Good recount of the Josh Marshall vs. Prince of Darkness (Richard Perle) battle at the Hudson Institute broadcast on C-SPAN.Neoconservatives are very sensitive people. Even those who've attained stature and power are exquisitely attuned to insults hurled from obscure quarters of the left as well as the barbs of French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin. It's not only bombastic blogger Andrew Sullivan who trolls Web sites like Indymedia.org, hunting for evidence of moral relativism. No less a personage than Richard Perle, the neocon kingpin who sits on the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board, bristled with irritation when mentioning Talking Points Memo, the blog of liberal Washington journalist Joshua Micah Marshall.
To answer the criticism directed against his movement, Perle appeared with Marshall at a panel on Monday in Washington called "Is the Neoconservative Moment Over?" Perle's answer: Not even close.
"Not only is the neoconservative movement not over, it's just beginning," he said. "Also not over is the left's obsession with neoconservatism. If you look at Mr. Marshall's blog, it seems to occupy his every waking moment."
The panel was sponsored jointly by the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative Washington think tank, and the hawkish, Liebermanesque New Republic magazine, and it was moderated by neoconservative New Republic writer Lawrence Kaplan. Besides Perle and Marshall, the speakers included Gary Schmitt, president of the Project for a New American Century ("The object of many conspiracy theories," Kaplan said with a chuckle), and Adrian Woolbridge, Washington bureau chief for the Economist. The audience of 40 or so gray-haired eminences, packed into a small, fluorescent-lit conference room at the Hudson Institute's office, included Barbara Ledeen, wife of neocon bomb-thrower Michael Ledeen, and Michael Barone, a right-wing columnist for U.S. News and World Report.
more...
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/12/17/neocons/index.html