Pay no attention to the neocon behind the curtain
By Timothy P. Carney
carney@evansnovak.com
Debates among and about “Neoconservatives” and “Paleoconservatives” recently have bounced between being enlightening, mendacious, vicious, and dangerous. But easily the most bizarre aspect of the fight is the claim that neoconservatives don’t exist—that they are the hallucinations of fevered minds. ...
...Conservatives usually leave it up to the left to play the race card. Byron York of National Review sums up nicely the “standard rhetorical device of the Left: If you can’t win an argument with a conservative, call him a racist.”
Sadly, this device has been employed by a handful of conservative writers who have called those who criticize the neocons anti-semitic. “Neocon,” we are told, is a code word for “Jew.” Even though, as Boot points out:
First, many of the leading neocons aren’t Jewish; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Father John Neuhaus and Michael Novak aren’t exactly menorah lighters. Second, support for Israel—a key tenet of neoconservatism—is hardly confined to Jews; its strongest constituency in America happens to be among evangelical Christians.
This bizarre reasoning—that “neocon” secretly means “Jew”, but neoconservatism isn’t particularly Jewish—reminds me of another absurdity. Some will call you a racist for opposing welfare, and in the next breath bring up that most welfare recipients are white. Doesn’t the latter fact discredit the former accusation?
