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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (348071)	8/22/2007 7:27:08 PM
From: steve harris	Respond to of 1573901

New toy for you John... earth.google.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (348071)	8/30/2007 5:20:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573901

"Neo", or "neo-conservative" tend to be applied by many liberals as a term that means "conservative I really don't like", or sometimes "conservative who supported intervention in Iraq" (which for most liberals is probably close to the same thing). Its real meaning isn't anything like that. It isn't even "conservative who supports an interventionist foreign policy", or "self proclaimed conservative, who isn't really conservative, who supports an interventionist foreign policy, and isn't very concerned about deficits", or anything like that. Its true that the actual neo-conservatives did support a relatively aggressive foreign policy more often than that, and tended to care less about deficits than some other groups of conservatives, but its a distortion of the normal meaning of neo-conservative to call Bush one, whether or not he is "a real conservative". The conservative movement in America contained (and to the extent its firmly identifiable today still contains), "social and religious conservatives", "anti-communist and anti socialist conservatives" (less relevant than in the past but its not like socialism is an idea with no support), "strong assertive foreign policy conservatives","strong military" conservatives", "support for business" conservatives, isolationist conservatives (who are directly opposed to "assertive foreign policy, except in a few cases, and also opposed to things free trade that most "support for business" conservatives would support, but then conservatism is a "big tent" ideology), strict constructionists (re: the constitution) conservatives, low tax conservatives, fiscal conservatives, who care about low spending, and moderate deficits (or want no deficits) and maybe some other groups/ideas. There is a lot of overlap between them, but they are somewhat distinct ideas. Neo-conservatives, where "neo" because they where new to conservatism, formerly being something else opposed to conservatism (mostly from liberal to socialist, with a few formerly being full fledged communists). I don't think that really describes Bush. As for the other ideas, well he supports quite a few of them (although not isolationism, and he either doesn't support or has a done a poor job in the fiscal conservative area). I don't think I'd say that Bush isn't a conservative. As for whether conservatives should support him, well that obviously depends on how good of job they think he's done, and also what strains of conservative thought they support. Personally I think he's been a big let down in terms of controlling spending. The deficit isn't really unreasonable any more, but if it wasn't for all his additional spending we wouldn't even have a deficit. (Yes Iraq is a big part of that, but not the majority of it).