The Neocons & Contragate

As we totter on the edge of a recession, Reaganomics, plus the foreign policy that went with it for seven happy-go-lucky years, seems just about totally discredited. So what else is new? Isn’t it obvious to everyone? Well, not quite. Not to the neoconservatives, who keep dragging themselves further and further rightward, even to the right of their darling in the White House.

The ante is constantly being raised, the threshold of shame lowered. Regular Commentary watchers, pursuing their grim occupation, may notice a turn still further toward fanaticism, an extra touch of hysteria. Consider the October 1987 issue featuring an article by one L. Gordon Crovitz, who, if not exactly a household name, comes credentialed as “assistant to the editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal,” a writer with two law degrees, one from Yale, another from Oxford. How could such a scholar fail to enlighten about “Crime, the Constitution, and the Iran-Contra Affair”? If, after all, even many Republican congressmen admit it all smells bad, then surely . . . but not in Commentary as it moves toward Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

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