Most Dishonest Intellectual Alive

The excellent Matthew Yglesias rends Joshua Miravchik into shreds and gobbets, and then devours the gobbets:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: "Operation Comeback": Joshua Muravchik writes in Foreign Policy about how to save neoconservatism. The main priorities will be surprising -- it involves a lot of lying, and a lot of smearing of one's enemies. For example, "'Neocon' is now widely synonymous with 'ultraconservative' or, for some, 'dirty Jew.'" Yes, it's true. Neocon is in disrepute not because neoconservative ideas make very little sense and the policies they've advocated have proven disastrous -- it's because we hate the Jews. Similarly, here's step one:

Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth conspiracy. The second probably originated with insufficiently reconstructed Stalinists.

What crazy canards! This here is the Amazon page for Irving Kristol's 1995 book, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. John J. Miller writes that in the book, "Kristol sketches his intellectual growth, which began while he was a young man attending neo-Trotskyite meetings in Brooklyn (where he met his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb) and eventually took him to Washington, D.C., where today he is a fixture at right-of-center political gatherings." Canard! Publisher's Weekly writes, "Particularly interesting is his previously unpublished opening memoir concerning influences such as Lionel Trilling, Leo Strauss and army life as well as the founding of his magazine and his work with the American Enterprise Institute to extend conservatism beyond free enterprise to reflect "on the roots of social and cultural stability." Canard!

In his essay "A Man Without Footnotes" included in The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer recounts that "Irving Kristol at one point wrote that the two chief influences on his thinking were Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss." Canard!

Why is Foreign Policy publishing this crap?

Why shouldn't Foreign Policy? Are they in the business of publishing smart things by intelligent people seeking to understand the world? Or are they in some other business?