Bush's Top Neocon Denies Existence of Neocons

 In real life, Richard Perle is the neoconservative mastermind who devised the Bush Doctrine and argued vociferously for the Iraq war. But apparently, Perle lives in a different world, writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. At a foreign policy forum yesterday, Perle insisted that:

• He is not a neoconservative.
• Neoconservatives don't exist.
• If they did exist, you couldn’t blame them for Bush’s foreign policy.

“There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy,” Perle insisted. So what about the 1996 report he co-authored that lays out neoconservative foreign policy? “I didn’t approve it. I didn’t read it.” His barnstorming tome An End to Evil? “There’s hardly an ideology in that book.” His cheerleading for the Iraq war? “Regime change does not imply military force … when I use the term." (More Richard Perle stories.)