Blogging at the New York Times under the boringly provocative title "Neoconservatism Lives!", Times Book Review Sub-Altern Editor for Life Barry Gewen touts Times regular reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn's latest suggestion -- this time in The American Conservative magazine -- that neo-cons are rising again.

Gewen isn't only being provocative, although, Lord knows, he tries. He actually likes the idea: "The Iraq war was never a partisan affair," he explains, adding that "Many prominent Democrats and liberals like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and George Packer supported it." Gewen neglects to mention that he supported it, too, along with his boss Sam Tanenhaus and most of the political reviews they published, as I showed here and in The Nation.

And how are Times Book Review readers responding? Click here and enjoy what Gewen wound up provoking.

Readers certainly aren't impressed by his claim that, just like neo-cons, Hitchens, Berman, Packer and others "wanted to promote democracy in the Middle East" and that when Gewen once asked David Brooks and Paul Berman "what difference there was in their positions on Iraq... they agreed that there wasn't any."

Gewen seems awfully sanguine about Heilbrunn's discovery that neo-cons may yet worm their way in from the cold thanks to Hillary Clinton, who's now their favorite woman in Washington. Or they may insinuate themselves back into power thanks to a recent report on possible American responses to genocide -- co-authored by Clinton's friend and predecessor Madeline Albright -- that, as Heilbrunn puts it, "is essentially a stalking horse for liberal intervention. It would create a permanent bureaucracy with a vested interest in insisting upon armed interventionism whenever and wherever the U.S. pleases...."

The American Conservative published Heilbrunn's warning because it wants to save its movement from neo-cons, for reasons like those I sketched recently here and in openDemocracy. American Conservative editor Scott McConnell actually endorsed John Kerry in 2004, warning that four more years of George W. Bush would leave the conservative movement exactly where those four years have left it. In 2008, McConnell, horrified by neo-cons' battening onto John McCain's campaign, actually canvassed for the Obama in Virginia.

The New York Times Book Review was and is far less horrified than The American Conservative, as Gewen unwittingly reminds us by spinning Heilbrunn's warning as far as possible from its author's intent and from McConnell's brave and honorable responses as an editor and citizen. But now Gewen's own commenters are reminding us what neo-cons are worth to many of his and the Book Review's long-suffering readers.