Friday, August 26, 2005

Why is Leo Strauss Running My Country?

I think it's time Americans start talking about Leo Strauss (also here) and the belief his neocon followers have about the NECESSITY of lying (Cindy Sheehan and the anti-war folks are calling Bush on it). It's time to step loudly up to those who won't call Bush a liar, instead deferring to 'respect for the office' and suggesting that he was misled. He wasn't. He hired the liars and as the boss of them, he is responsible for them and to us.

It's time to out the philosopher and the neocon core* contributors to the Project for the New American Century, PNAC (more here, here and here) and others** following him; how their continued influence will destroy this country and it's original 'Contract With America'--the Constitution--which explicitly provides for a free and informed electorate.

Democracy may be an experiment but I do not believe the framers envisioned that Americans should be lab rats in one unelected philosophical experiment, hence their provision for checks and balances to protect minorities. The current administration, under the influence of Straussian followers, is dismantling those checks and balances. All of them, when sworn into office, signed pledges to uphold the Constitution. Now they are willingly dismantling the processes the Constitution describes. They are, in practie and in fact, traitors.

Can we question THEIR patriotism now?


* Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz.

** John Agresto (former Chair, National Endowment for the Humanities, Deputy Coalition Provisional Authority, Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Baghdad Iraq), Mark Blitz (articles by Blitz on Strauss here, served as Associate Director of the United States Information Agency, where he was the United States Government’s senior official responsible for educational and cultural exchange, and as Senior Professional Staff Member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations), Seth Cropsey (Caspar Weinberger’s former speechwriter), David Epstein (Office of Secretary of Defense, Net Assessment), Charles Fairbanks (Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. - Johns Hopkins University; Ph.D. student of Bloom at Chicago, former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of State and member of the department’s policy planning staff; foreign policy adviser to the Reagan campaign in 1980 and the Bush campaign in 1988; past member of political science faculty at Yale University and University of Toronto; a friend of Wolfowitz), Robert Goldwin (special assistant to President Ford, Resident Scholar of The Constitution Project and former Director, Constitutional Studies, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ), William Kristol (chief of staff for Vice President Quayle), Alan Keyes (Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs), Carnes Lord (served on the National Security Council under Reagan), Michael Mablin (House Republican Conference director), Gary L. McDowell (served as adviser to Attorney General Edwin Meese III), Ken Masugi (E.E.O.C.), James Nichols (National Endowment for the Humanities under Reagan), Abram Shulsky (director of strategic arms control under Reagan, RAND Corporation, Director of Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s Office of Special Plans), Gary Schmitt (head of President Ronald Reagan’s National Advisory Board of Foreign Intelligence, now Executive Chairman of PNAC), Peter Schram (Dept. of Education under Reagan), Abram Shulsky (Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans), Nathan Tarcov (A leading authority on the educational writings of John Locke, scholarly interests and involvements also include Machiavelli, Rousseau, the American founders, and U.S. foreign policy, currently Professor of Social Thought, Political Science, at the College at the University of Chicago, Director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory & Practice of Democracy and past member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State), Jeffery Wallin (director of special programs, National Endowment for the Humanities). This list is edited and updated from the original published in the article
The Ivy League Dissects the Neocon Cabal.


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