{"id":3877,"date":"2007-04-11T13:17:43","date_gmt":"2007-04-11T18:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/2007\/04\/11\/im-a-truth-hating-neocon\/"},"modified":"2007-04-11T13:17:43","modified_gmt":"2007-04-11T18:17:43","slug":"im-a-truth-hating-neocon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2007\/04\/im-a-truth-hating-neocon\/","title":{"rendered":"I'm a truth hating neocon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Blosser has a large roundup<\/a> to the Pope’s Urbi Et Orbi Easter Message and his statement "Nothing Positive Comes from Iraq"<\/p>\n

I woke up on Easter to find an email from a sometime reader demanding to know why I hadn’t blogged on the Pope’s statement, calling me a neocon and afraid of the truth. At the time though I hadn’t blogged since Holy Thursday and in fact hadn’t read his message yet.<\/p>\n

Now for the record I am not a neocon, as I have said before I am a "kneel con." In the latest issue of Crisis magazine they had an article on neocons and what they are. The descriptions certainly match me to a certain extent. I was "a man of the left" like many neocons and was involved in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. I was also a bleeding heart liberal who thought the government should solve all problems and a wannabe hippie. Like many neocons I became disenchanted over the Democratic Party on the issue of national defense as my own position changed (Thank you Jimmy Carter for waking me up), especially to the anti-American rhetoric coming from the left. Nothing like being in the Navy and traveling the world to get a appreciation for being American. Like Ronald Reagan (who I once despised being a good Portland, Or leftist) I did not leave the Democratic Party, it left me – especially as I left my pro-abortion stand and became pro-life. There is the joke that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged, well I was mugged by reality.<\/p>\n

As regards to the Iraq war will know that I seldom blog on the topic and before it started I had reservations about it. There are people I respect on both sides of the question as to whether the initial war fulfilled just war criteria. I know my own biases being both ex-military and a general supporter of President Bush and so I have tried to be very careful into taking that into account. Regardless though whether the initial Iraq war was just I think it would be totally wrong to leave now. When you try act as a midwife to birth a Democracy you don’t run away when the contractions start. The Bush Administration has certainly made major mistakes in the aftermath of the war and the transiting of the government. Though I am slightly optimistic in that the surge does seem to be slowing down some of the violence. So whether there is anything positive coming out of Iraq is certainly something open to question. I just can’t see how withdrawal of our troops will make the terrorists who are often being aided from Iran stop their violence and their search for dominance. Iran likes a destabilized Iraq and they certainly don’t want a successful democracy that would put pressure on them to change.<\/p>\n

Right now I support both the troops and their mission. I don’t really understand those who say they support one and not the other. For example if a Democratic politician asked me if I supported them and I said yes, but I won’t give you any money, won’t vote for you, and I don’t like what your doing – I am sure they would think that regardless of what I said I was not in fact supporting them.<\/p>\n

I do find it rather funny the new found love that progressives now have for the Pope’s words. Encyclicals, Apostolic Letters, Church Documents can all be discarded, but the Pope making a personal comment on the situation in Iraq and all of a sudden it is as if he has made a dogmatic definition. They latch on to one sentence while not giving the same weight to the Pope talking about "contempt of life" and the horrific situations in the other countries the Pope mentioned. But cherry picking is nothing new.<\/p>\n

Mark Shea often gets a lot of heat from both sides as he dares to try to be consistently Catholic. That is decrying torture apologists on the right along with abortion advocates mostly on the left. I really don’t like prefix Catholicism. That is where you have to put some prefix to describe yourself before the world Catholic. I never describe myself as a Conservative Catholic since I think prefixes take away from and not give more meaning to the word Catholic. Exactly how does universal need a prefix? But I am only a truth hating neocon I guess. I learn something new everyday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Blosser has a large roundup to the Pope’s Urbi Et Orbi Easter Message and his statement "Nothing Positive Comes from Iraq" I woke up on Easter to find an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}