Max Boot is among the conservative columnists I esteem the most. One reason is that he has to be more than a bit brave because the right is not ordinarily cordial to those who dissent on its keystone issues. Of course, he is not the only conservative to be sensible on gay matters. Still...

Ben Smith has the goods on a letter to Obama from an esteemed roster of neocons--including Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Pete Wehner, Max Boot, Cliff May, Randy Scheunemann, and other familiar fellow travelers--urging him "to fully resource this effort [in Afghanistan and] do everything possible to minimize the risk of failure."

This fall, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. launched a search for a new conservative columnist. It had been nearly three years since William Safire had retired from his weekly column in 2005, and Sulzberger’s initial replacement, libertarian John Tierney, lasted just 20 months before abandoning his column.

In the weeks after September 11, 2001, Clifford May, a former journalist and Republican National Committee official, launched a new think tank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Unlike the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or other Washington bastions of chin-tugging wonks, FDD devotes itself almost exclusively to Topic A: international terrorism. While FDD has a smattering of Democrats like Chuck Schumer on its board, its approach announces its ideological allegiances. The group strongly advocates liberal democracy, aggressively promoted by the United States, as the antidote to Middle Eastern terrorism. That is, the group trumpets the Bush doctrine.