Matt Taibbi: Neocon II: Lie Hard With A Vengeance

Call it the Leslie Nielsen effect. Your first attempt at a show-biz career fizzles out and dies, but your failure is so quirky and charming that it wins you a whole second career. Think Robert Goulet, Bill Shatner, even John Travolta. America loves a brave second act, particularly one that doesn’t mind doing a take or two with egg still on his face.

What the Zucker brothers did for actors, the neocons are now doing for politics. In the first six years of the Bush presidency the administration’s ideological nucleus – a tribe of humorless conservative revolutionaries led by Dick Cheney and including the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Elliott Abrams – racked up a startling record in matters of official policy. From their juking of the case for the Iraq War to their Jacobin-esque purges within the government’s intelligence apparatus to their paranoid and sometimes criminal fragging of political enemies great and minor, the neoconservatives working for George Bush botched virtually every important move they made in the last six years.