Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism. For anyone who believes that the existence of neocons is a conspiracy theory or that mentioning them is akin to anti-Semiticism. These are them, folks. Don't think Francis Fukuyama is Jewish or Bill Bennett either. It ain't about being Jewish. It's about buying into a worldview and that litany of names at the bottom of the page shows you those who do. And the Project for the New American Century couldn't be more real or formidable.

So, Mr. Brooks, are you ready to plead insanity? No, I think as Eric Alterman points out, you know very well what you're doing. Says he:

I know Brooks is too smart to mean what he professes to say. I mean the term [neocon] is self-chosen by the people who operate under its rubric and is used frequently by the likes of Irving Kristol and Norman Podohoretz to describe themselves. I have on the shelf of my library, five books: John Erman’s The Rise of Neoconservatism, Cary Dorrien’s The Neoconservative Mind, Peter Steinfels’ The Neoconservatives, Mark Gerson’s The Essential Neoconservative Reader and Irving Kristol’s Neoconservatism; Autobiography of an Idea. Is Brooks saying all of these people are playing at anti-Semitism? Really, it’s beyond stupid and Brooks is quite smart so he really should apologize before he loses all credibility with his fair-minded (and well-wishing) critics.

That letter was dated September 20th, 2001, folks. The neocons are a smart bunch. Anybody who's given the history of this group even a cursory review knows they wanted to do this long before 9/11. Knows that they'd floated the ideas of pre-emptive attacks and exporting democracy a decade earlier and had been shot down. Soon after September 11th--while bodies were still being ppulled from the rubble-- they saw their opening, knew they'd now have a sympathetic audience, and they seized the day.

Don't play us for fools, Mr. Brooks.