The Fightin' Neocons! Ctd

Hitch got there first:

The neo-conservative movement is really a mentality, a mentality of refined pessimism about politics and rancid pessimism about human nature. As such, it is more or less impervious to new evidence or new experience, and increasingly obsessed with refighting battles of the past... It has also been centrally preoccupied with power and more explicitly concerned with its cultivation and exercise than any comparable intellectual movement...

At last November's gathering for the Committee for the Free World, when things were already beginning to look a bit too bright for holders of the neocon worldview, Frank Gaffney, a Richard Perle acolyte, announced that he and a few hard-liners were setting up a Center for Security Policy to resist appeasement tendencies in the weapons business. Seymour Weiss, one-time Reagan adviser, denounced Helmut Kohl as a dupe for lending money to the East Germans. You would not have guessed that the Berlin Wall was within hours of its fall. But if you had listened to the contribution of Bruce Weinrod, head Heritage Foundation military-industrial acolyte for much of the 1980s, you would have known why the idea was an unwelcome one:

The first thing [Bush] ought to do is call Margaret Thatcher and try to talk some sense into her. She was recently quoted as saying the Cold War is over. That really is a problem if you have somebody who is tough-minded saying that. She may not understand that, at least with the American public, you have to create a sense of some urgency about what we are doing; otherwise, the course resistance is followed and funding shifts to social programs. [Empasis added.]

There went the feline, screeching from the bag. In case of misunderstanding, Weinrod added:

The Soviets have stated that one of their major objectives is to remove what they call the 'enemy image' Unless something comes up that forces them to act in an overt way, making it clear that they have not changed, it is going to be a very difficult challenge to maintain our military expenditures.