Hess also noted that “Dowd is not yet ready to assume responsibility for her own role” in tarring and feathering Lewinsky. She appears to be correct in that assessment. Dowd glibly dismissed Hess’s criticisms when they first appeared. Nor has this deterred her from writing about the #MeToo movement, to the consternation of the Daily Beast’s Erin Gloria Ryan and Vox’s Laura McGann.

If Dowd’s discussion of #MeToo has been problematic, her prior discussions of American foreign policy have been blinkered. Dowd wrote a whopper of a column during the heat of the 2016 election claiming that, “on some foreign policy issues, the roles are reversed for the candidates and their parties. It’s Hillary the Hawk against Donald the Quasi-Dove.” That column did not age well, either. Trump has increased the deployment of U.S. troops in the Middle East, escalated the conflict with Iran and dispatched thousands of troops to the southern border for no good reason. The one area where Trump likely pursued a more dovish course of action than Clinton would have — North Korea — is not going well at all.

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All of this leads us to Dowd’s column this past weekend, which has garnered predictable praise from some quarters, about whether Trump is really so bad compared with, you know, the neoconservatives who implacably oppose him:

[Donald Trump is] such a menace that it’s tempting to cheer any vituperative critic and grab any handy truncheon. But villainizing Trump should not entail sanitizing other malefactors. And we should acknowledge that the president is right on one point: For neocons, journalists, authors, political hacks and pundits, there is a financial incentive to demonize the president, not to mention an instant halo effect. Only Trump could get the pussy-hat crowd to fill Times Square to protest Jeff Sessions’s firing.... Even for Washington, the capital of do-overs and the soulless swamp where horrendous mistakes never prevent you from cashing in and getting another security clearance, this is a repellent spectacle. War criminals-turned-liberal heroes are festooned with book and TV contracts, podcasts and op-ed perches.

How dare neoconservatives reap fruits similar to what Dowd has reaped for two decades now!!

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts remains of the view that the Trump administration poses a far greater threat at the moment than the dissipated neoconservative movement. But it is worth noting a few additional points.

The first is the degree to which, in her column, Dowd conflates the responsibility for the Iraq War of former vice president Richard B. Cheney (who deserves whatever Adam McKay dishes out in his forthcoming film) with pundits who advocated for the war. The latter certainly merit some opprobrium, but there is a difference between writing in advocacy for a cause and, you know, being the architect for the disastrous foreign policy embodying that cause. Dowd, for example, does not deserve blame for Bill Clinton’s actions, even if she does deserve some criticism.

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Second, Dowd misunderstands the incentives of the foreign policy wonk. Sure, folks like Eliot A. Cohen don’t mind writing columns and books and speeches, but they like being in power and influencing policy a hell of a lot more. This is what they risked when they organized petitions against Trump during the GOP primaries and warned people against working for the administration. This is what they are experiencing now. Critics presume that they did this because Trump was so at odds with their hawkish views. It is worth considering, however, that the moral revulsion that neoconservatives feel about Trump might be genuine.

Third, the reason that penitent neoconservatives have the perch they possess is the rest of the GOP has fallen in lockstep with Trump’s brand of pluto-populism. Apostates always generate more media attention than partisan opponents, particularly when those opponents lack political power. Now that the Democrats have captured the House, it will be interesting to see whether their foreign policy criticisms of Trump start to command greater media oxygen.