Syndication
Neocons
Kristol Hearts Huckabee
Neocon chieftain and liberal bogeyman Bill Kristol made his debut as the newest New York Times columnist this weekend. His choice of inaugural topic? The great potential of candidate Huckabee — the same subject his fellow Weekly Standard hand turned Times Op Ed columnist David Brooks tackled months ago.
Funny, I suggested just last week that Brooks and Kristol are two peas in a neocon pod. (Okay, Slate’s Jack Shafer explains why the two are actually quite different here.)
Like Father Like Son: JPod Takes the Reins at Commentary
Neocon scion John Podhoretz is following in his father’s footsteps. Podhoretz will succeed Neal Kozodoy as the editor of Commentary, the magazine that his father, Norman, shepherded from the left to the right and shaped into one of the country’s most influential conservative journals.
Commentary doesn’t wield the influence it once did (as our Alana Newhouse noted a few years back), but its pages continue to crackle with often intelligent, lively and provocative right-wing perspectives, as well as some of the most thoughtful writing on Jewish affairs that’s out there. Of course, it also publishes more than a few crazily bellicose articles on foreign policy (often penned by the elder Podhoretz).
In its heyday, Commentary rose to influence with sharp — and frequently necessary — critiques of left-liberal orthodoxies. At its best, Commentary has been invaluable. In recent decades, however, Commentary has all too often simply substituted the rigid orthodoxies of the neocon right for the dogmas of the left. At its worst, Commentary can be laughable.
Which side of the Commentary tradition will Podhoretz fils embrace? Given his work so far, I have my own prediction.
He is, in any case, evidently quite a character.
Peter Beinart on Norman Podhoretz’s Bluster Problem
Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart eviscerates neo-con chieftain Norman Podhoretz’s new book “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” in The New York Times Book Review:
His assertions are bold, sweeping and almost wholly unencumbered by evidence. We learn, for instance, that “almost to a man, Muslim clerics in their sermons” endorsed the 9/11 attacks. “Just about everyone in the whole world who was intent on discrediting the Bush doctrine,” he tells us, claimed that Jews were behind the Iraq war. And none of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib “so far as anyone knew, was even maimed, let alone killed.”
But what really gets Beinart — hardly a starry-eyed dove himself — is the Commentary editor’s blustering antagonism toward his domestic political opponents. Beinart writes:
The Pain in Norman Ornstein’s Tuchas
Quotable Washingtonian Norman Ornstein has a fun piece in The New Republic complaining that he’s always getting labeled a neocon because he’s based at the American Enterprise Institute. In fact, Ornstein explains, he’s “one of those Jurassic-era Washingtonians who believes in the virtues of centrism and bipartisanship.”
But, predictably, it’s not only Ornstein’s AEI affiliation that contributes to the misunderstanding of where he stands:
I have a suspicion (based on occasional e-mail rants I get) that, for some lunatics, my knee-jerk inclusion in the neocon camp has to do with my double whammy: a home at AEI and a very Jewish name.
(Although, in all honesty, I have to confess, in the days before I had read much from Ornstein, I, too, assumed he was a neocon for those two reasons.)
Ornstein says that the eagerness of people to lump him into the neocon camp is indicative of the increasing polarization in political life, something that has made life in the middle, as he puts it, “a pain in the tuchas.”
Neoconservatism: Not Just for Jews Anymore
Neoconservatives have variously been pigeonholed as crazed former Trotskyites, duplicitous Straussians and American Likudniks. Often, “neoconservative” seems to simply be used as shorthand (or code) for “conservative Jewish intellectual.”
Since the Iraq war, however, the term has entered popular usage. What it means now is a little difficult to put one’s finger on, as a passage from a recent article in Time Out New York demonstrates. Explaining why she doesn’t date guys of her own ethnic background, a Korean-American woman, identified only as Jane, told the magazine:
My problem with most of the Korean guys I’ve dated is that they usually want to go out with girls who are just like their mothers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m no neocon, and I won’t be slaving over your kimchi in the kitchen.
I wonder what Irving Kristol has to say to that?
