RUSH AND THE NEOCONS

Let me ask you a question very simply, ladies and gentlemen. Imagine... We have conservatism and we've got neoconservatism. Why do we allow that to happen? And who are the neocons? Well, the neocons are ex-Democrats, by the way, who moved into the Republican Party along with Ronaldus Magnus. They are big hawks, but they also believe in a big, activist, "compassionate" executive and government. So we have conservatism and neoconservatism. Imagine if there were a neo-Marxism or a neoliberalism. They wouldn't permit it. Marx wouldn't permit a neo-Marxism nor would liberalism permit a neoliberalism. But let's pretend. Let's pretend that there was a neoliberalism, in which a bunch of egghead liberals got together and said, "You know what? We're still going to care about the kids and we're still going to care about the poor and injustice and diversity and all that, saving the planet and all the pieties that we good Marxists care about. But we're going to introduce a touch of the free market, too, to produce school choice, economic opportunity, increased income tax revenues, et cetera, in order to solve these problems."

So, yeah, we're still good liberals, but we're going to have some neoliberals here who are actually conservatives. No self-respecting liberal would let 'em get away with it, 'cause it wouldn't be Marxism anymore; it wouldn't be liberalism anymore. But that's exactly what we are allowing and have allowed to happen to conservatism. Ten years ago, 1998, would any of these pseudoconservative media types, the so-called "conservative elite," the intellectuals, would they have dared to say out loud that Ronald Reagan's way was obsolete back in 1998? They may have thought it back then but they would not have said it, certainly not as a regular schtick as they are doing today. Nope. They had to call it "American greatness conservatism," or "neoconservatism" or "compassionate conservatism" or whatever Brooks, Kristol, and Barnes and Michael Gerson and the rest of them are calling it this week. Whatever their brand of conservatism is, they had to call it some neoconservatives. "We're not Reagan conservatives. We're neoconservatives. We're smarter than Reagan." Now they've made enough progress in having the media brand them as the face of serious conservatism, and they're out there feeling their oats.