GETTING THE NEOCONS WRONG.

Jon Chait took to The Washington Post this weekend to cry out in protest against Chas Freeman, the incoming director of the National Intelligence Council. Calling Freeman an "an ideological fanatic" -- but a realist fanatic, not a neoconservative fanatic -- Chait warned that some might think that "the National Intelligence Council job is so technocratic that Freeman's rigid ideology won't have any serious consequences. But think back to the neocon ideologues whom Bush appointed to such positions. That didn't work out very well, did it?"

I think the technical term for this is "analogy fail." I don't have a strong sense of the universe of positions and opinions held by Freeman. Nor does Chait, who confines his evidence of realist fanaticism to a leaked e-mail from an online message group. But the role Freeman has been asked to play in the Obama administration is precisely the opposite of the role assumed by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. What "didn't work out very well" in the Bush White House -- aside, of course, from the Iraq War, which Chait (and I) supported and Freeman opposed -- was that unpopular opinions went unheard in the administration.

Freeman, possessor of many unpopular opinions, has been invited to join the Obama administration to protect against the emergence of a similar hegemony of popular thought. He may or may not be a "rigid ideologue," but he's not the same sort of rigid ideologue as Susan Rice or Robert Gates. Which is much the point: The neoconservatives weren't seen as fanatics in 2003, but that was in part because so few credible voices were willing to risk unpopularity by questioning them. That, as Chait's op-ed decisively proves, is not a character flaw Freeman suffers from. Which suggests that whatever problems his appointment presents, they're not the problems that the neoconservatives presented in the Bush years.