How many neoconservatives are advocating voting for Nader rather than Bush?
Perhaps Hitchens has changed drastically since last year, but I haven't seen
any evidence.
>From a June '99 review of a Norman Podhoretz book:
"... When Joseph Heller published Catch-22 in the early 1960s, Podhoretz rushed to praise it in a glossy sheet called Show. As a consequence, Heller and he became social friends. But as the years passed, and as Podhoretz began to fawn more openly on Richard Nixon and the Israeli general staff (as if rehearsing for the engulfing, mandible-straining blow job that he would later bestow on Ronald Reagan), Heller hauled off and dealt him a sock in the jaw in a letter to The Nation. He rammed this home, as it were, with a sprightly caricature of our Norman in his novel Good as Gold. One can now see the cruelty of Heller's tactic. He not only repudiated his old friend but stabbed him in the front! And he did so at a time when the tide was running in Podhoretz's favor. I ran into Heller, by a happy chance, while I was cogitating this review. "Yeah," he said. "I never gave him the chance to dump me."
What Heller saw coming is what we now term "neo-conservatism." This is a protean and slippery definition, and very inexact as a category, but not all that hard to parse. If you take the version offered by its acolytes, you discover a group of New York Jewish intellectuals who decided that duty, honor, and country were superior, morally and mentally, to the bleeding-heart allegiances of their boy- and girlhoods. If you take the version offered by its critics, you stumble on an old Anglo-Saxon definition of the upper crust: "A load of crumbs held together by dough." They just might have set out to do good, but there is no question that they ended up doing well. Podhoretz, of all the old gang, is in the weakest position to rebut this charge. His book Making It is perhaps the most vulgar paean to pure and simple arrivism that has ever been penned...." http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1789_298/54731390/p1/article.jhtml