{"id":4171,"date":"2008-02-10T15:02:02","date_gmt":"2008-02-10T22:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/10\/neo-cons-and-bolton-flock-to-mccain-standard\/"},"modified":"2008-02-10T16:33:21","modified_gmt":"2008-02-10T23:33:21","slug":"neo-cons-and-bolton-flock-to-mccain-standard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/10\/neo-cons-and-bolton-flock-to-mccain-standard\/","title":{"rendered":"Neo-Cons and Bolton Flock to McCain Standard"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I noted in my last post, the withdrawal of both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson would spur neo-conservatives and their closest aggressive nationalist friends, like John Bolton, to rally behind John McCain as their preferred candidate. Of course, now that Romney himself has withdrawn, there hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really much of an alternative, notwithstanding Mike Huckabee\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ardent Christian Zionism. In any event, Jennifer Rubin, a political correspondent at Commentary<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Contentions blog (which has become much more active, if predictable, under John Podhoretz\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s editorship), has a good rundown<\/a> with useful links of the latest endorsements and commentary:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153On Friday at CPAC, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton<\/a> sung McCain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s praises and then heartily endorsed him<\/a> on Saturday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell<\/a> and Fred Thompson<\/a> got on the McCain bandwagon too. The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s<\/a> editors disparaged the notion that social conservatives should sit home or vote for Hillary Clinton ( \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do with any credibility is claim that helping to elect a liberal President will further the causes that these conservatives claim to believe most deeply in\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) while President Reagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane<\/a> doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think much of the talk show critics\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 suggestion that we hand management of the war over to one of the Democrats. Newt Gingrich<\/a> recognizes the obvious ( \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s had a lifetime voting record that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dramatically more conservative than Clinton and Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) and Larry Kudlow<\/a> voices support as well.<\/p>\n

Bill Kristol<\/a> thinks the anti-McCain sentiment among conservatives is exaggerated, and a simple account from the campaign trail<\/a> reveals a obvious truth: lots of conservatives have supported McCain all along.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, McCain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s main foreign-policy spokesman (and NRA lobbyist who, I had a heard a few years ago, got in trouble with the Capitol Police for carrying some kind of firearm where he shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have), Randy Scheunemann<\/a>, tends more to the Bolton camp. A former member of the board of directors of the Kristol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and a main founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq<\/a> (CLI), Scheunemann worked for McCain in 2000. (When at one point just before the Iraq war, I clicked on the CLI website and got the website of Ahmed Chalabi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Iraqi National Congress [INC] instead, it was Scheunemann who told me that the two organizations used the same web server, thus tending to confirm the notion that the CLI \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whose honorary co-chairs were John McCain and Joe Lieberman \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was a Chalabi front organization.) And, as pointed out in a previous post and in a Friday article<\/a> by McClatchy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s excellent Warren Strobel, former CIA director James Woolsey has signed on to the campaign as an adviser, too. Scheunemann set up the CLI with Bruce Jackson<\/a>, a long-time friend and protege of Richard Perle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n

Does this mean John McCain is a neo-con or would necessarily pursue neo-conservative\/aggressive nationalist positions if he became president? No. Unlike Bush, he has his own strong views on U.S. foreign policy, not to mention far more foreign-policy experience \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and hence confidence \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in those views. He also has advisers who tend to the realist category. But it does mean that, like Bush, there would almost certainly be a major power struggle between the two tendencies if he got to the White House. The best relatively recent article on McCain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s foreign-policy evolution, however, suggests that the hawks would definitely enjoy the upper hand. Read John Judis\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 October 2006 article in The New Republic<\/em> entitled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Neo-McCain<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n

<\/a>Visit Lobelog.com<\/a> for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I noted in my last post, the withdrawal of both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson would spur neo-conservatives and their closest aggressive nationalist friends, like John Bolton, to rally behind John McCain as their preferred candidate. Of course, now that Romney himself has withdrawn, there hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really much of an alternative, notwithstanding Mike Huckabee\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4171"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}