Actually, it’s probably too soon to tell what happened to the neocons’ reputations. We’ll have to wait to the next Administration, when they’re no longer insiders or allies or connected, to see.
You too, eh?
I was all prepared to talk about the Tyranid-repelling Dyson Sphere and everything 
Willlliam kristol was recently on The Daily Show and he claimed that George W. Bush would be known as one of the great presidents. He is sucking Bush’s cock and is so deluded thzt I can’t imagine any major new outlet would hire him let alone the NYT!
I came across some links about the welfare machine for right-wing nuts. For the modern conservative chatterer, being wrong isn’t a career-killer: just espousing an approved point of view is sufficient.
Link
Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense who threatened to fire anybody who engaged in post-invasion planning because it might slow the rush to war, is now a “Distinguished (sic) visiting fellow” at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a long time advocate of the Iraq war, was bumped upwards to a stint at the World Bank. He had to leave though when he found that international institution to be less tolerant of hypocrisy: those who go on about 3rd world corruption should avoid the appearance of nepotism. Mr. Wolfowitz is now a visiting scholar at the AEI, joining such luminaries as Newt Gingrich and the author of the infamous torture memo, John Yoo. AEI’s list of approved scholars and fellows.
Oh yeah, John Yoo is facing war crime charges in Germany. I doubt whether he will face trial any time soon though.
John Bolton was shunted over the UN, as Condy Rice didn’t want him sabotaging her post 2004 efforts at diplomacy. After he resigned that position in 2006, he won a cosy sinecure at AEI.
Richard Perle, friend of Iranian intelligence agent Ahmed Chalabi is a now resident fellow at… AEI!
Scooter Libby, who passed classified information about a WMD analyst to a crooked reporter, thereby putting foreign intelligence contacts at risk, was disbarred (for perjury). George Bush commuted his sentence, so that Scoots didn’t have to inhabit a 6x6 cell for undue amounts of time.[1] Still, he doesn’t appear to be an AEI fellow, and Valerie Plame’s civil case probably absorbs a fair amount of his time. Surprisingly, it appears that felony conviction may actually hurt one’s conservative career.
A week after the 2007 conviction of Lewis Libby for multiple counts of perjury, AEI held one its galas. The mood of the neocons was not introspective: indeed they celebrated the occasion by bestowing Bernard Lewis with the Irving Kristol Award. Some of those who are unconstrained by fact, observation and the consequences of their advice lead a swell life.
[1] This Presidential decision apparently lacked direct precedent.
That just means there will always be a place for neocons at neocon think-tanks, which is unsurprising. (What surprising is that any deep-pockets parties are still, after all this, willing to lavish funding on things like the Hoover Institute and AEI, but that’s another discussion.) Asking about their “reputations” is to ask how much influence they will enjoy in the wider political sphere in the future. Probably very little. I.e., it’s one thing to get your column published in the Weekly Standard and another to get it published in the . . . New York Times . . . waitamminnit . . .