After an almost 30-year run of counterintuitive projects, insider scheming and unctuous deceit, neoconservatives may discover, amid rubble of a likely GOP catastrophe Nov. 4, that the next backs knifed are their own.

In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion in 2003 - what must be the high-water mark of the neocon movement - David Frum memorably counseled that doubtful paleoconservatives and antiwar Republicans should be purged from the party. It was the kind threatening, pseudo-Bolshevik smack talk suitable for a political mindset that began in the palpitating post-Trotsky Left.

But now, those one-time targets are seeing a glimmer of hope in the imminent ballot-box ass-kicking: Anger post-debacle could provide a chance to scour the GOP of its neoconservative domination.

Neocons themselves already are pointing fingers and assigning blame - none of it their own, of course. David Brooks has picked out Sarah Palin as the "cancer" shearing off reliable votes, a sentiment echoed by Charles Krauthammer. Ken Adelman, who once famously predicted the Iraq War would be a "cakewalk", has endorsed Obama, joining some other notable rats deserting the leaky tub.

Frum himself has counseled that the RNCC choke off funds to the party's combustive Presidential candidate and steer money to embattled Congressional campaigns for once-safe seats which are now in jeopardy. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his head on block election day.  But that kind of panic-button brainstorming may be too much, too late.

Traditional conservatives have long been wary of the neoconservative tendency toward "big government" - hefty spending programs, defense intitiatives and a policy of international interventionism. George W. Bush proclaimed himself an opponent of "nation-building" in his 2000 debates with Al Gore, stamping as misadventure the Clinton Administration's operations in the Balkans. At that point, it was difficult to argue with him, since allegations of Serbia's perfidy were countered by NATO's inability to find traces of massacres and burial pits, and a Serbian-cleansed Kosovo was turned over to a cartel of drug smugglers and Islamic radicals.

But the attack of 9/11 provided the neoconservatives with the pretext they needed for their own grand crusadet: Establishing "unilateralism" in the form of new American Imperium. After all, our status as the world's sole remaining superpower was as pointless as a bib on a boar hog unless we could jump the rest of the world through the flaming hoops of our arrogance and militant aggression.

That was just about 180-degrees from the tenets of traditional American conservatism, which long has cleaved to John Quincy Adams' admonition against going forth in search of foreign dragons to destroy. That worldview also has favored American foreign policy that actually benefits this country, not the security interests of another - even if it's Israel's as envisioned by the Likud Party - or energy and defense interests.

On domestic policy, neoconservative influence amended traditional Right approaches to ultimate exclusive corporate control of economic policy. In and out of politics, they were vocal proponents of deregulation - delivering us a flabby, fragile economic base that finally was squashed by greed from the top.

Few issues so crystallize neoconservative public relations agility than immigration. By smearing opposition to open borders policies in terms like "racism" and "nativist", they were able to help ensure a supply of cheap labor in the American employment pool, and one with enough illicit element to guarantee such workers fell through the cracks of workplace safety and fairness rules. The Bush Administration has been unable to apply neither equity nor foresight to immigration policy simply because such approaches were skillfully sabotaged before they could be developed.

Fugitives from the "rightish" Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party, neoconservatives popped up like toadstools in the 1970s, and over the next decade rose to the top of GOP prominence on the self-generated heat of their "intellectual" component. But the historical breadth and insight they tirelessly brayed were their unique possessions in fact were colored by a rigid agenda of anti-democratic elitism and backward warmongering; if the 20th century taught us anything, it is that ideology is a poor template for government and economics.

It's easy to feel schadenfreude at the GOP's dilemma - certainly the Democrats have seen their portion of division and catastrophic failure. But alleviating the baleful influence of the neocons could mean a more sensible foreign policy, and a more civil domestic political dialogue.