Quote:

"Congradulations, you managed to discredit yourself in your very first post by decrying an act then doing exactly what you condemned." -wannabuyamonkey


I didn't say that we should never use labels; I meant that we should be careful when we use lables. We should not just assume that an individual's political views are reducible to a stereotype or accept positions/beliefs uncritically because they are presented as the party line.

That being said, I'm only human. Honestly, I was worried that my post would look like I was talking out of both sides of my mouth, but that wasnt my intent. In the last part, I just wanted to express my own insights and opinions about what bugs me today. Maybe I did regress back to hasty generalizations.

Now I would like to explicate the point I was making and add some more info to the discussion about the neo-conservative movement. What Paul Mandral posted is a good historical description of the group, but I wanted to reveal their political philosophy.

Several top Republican officials and strategists (Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl) studied under a man named Leo Strauss at Chicago University during the fifties and sixties. Strauss was a Jewish refugee and philosopher who studied ancient political works like Plato's "Republic." He believed that the job of the philsopher was to protect the masses of humanity from the truth that there is no God, b/c if the masses knew this truth social chaos would ensue (He borrowed this from Nietzsche). The duty of philosopher is to hide and reinforce the "noble lie" or religion to the masses inorder to maintain control. While the majority of people are kept in the dark those powerful enough and intellegent enough to make the decision (the elite) are able to do as they will, making decisions, without feeling the need to explain them to anyone beneath them.

Strauss is not a conspiracy theorist; he is one of the most respected scholars of the twentieth century. As I said, people like Wolfowitz and others in the current administration are avowed followers of Strauss. It is Straussian ideas that influenced the charter of the PNAC; the blueprint for the foreign & domestic policy of our current adminstration that was written in 2000, a year before the election.

I think it is spooky to know that our current leaders believe in a figure who argued that there was no god yet uses religion purely for political ends. The purpose at the end of my post was to say that veil of religosity and morality that some Rebuplicans have veiled themselves in is beginning to unravel. So, sure Liberals might be godless heathens, but how honest do you think conservatives are being?

I am a man with needs. Rack JLA!!!