Jumping Ship - Again

It would appear that the neocons have given up on a failed president but not their failed ideology.

Neo-conservative commentators at the American Enterprise Institute wrote last week what amounted to an obituary of the Bush freedom doctrine.

“Bush killed his own doctrine,” they said, describing the final blow as the resumption of diplomatic relations with Libya. This betrayal of Libyan democracy activists, they said, came after the US watched Egypt abrogate elections, ignored the collapse of the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon, abandoned imprisoned Chinese dissidents and started considering a peace treaty with Stalinist North Korea.

The neo-conservatives offered no explanation for desertion of the doctrine, other than a desire to make quick but transitory short-term gains. “The president continues to believe his own preaching, but his administration has become incapable of making the hard choices those beliefs require,” they wrote.

But the ranks of the neo-conservatives are also being depleted. In his new book, America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama, perhaps the movement’s most outstanding intellectual force, confirms his defection from the brand concepts of “pre-emption, regime change, unilateralism and benevolent hegemony as put into practice by the Bush administration”.

“It seems to me better to abandon the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign policy position,” he writes.

So where so the neocons go. They are attempting to take over the Democratic Party and it would appear they have already taken over the DLC. We have talked about the DLC's Marshall Wittmann's attacks on those "lefties", most recently this morning, and how Hillary Clinton has become the new Goddess of War. And of course we have neocon Joe Lieberman. The attacks by Wittmann and the other DLCers would indicate that they think they are losing. Don't be too surprised to see a third party before 2008 made up Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Don't forget, most of the original neocons started out as Democrats.