“During February 2009 Andrew Sullivan wrote he no longer took neoconservatism seriously because its basic tenet was defense of Israel:[69]
The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right. That’s the conclusion I’ve been forced to these last few years. And to insist that America adopt exactly the same constant-war-as-survival that Israelis have been slowly forced into... But America is not Israel. And once that distinction is made, much of the neoconservative ideology collapses.
Neoconservatives respond to charges of merely rationalizing aid for Israel by noting that their “position on the Middle East conflict was exactly congruous with the neoconservative position on conflicts everywhere else in the world, including places where neither Jews nor Israeli interests could be found – - not to mention the fact that non-Jewish neoconservatives took the same stands on all of the issues as did their Jewish confrères.”[70]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
When you look at that one fact alone (Dick Cheney e.g. is a big neocon as was, arguably, Dick Nixon, Cheney's mentor in the 60's), you begin to realize that the Leftists who keep carping about "neocons" sound an awful lot like Bill Buckley's recollections of the antisemitism of Westbrook Pegler, who brought every conversation back, somehow, to the insidiousness of David Ben-Gurion and his Joooooos.
Those guys are the descendants and heirs of the old white-shoe antisemites who started it all back in the 1870's by shutting Jews out of their clubs, resorts, businesses, and universities.
That all said, there's still a considerable divide between paleocons and neocons, the former being modern-day economic liberals of the 1890's and supporters of e.g. Bob Taft and Barry Goldwater; but the neocons are more like 1950's "defense Democrats" of the Henry Jackson, Sam Nunn, Sam Rayburn school. They favor liberal social and cultural values (they can't stand people like Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Sarah Palin, and Ronald Reagan) and are very urban/Atlantic-Slope in their thinking, which has lots of deficits in the American Values account and is more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian. (And remember, Hamilton opposed the Bill of Rights.)