PNAC is back...

One of the more interesting aspects of the recent election for me was reading George Weigel's election related columns in The Tidings, the weekly newspaper for the Archdiocese. It was no surprise to hear blatant partisan rhetoric, that has been Weigel's MO for years. Even he seems to realize that he sometimes pushes the boundary of blatant lap dog. For example, one of his 'Catholic Difference' columns on Campaign 2008 appeared in The Tidings as so:

http://www.the-tidings.com/2008/091908/diffce.htm

But the column is truncated in his official archive:

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubid.3568/pub_detail.asp

And the Boston Pilot (published a few weeks after The Tidings):

http://www.thebostonpilot.com/articlearchives.asp?ID=7010

So the surprise was not divisive, hateful, rhetoric like this:

"Question for Sen. John McCain:

How would you work with Democrats so that the war against
terrorism is a bipartisan effort?"

In the world Weigel lives in, love of one's neighbor, security of one's children, etc. are traits which are demarked along political partisan lines. The fact that a Democratic Congress has continued to fund President Bush's wars and given his administration tremendous latitude in waging a so-called 'war on terror', even at the expense of civil liberties, simply does not register.

This is much like Rush Limbaugh's current use of the term "Obama Recession" and "Obama Depression". Obama may not yet be president, but the 10 straight months of job losses, an additional $40 B in taxpayer dollars to AIG, etc., are somehow his fault... I am tempted to ask my Bishop, does Obama's responsibility for national failures extend back soley through the Bush years, or, as a good Catholic, am I to hold him responsible back to the point he was a fertilized zygote?

I once heard a Homily where 'Us' and 'Them' thinking was partially attributed to our deep roots as a Protestant nation. I must admit, the whole concept of identifying "real" Americans or "serious" Catholics does seem closer to Evangelical rhetoric than anything I have heard at Mass. But given he is a recipient of a papal cross ("Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice"), it is certainly not my place to question Weigel's religion, not matter how blatantly he wears his politics on his sleeve.

But, again, it was not his partisanship that surprised me. What peaked my interest was the seeming utter inflexibility of his world view. I guess I had expected more self described "neo conservatives" to follow Francis Fukuyama's lead and accept the discrepency between neoconservative ideas in theory, and disasterous practice. It is, after all, a fundemental concept of behavioral science that we can, in fact, learn from direct experience.

But, if anything, the failure of neoconservatism as foreign policy, the unerring failure of neoconservatives as prognosticators, and the rejection of neoconservative standard bearers in the recent elections seems to have reinvigorated true believers like Weigel and William Kristol. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which Kristol headed and for which Weigel is a mission statement signatory, had seemed headed for oblivion. But the web site has now returned from the dead.

Personally, I have no problem with this. I think that free speech is an important component for any Democracy. But I would sincerely like to see, just once, Weigel explain the disparity between the thousands of words he has written in support of the Iraq war on moral grounds (virtually all of which has since been debunked) and PNAC's position papers, which identifies war with Iraq as a "convenient excuse to promote [US] self interest". Much as Weigel once conceded that torture as US policy would invalidate a Just War argument for Iraq, but has since gone mute on the subject now that we know that, in fact, torture was/is official US policy, knowing where national (and, according to Fukuyama, partisan) self interest fits into Weigel's position would be helpful in judging his arguments.