Behind the Scenes with Neo-Cons

Tuesday is as good day as any to demonstrate bipartisanship, so. . . .

Columnist Johann Hari recently infiltrated an annual National Review-sponsored cruise so that he could discover What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren't Listening. Seminars were designed to exhume the conservative corpse and discover its cause of death on the black night of 7 November, 2006.

I have excerpted from the forest some of the more coherent trees which Hari relates.

Dinesh D'Souza:

It's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? The left won by demanding America's humiliation.. . . of course politics is about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.

Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbled from beneath low-hanging jowls:

The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing them.

Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says,

The American public isn't concluding we're losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They're looking at the cold, hard facts. I wish it was true that, because we're a superpower, we can't lose. But it's not.

The ageing historian Bernard Lewis - who was deputed to stiffen Dick Cheney's spine in the run-up to the war - declares,

The election in the US is being seen by the bin Ladenists as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.

Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley are adversaries on the topic of Bush and his Iraquagmire. Podhoretz, looking in Buckley's direction, says,

I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I'm going to have some ex-friends on the right, too. . . . There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better. . . . There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning.

pertaining to Islamophobia and Iraq, Buckley confides in an interview,

. . . . what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That's pretty well gone. . . .I think the prudent Reagan would have figured here, and the prudent Reagan would have shunned a commitment of the kind that we are now engaged in… I think he would have attempted to find some sort of assurance that any exposure by the United States would be exposure to a challenge the dimensions of which we could predict. . . . found a strongman to replace Saddam. . .

James O'Beirne is husband to National Review's Kate O'Beirne and was Rumsfeld's Pentagon personnel director who staffed Iraqi occupational authority based upon personal loyalty to Bush:

The civilized countries should invade all the oil-owning places in the Middle East and run them properly. We won't take the money ourselves, but we'll manage it so the money isn't going to terrorists.

Mark Steyn, author of America Alone bemoans a fact that Muslims are procreating faster than

European races . . . who are too self-absorbed to breed . . . large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015. . . Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.

Here endeth my weekly duty to the spirit of bipartisanship. I've done my best to provide fairness, balance and equal time.