Although I’m delighted that Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites turned out well and although I undoubtedly upset my fellow-paleoconservatives by strongly supporting this action, it seems appropriate to balance that expression of enthusiasm by pointing out the despicable way the conservative establishment and its neoconservative prompters have responded to their critics on the right. The reaction to those on the right who were out of line has been relentless defamation.

Principled objections from people like Rep. Thomas Massie, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Senator Rand Paul, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green were thrown together with those of the thoroughly dishonorable Democratic opposition, as if they are partners in infamy. An editorial in the Murdoch-controlled New York Post on Tuesday began by deriding” Trump-deranged lefties and pseudo-MAGA isolationists.” Apparently, these groups have become fused in the establishment conservative mind.

There is no reasonable comparison that can be drawn between the crassly opportunistic Democratic politicians who are raging against Trump’s action for making war without congressional approval, and the more principled objections coming from the right. Democratic senators like Chris Coon, Mark Warner, and Chuck Schumer expressed absolutely no objection when Obama carpet-bombed Libya to bring about regime change in that politically unstable country. Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state under Obama, treated any call for congressional approval for the use of military force as a laughable matter. She knew congressional Democrats wouldn’t say peep if a president from their own party, one whom the media still adores, made war quite arbitrarily and without their approval. Nor did congressional Democrats complain when Biden quite unconstitutionally opened the sluice gates to over 10 million illegals.

 Their frenzied concerns about Trump violating Article One of the Constitution by not asking for congressional approval before engaging in military action, is transparent posturing.  The objections from the Republican right are intrinsically different. They’re issuing from strict constitutionalists and from people who are understandably fed up with those “forever wars” that both national parties have unleashed uninterruptedly for decades. Although these dissenters have supported Trump, they are certainly not his blind followers; nor are they afraid to raise embarrassing questions.

The most godawful assaults on these Republicans have come (should we be surprised?) from the neoconservatives, whose disappearance from the political conversation has been unfortunately exaggerated. As I have continuously watched neoconservative “experts”  from places like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and AEI paraded before me on Fox News, I’ve been forced to conclude that these news-shapers have not gone into exile under the Trump dispensation.  Indeed, their benefactors pay for their perpetual presence on these news programs, and God help anyone who deviates from their hardened foreign policy positions. As much as our establishment conservatives insist “we’re not neoconservatives,” they’re lying through their teeth. The presence of paleoconservatives is notably absent on their programs and in publications while they exuberantly embrace the supposed wisdom of neoconservatives and their endless drumbeat for American intervention abroad.  

The most obvious and nauseating sign of this servitude is the reduction of anyone on the right who objects to neoconservative policy positions as Nazi-sympathizers. I encounter this habitual neocon defamation every time I expose myself to the Murdoch-media concerning American involvement with Iran. Although I happen to have taken the same position as these “experts” on Trump’s bombing last week, I get sick to my stomach when I notice these accidental allies. They are vulgar slanderers who try to exploit American Christian guilt about not having done enough to stop the Nazis before they unleashed the Holocaust.

Such guilt-tripping of American Christians sounds like drivel, even if it works. This historical reconstruction goes together with the demonization of the “appeaser” Neville Chamberlain and the glorification of the noble anti-Nazi Churchill.

Never mind certain inconvenient facts, on which I should elaborate: Chamberlain didn’t believe his country was prepared emotionally to fight another war against Germany in 1938; the prime minster was already fatally ill with cancer when he negotiated with Hitler; and he declared war on Germany in September 1939, after Nazi Germany invaded England’s Polish ally. Churchill may have taken the right position on the need to oppose Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, he also had a deserved reputation as being a war monger from the atrocity-ridden Boer War in 1899, which he enthusiastically supported, onward. England’s “last lion” had also called for a hostile policy toward the Germans even before the World War I and played a major role in aggravating tensions between his country and the German Empire.

It seems these attempted historical parallels have outlived any moral or instructive value. They are now being used to make people feel they would be retrospectively complicit in Nazi crimes, if they rejected certain neocon historical and policy premises.

Moreover, if Americans dare to disagree with neoconservative positions on Israel and Iran, they are painted as now saying yes to anti-Semitic activities. Why else, we are led to believe, would these people think differently about an issue that neocons care about? Admittedly there are anti-Semitic opponents of Israel, for whom I offer no apology. But I can’t see how neoconservative slanderers and emotional blackmail artists represent an alternative path of reason.