--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "seventhray1" <steve.sundur@...> wrote: > > Let me be more concise. I particularly liked this phrase, and I > think it is often true. > > > > > Turn a liberal over and give them a good shake and out > > > > pops a born again neo con---almost every time.
Yeah? What do you think it means to "turn a liberal over and give them a good shake"? Be specific. Give an example. And what do you think a neocon is? I'm sorry, but it's meaningless, just a bunch of phrases that sound good strung together but don't actually refer to anything real (even if he weren't using them to describe me specifically). There's an old saw about how a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, implying that the liberal becomes a racist after having been mugged (the assumption being that the mugger was black). I suspect Bob was trying to echo this saying while giving it a different context, but while there was a grain of unpleasant truth to the original, what Bob ended up with was too vague to mean anything. I don't think he even knows what a "neocon" is, and I'll bet you don't either. Nor did Barry when he claimed the neoconservatives were waging a "war against science." >From Wikipedia: "Neoconservatism in the United States is a branch of American conservatism that is most known for its advocacy of using American economic and military power to topple American enemies and promote liberal democracy in other countries. The movement emerged during the early 1970s among Democrats who disagreed with the party's growing opposition to the Vietnam War and had become skeptical of the Great Society's welfare programs. Although neoconservatives generally endorse free-market economics, they often believe cultural and moral issues to be more significant, and so have tended to be less thoroughgoing in opposition to government intervention in society than more traditionally conservative and libertarian members of the Republican Party.[1][2] Most neoconservatives support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism The trend of liberals becoming neocons is long past because the situations that inspired their change in viewpoint are long past. Neocons today--the second generation--are mostly from the GOP to start with. I suspect Bob remembered reading something about the liberals in the '70s who became neocons and figured it must apply today as well, but he was thinking of today's conservatives, not neocons. Remember how he led up to this: "Like many progressives you're progressive till someone offends your sense of what is acceptable. YOU SEEM TO FORGET, democracy is NOT about protecting the people we agree with, it about protecting the people many of us don't agree with." This has nothing at all to do with neoconservatism. And it's all in the context of my purported censorship, an idiotic notion to begin with. The whole paragraph is just blather. I think he'd temporarily run out of things to say and was just marking time, keeping his fingers going, by typing words until something more pointed occurred to him.
