the concept (think “New Labour”), the term “neoliberalism” in this American usage was replaced by a variety of other equally empty terms by the 1990s: centrism, the Third Way, etc. (My guess is that “neoliberalism” in this sense was designed as an analogue to “neoconservatism,” since both movements tended to be self-consciously “idea”-centered and vaguely elitist.)

Of course all of this probably went whizzing above Richard Cohen’s fuzzy head. And he’s probably just further confused by the fact that those foreigners seem to be using the word in a totally different way.

This is Exhibit A of a “Doughbobism”:

Years ago, someone coined the term “neoliberal.� I was never sure what it meant

and I couldn’t find a dictionary any time in the intervening years. Clearly, this man is worth every penny of what they pay him. Every penny.

by far one of the the hardest hit Allied nations in WWII was Australia, which lost something to the order of 30% of an entire generation of young males

**** RANDOM PEDANTRY ALERT **** — Some Guy, best check your sources.
[consults Wikipedia]… Australian military fatalities in WWII were 40400, from a population of 7 million, i.e. 0.6%. This does not look so impressive against the Soviet Union’s 6.1%, Yugoslavia’s 2.9%, and the UK’s 0.8%. Even New Zealand managed a larger sacrifice (0.7%). Of course if you consider civilian fatalities as well then the Australian losses fall off the bottom of the chart.

Perhaps you meant WW-I fatalities. That time, gallant little Serbia managed to lose 275000 soldiers from a population of 4.5 million, i.e. 6.11%. Then going down the list there is France (3.5%), Romania (3.3%), the UK (1.95%), Italy (1.8%), New Zealand (1.6%) and Bulgaria (1.6%) before we finally reach Australia (1.4%).

Military casualties among the Central Powers were generally smaller, but a larger proportion of total population.

Hey Dok. I’m not smart enough to actually be in this debate, but I’m pretty sure he said 30% of an entire generation of young males, not of the entire population. Not that your numbers don’t tell a thinking human everything they need to know about war (You lose a few percent of your fucking POPULATION??? This is good how???).

But a third of a generation of just the males is not the same as a third of the population, so I think you can both be right….

mikey

“I can only imagine a future Richard Cohen column where, despite the fact that he’s never actually tasted them, he praises McDonald’s hamburgers simply because he’s seen the Hamburglar try so hard to steal them. ‘You can tell the burgers appealed to him through his rhetoric and body language,’ Richard would write. ‘Robble, robble!’â€?

Best paragraph I’ve read in a long time.

But a third of a generation of just the males is not the same as a third of the population, so I think you can both be right….

I wondered about that too, Mikey… but for 40400 fatalities to be 30% of the young-bloke population, the entire generation would have to amount to only 135000. Which doesn’t seem right in a total population of 7 million.
More likely that Some Guy made the mistake of talking to an Australian. Especially on Anzac Day, the Aussies manage to combine a sense of victimhood (those Pommy bastards took away our young men to be slaughtered at Passchendale!) and self-righteous heroism.
Not that New Zealanders are any better…

Back in the 80s, we thought the self-proclaimed “neoliberals” were just Democrats who were ashamed that their parents were blue-collar (and pink-collar) workers, rather than middle-management jagoffs like the Neoliberals’ new Repub coke-sniffing buddies’ parents. Since history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes*, seems like we’re about to be burdened with a cadre of “neoliberals” who are actually Repubs ashamed that their (ideological) parents are coke-sniffing, democracy-destroying jagoffs like the scum currently infesting the Oval Office.

*thank you, Mr. Twain

I always thought a neoliberal was a little twat like that pinheaded Yglesias, who espouses to be liberal, but loves him some imperialism ala the Iraq War.

Actually, affirmative action is designed to take jobs away from UNdeserving white men and give them to UNdeserving white women, with a few blacks thrown in. hard as it is for rightists to believe, there are quite a few undeserving whites filling space that can just as easily be filled by underserving nonwhites.

[…] know i quote sadly, no entirely too much, but… I can only imagine a future Richard Cohen column where, despite the […]