For every op-ed action, there is an out-of-proportion blogosphere reaction

Intentionally or not, Roger Cohen has some fun with the netroots in his New York Times column today: A few years back, at the height of the jingoistic post-9/11 wave, the dirtiest word in the American political lexicon was ?liberal.? Everyone from President Bush to Ann Coulter was using it to denote wimplike, Volvo-driving softies too spineless for dangerous times and too given to speaking French.... [A]s America bumped down to earth, ?liberal? lost the mantle of political insult most foul. Its place was taken by the pervasive, glib ?neocon.?.... What?s a neocon? A liberal ?mugged by reality,? Irving Kristol said. The reality in question, back then, was communism-as-evil, the centrality of military force, the indispensability of the American idea and much else. But that?s ancient history. The neocons are the guys who gave us the Iraq war. They?re the guys who, in the words of leftist commentator and blogger Matthew Yglesias, ?believe that America should coercively dominate the world through military force? and ?believe in a dogmatic form of American exceptionalism? and ?favor the creation of a U.S.-dominated ?universal empire.? ? But the term, in these Walt-Mearsheimered days, often denotes more than that. Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply U.S. power to Israel?s benefit. Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States ?on the right side of history.? In short, neoconitis, a condition as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back, has left scant room for liberal hawks.... Democrats have learned from their nuance-free bludgeoning by Republicans in the 2004 election, and they?re reciprocating. I?ll see your ?liberal? with a ?neocon? ? and truth be damned. This has prompted some acerbic replies. Here's one example: I assure you, we liberals are smart enough to know that [Paul] Berman is not Wolfowitz. No one, except for you, Berman, and other liberal hawks is confused about this (and Feith, but he's confused about everything). Certainly your critics aren't, because if they were, you'd give an example, and you don't.... No, Roger, I honestly don't think you're a neocon. I just think you're a goddammed fool. And you're a fool who still doesn't understand that only incompetents who rose to unimaginable power, like Bush and Rumsfeld, would ever have thought the invasion of Iraq was a good idea in the first place.Meanwhile, Yglesias doesn't seem thrilled with being quoted in the New York Times: I'm not sure if I'm meant to be included within the scope of those nameless Jew-haters who appear to be criticizing an ideological movement of the American right while actually criticizing a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, but if you're interested in the post from which Cohen drew those quotations, it's here and you'll see that neither Israel nor Zionism actually comes up. Um... OK, a few things: 1) Seriously, how do netroots types attain this level of cognitive dissonance? Perhaps Digby Tristero has not conflated liberal hawks with neoconservatives, but is he seriously suggesting that no one else hasperformed this rhetorical trick? 2) In his response, Yglesias seems to be purposefully misreading Cohen's essay to infer that he's being lumped together with "Jew-haters." It seems pretty clear to me that Cohen is transitioning from Yglesias to others in the paragraph break. 3) Why should the netroots be upset about Cohen's argument? Everything from Crashing The Gate onwards has been about how the left should appropriate the tactics of the right, because it was politically effective. Isn't this tactic exactly what Cohen is describing?