NEO-CON INFESTATION

Commenter JJ at Matt Yglesia's place linked to an interesting op-ed in the Financial Times:

The neo-cons’ route to disaster

By Gideon Rachman

Published: January 15 2007 20:56 | Last updated: January 15 2007 20:56

I especially liked these passages:

The fingerprints of simplifying and exaggerating journalists are all over the Iraq debacle. Take a look at The Neocon Reader, which is edited and introduced by Irwin Stelzer, who writes a column for The Sunday Times. The book brings together essays by political figures, academics and journalists, but the last are the most numerous. Ten of the 22 contributors are columnists or editors.

David Frum, a former journalist, served as a White House speech-writer and helped coin the most famous over-simplification of the Bush era – the phrase “axis of evil”. He is now at the AEI.

Less than a year after the fall of Baghdad, it fell to Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for The Washington Post, to give a triumphal address on America’s role in the world to the annual dinner of the AEI. The elevated status of the Washington punditocracy was underlined by the fact that Mr Krauthammer was introduced by none other than Dick Cheney.

The current debacle in Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy.

There is little doubt that Krauthammer is a hack but what's not in doubt is how well-entrenched neocom hacks like him are. I looked at the table of contents of The Neocon Reader and found some familiar newspaper names: David Brooks, Max Boot and George F. Will. There are also less familiar but nonetheless well-connected people like Karlyn Bowman, who's a senior fellow at AEI as well as a columnist for Roll Call.

I used to write LTE's to my local paper rebutting the claims made by one or other of the wingnut columnists it carries and that's all I can think I can locally do to help banish these people to the fringes where they belong.