Neocons still enchant some Republicans

You might have thought, considering how badly the war in Iraq has gone and how mistaken the predictions and knowledge of the most aggressive war whoopers has turned out to be, that neoconservatives would be thoroughyly discredited. As I've observed before, however, those who were wrong before the war seem not the least bit rueful and they still get more TV appearances than those who were right about the wisdom of the war before it was begun.

According to a recent WashTimes article (can't get the link active but I will) they also seem to have plenty of credit among GOP presidential candidates besides Ron Paul. "There is an overwhelming presence of neoconservatives and absence of traditional conservatives that I don't know what to make of," Richard Allen, who was Reagan's national security adviser (and is a pretty good guy; I knew him slightly in the '70s), says.

Specifically, Robert Kagan, co-founder of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is an adviser to John McCain, neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz, who recently wrote an extensive piece praying (literally) for Dubya to bomb Iran, is on Giuliani's policy team, and Dan Senor, former mouthpiece for Jerry Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, advises Mitt Romney.