What I've Learned

When Bush was elected, I figured he'd be wrong for the country because he was a Conservative. I didn't really know what a neocon was.

Now I do.

George W. Bush is NOT a conservative. He espouses family values, but saying that you support the idea of "family values" doesn't make you a conservative. It could make you a liberal who still believes in the idea of a two-parent household. "Family values" is a buzzword that means absolutely nothing regarding your own political slant.

Conservatives tend to be more reactive than proactive. Again, George Bush and his cohort are not conservatives - that reactive nature tends to lend itself to an aversion to large federal spending.

These guys in power now are not right wing, per se. They're way off the starboard rails. They spend and spend and spend, then say, "We're not wasteful! Don Young Way is vitally important! National Security! Nine eleven!" Then they go off and try to weaken government so that it will fail, giving them ammunition to say, "Government fails! Private industry! Nine eleven!"

Let me say something, and I'm generally not this clear: Neocons are very, very bad for this country. The real reason that GWB won re-election is because he became a fearmonger in the year leading up to the election, and managed to convince people in North Dakota (where the unemployment rate is well above the national average, so job growth SHOULD have been their major statewide issue) that terrorism could happen anywhere. I watched an interview with a guy from Montana saying he was voting for Bush for that specific reason.

Montana? FREAKING MONTANA?!?!?!? What is al Qaida going to do, blow up a log cabin and a few FREAKING ELK?!?!?

The current group of powerful neocons has managed to take a hugely devastating event and use it to play on the population's basest fears. They've used it to justify an invasion of a sovereign nation that posed no threat to us while distracting us from our real mission in Afghanistan, which was to wipe out the Taliban (which we haven't done), establish a democratic government (it's alright), and capture Osama bin Ladan and Ayman al-Zawahri (George Bush: "Who?").

Now we're in Iraq because we were:
-Looking for WMDs (Oops. Our bad.)
-Wait, No! We're protecting our allies and ourselves from terrorists like Saddam Hussein! (see previous justification)
-Never mind. Now we're protecting the people of Iraq from terrorists like Saddam Hussein (Yeah, we're sorry about creating more of them, by the way.)
-Go back a second! We're fostering Democracy in the Middle East (Except for Sunnis.)
-Forget those last four. We were really protecting us abroad from Terrorism at home (How a Syrian angry at the US would decide to blow up Baquba rather than Washington is beyond me.)

Neoconservatives aren't conservatives. They're power-hungry idealogues who believe that if they can thwart government, they can have it dismantled. Sounds a lot like Marxism, actually, that people would be better off in a totally anarchic environment. So they lead us off into pointless wars to create profits for their oil buddies, they forget what the hell we're supposed to be fighting, and they spend the government into what they hope will be an irreparable slide into failure and incompetence.

I don't dislike conservatives. Conservatism, on its face, is an understandable and in some cases correct way to go. But I loathe neoconservatism. It's a political bent that does nothing but encourage fear and hatred and unthinking loyalty and whose single, though unstated, goal is the ruination of this country.