Last week the New York Times Review front-paged TPM contributor Robert Reich's clarion call for universal health care in a magisterial review on the subject.

And this week the Review showcases New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier's equally magisterial -- and, from the Times Book Review, equally unexpected -- put-down of his old friend Norman Podhoretz's unrepentantly neo-conservative tract, Why Are Jews Liberals?

Have the Book Review and Wieseltier changed for the better? Or are the editors just doing neoconservative damage control via feints toward the left, and is Wieseltier just trying to cover his past blunders, this time by turning on a friend?

The record doesn't augur all that well, for there is more (or less) to the editors' and Wieseltier's gestures than meets the eye. Of Wieseltier's review it needs to be said that he is right about Podhoretz, but dishonestly so, while Podhoretz is honest about what he believes, but woefully wrong. Hoping for better from the Book Review and its reviewers, let's take a closer look.

Since 2004, Review editor Sam Tanenhaus and one of his deputies, Barry Gewen, have assigned dozens of reviews deriding "liberal" and leftist books as silly or strident and praising neo-con war tracts and market manifestos as wise and sobering.

More than a year and a half ago I dubbed the Book Review "The Neoconservative Damage Control Gazette" in columns here at TPM and in The Nation. Undaunted, the Review continued to embody and nourish a mindset that rejects what it thinks is soft-headed progressivism and embraces what it thinks is a tough, post-9/11, "We know better" ideology, with its self-congratulatory pretense of taking on a world much darker and crueler than any our generation anticipated.

"A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality," as Irving Kristol once put it, and for years now that sour apothegm could have been the motto of the Times Book Review.

But this mindset is more than a bit naïve, and, for all its noisy affirmations of patriotism, honor and loyalty, it is also in bad faith. Now that the Republican Party has bared its perversity, at least some New York liberals are neoconservatives who've been mugged by reality, and Tanenhaus' and Gewen's indulgence of conservative political positioning instead of real book reviewing has provoked rising disdain from acute observers such as this one at Litkicks and from Times readers, who posted angry comments when Gewen, in a blog item, made rather too much of neo-conservatism's resilience. (Read it here, with readers' delicious responses.)

But publishing houses still defer to the Review's make-or-break power over book sales to the typical Review reader (who, Gewen instructs reviewers, is "a dentist in Scarsdale"). So they have kept on publishing neo-connish tracts such as Bruce Bawer's Appeasing Islam: Sacrificing Freedom. And these have been duly rewarded, as was Bawer's last month with a Times rave, which was rightly called "a polemic on behalf of a polemic" in a letter to the editor from Gregory White, a professor of government at Smith College.

Unfortunately for such neo-connish reviews and the editors who indulge them, many neo-conservatives and their fellow travelers are now trying to worm their way back into the Democratic Party, because the 2008 Republican National Convention and Sarah Palin rallies rattled all those who aren't as witless as Bill Kristol (who had "discovered" and commended Palin to John McCain) and the ever-truculent Podhoretz, who is still urging Jews to become or remain Republicans.

The "new" neo-cons, who dare not speak their old name, are reminding everyone that they've always really been Democrats -- "Cold War," "Scoop Jackson" liberals in foreign policy, pro-labor and even pro-welfare-state in domestic policy. Never mind that they muted or forgot the more-liberal of these convictions during their 25 years amid think-tank fleshpots in the lavish conservative Egypt on the Potomac; now the Times' showcasing of Bob Reich's review may herald neo-cons' opportunistic exhumation and buffing of their old statism, at home as well as abroad.

Surely they also feel relieved to be hustling the embarrassing Podhoretz off stage, as the penitential war hawk Peter Beinart began doing two years ago in a Times review of Podhoretz's book World War IV. But Beinart merely exposed the narcissism of his own small differences with neo-cos when he sniffed that Podhoretz writes as hysterically as if he were "dodging I.E.D.'s on his way to Zabar's."

Wieseltier is better suited to smooth this bump on war hawks' road to redemption, because he's already too convoluted to require a political makeover, as Beinart did, before turning on Podhoretz.

So here is Leon this morning, filleting Norman's Jewish nationalism and bombastic Americanism as if he has always disdained them. Never mind that, until now, Wieseltier spoke endearingly of "Norman" as his friend and that, just after 9/11, both signed a letter to George W. Bush, on the letterhead of Bill Kristol's neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, urging war on Iraq as essential to the Global War on Terror.

And never mind that Wieseltier joined Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to form the Committee to Liberate Iraq. Or that, just last year, he and Podhoretz wrote separate but parallel letters to a judge urging clemency for Cheney's malfeasant aide "Scooter" Libby.

Now Wieseltier is the tribune of the Jews who aren't following his old ally. He even makes some of the same criticisms of Podhoretz's book that I've made in BookForum (sign-in required, but free) -- that Podhoretz's history lessons are potted, that he reads world-historical currents into all his own little tiffs, that his Judaism is mainly tribal and his conservatism more partisan than principled. (Neo-cons never did understand the difference between loyalty and integrity.)

But do Wieseltier's own inveterate shape-shifting and bottom-covering really compromise this critique? Does it matter that his take-down of Podhoretz makes it easy for upper-middling intelligences like Tanenhaus and Gewen to adjust their neo-con damage-control project without even having to acknowledge its existence?

Should anyone care that Wieseltier, writing in the New Republic, lashed out recently at the self-absorbed fashion-mongers who pass for "liberals" at the Times? (See his rebuke to Times Sunday Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati.)

Unfortunately for the mitigating intent of these rhetorical questions, Wieseltier is beginning to resemble a tract of land that was stony and saline to begin with and has been exhausted by too much cultivation. His weird displays of religiosity and his compulsively alliterative sagacities in rabbinic mode make me wonder if Madonna sat at his feet on her way to Kabbalah. Religion and politics remain "braided in my head, but as a matter of conviction I endeavor to keep them apart," he tells the Book Review's useless "Up Front" section, which attempts to drape each week's big blunder in an emperor's new clothes.

But Wieseltier hasn't succeeded in his "endeavor" or borne its consequences very well by liberal standards or by biblical ones. Next month I sketch my own small understanding of the tricky but essential balance of republicanism and religion, in an essay on Puritans, Hebrews, Jews, and the American republic for the fall issue of World Affairs Journal.

Suffice it to say here that both Wieseltier and Podhoretz, along with other neo-connish pitchmen for Judaism such as David Gelernter, Elliott Abrams, and Martin Peretz, remind me of those French Muslim adolescent girls who wore their religious head scarves to public school, less to obey the commands of their patriarchal faith than to win from the liberal state some of the individual recognition and rights that young people in liberal societies crave but that their own faith didn't give them.

Similarly, neoconservatives brandish veils of Jewish tradition alongside contradictory liberal claims, demanding respect from a republican civic culture that finds its truest strengths in a kind of vulnerability they don't understand and in arts and graces of republican dialogue, more than in established power and capitalist wealth. None of these men seems to me to understand this about American civic-republican culture, or to know how to nurture or defend it. They certainly don't realize that they have drained and damaged it when they thought they were vindicating it by singing its glories.

Wieseltier does know, though -- as Podhoretz does not -- that the Right isn't a plausible alternative to the fatuities of the Left. Conservatives cannot reconcile their yearnings for an ordered, sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of global capital, which disrupts the communities and traditions they claim to cherish. Yet neither Wieseltier nor Podhoretz ever says anything serious about capitalism, as is evident from the first, utterly useless paragraphs of Wieseltier's review.

Wieselter does know, too - as, again, Podhoretz does not -- that both left and right have valid claims to certain truths. The left understands the necessity of public provision and planning, of strengthening the village to raise the child. Without that, the individual dignity that conservatives cherish could never flourish. But the right understands the equally important truth that without irreducibly personal responsibility and initiative, even the best leftist social engineering can turn people into clients, cogs, or cannon fodder.

A good society, like a healthy person, strides on both feet -- a left foot of social provision and a right foot of personal responsibility -- without worrying whether all its weight is on one or the other at any given point in a balanced stride. But ideologues of left and right try to strengthen one foot at the expense of the other, each side clinging to its "own" truth until it becomes a half truth that curdles into a lie and leaves each side right only about how the other is wrong.

A civic-republican ethos resists "solidarity" with left or right yet draws from both. Wieseltier has long claimed to do this, and that claim serves him well in critiquing Podhoretz. But there's a difference between an honest American synthesis of left and right and Wieseltier's faithless prevarications as a liberator of Iraq, an apologist for Scooter Libby, and a self-appointed rabbinic and mystical interpreter of Ancient Wisdom for the unwashed.

His expose of Podhoretz's short-circuited, Manichaean Jewishness and bombastic Americanism is effective, and therefore welcome. Yet something about his cultural and political arbitrage seems as dreary, even as dreadful, as the damage-control opportunism of the Book Review editors who publish him.