[Le Kiwi]

quote=bigdog;433720]
According to the leftist narrative, the neocons got us into the Iraq war—never mind the widespread assumption among intelligence services around the world that Saddam Hussein did have WMDs, or that large segments of the Democratic Party and liberal opinion leaders supported the invasion of Iraq, etc., etc.

Virtually all the information, without a shadow of a doubt, was drawn from the neocon "Office of Special plans", entirely designed to finger Saddam, so the PNAC overthrow of Saddam could, at last, be put into action.
Office of Special Plans - SourceWatch
Clarke's Take On Terror, What Bush's Ex-Adviser Says About Efforts to Stop War On Terror - CBS News

By now, “neocon” has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just those who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyone who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to national security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran, Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of terrorist groups around the world.

Wrong. Neocon is used to describe these people, and these people only, because, er, they are neocons.
Neoconservatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A brief history of the PNAC: a refresher « Project for the Old American Century blog

The chief purpose of this emergent rhetorical style is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not attain nuclear weapons, even if it requires war.

As usual, wrong again. The chief purpose of alerting people to the dangers posed by the quasi-fascism of the neocon movement is to PREVENT more senseless war which will enable them to finally bring about the fascist overthrow of America from within, with hardly a shot being fired as all Americas attentions are focussed on Iran and the large part of her army is spread out far from home fighting the neocon "War for Oil and Money" crusade. Who will stop the Blackwater Praetorian Guard then ? You, with your handguns and your every detail on the NSA and Fatherland Security databases ? Ha !

International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen, for instance, notes that “neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States ‘on the right side of history.’”

The differences are so blatent. One) The neocons were still fermenting their nasty little plots in their beer-hall think-tank when the UN mandated US military might to pin the Serbs down. Two ) Invading countries which have never attacked you, had no part in any "War to create Terror" and posed no threat BUT had all that oil and were militarily weak is NOT good foreign policy, but it is Neocon foreign policy...
As an aside, Global Stability has NEVER been worse since the Neocons took the power out of the hands of the people and into the claws of the 4 Horsemen, Dick, Paul, Michael and Richard.

Examples of this new, broader, definitional standard abound. In 2004, writing in The Nation, Michael Lind termed the National Endowment for Democracy—a nonpartisan institution that provides millions of dollars to democracy activists around the world—“the quintessential neocon institution.”

French intellectual Bernard Henri-Lévy deems France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, a “neoconservative,” a label that the socialist Kouchner would likely find surprising.

Look up the links I provided. Kouchner himself called himself a neocon.

But Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders and was one of the very few left-wing supporters of NATO intervention in the Balkans, recently observed that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” against Iran, adding, “The worst, it’s war”—enough to range him in the neocon camp, it seems.

Because, see above, he's a neocon.

When Joe Lieberman, whose positions on domestic policy are indistinguishable from those of the majority of his colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus, makes mere mention of Iranian or Syrian support for armed elements in Iraq, Matthew Yglesias—one of the most popular leftist bloggers, writing from his perch at The Atlantic—duly calls the senator a “neocon,” a “psychotic rightwinger,” and a “warmongerer.”

A clear and precise observation, backed by clear fact and evidence.

What about human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch?

Largely staffed by leftists, these days they escape the neoconservative charge because they generally presume moral equivalence between democracies and anti-American thuggocracies.

Amnesty, for instance, has referred to Guantánamo as a “gulag” and Human Rights Watch has issued more press releases about the lack of gay rights in the United States than any other country on earth.

They are also strongly anti-neocon, because no group like the neocons has taken such a staggering step backwards since hitler went to visit Moscow.

Freedom House, on the other hand, which rates countries on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free), and explicitly ranks some nations (invariably Western democracies) as “more free” than others, has long been the bane of the leftist “human rights community.”

Ah, yes, the Freedumb House.
Freedom House - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome to the new political discourse.

where you will hopefully be clever enough to see through the smoke and mirrors, and gaze into the neocon abyss they are opening up for all of us. Yay.