Mock on, Maureen Dowd: Why She’s Right About the Neo-cons

In the twilight years of the New Left, revolutionaries would regularly parse their adversaries’ statements for indications of “objective racism.” Even the slightest irregularity—calling someone’s thoughts “dark”—could unleash a volley of accusations. I was reminded of this in reading the responses to Maureen Dowd’s recent column, “Neocons Slither Back,” about the neo-conservative influence on Mitt Romney’s foreign policy.

A host of people have accused Dowd of anti-Semitism for using a term “puppet master” to describe Romney’s advisor Dan Senor and for implying that Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan are “foreign policy neophytes” who have received their current ideas about the world from neo-conservative intellectuals who previously prodded “an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq.”