Whither the neo-cons? The American Conservative (via The Real Glenn, not Mobius Dick) has some ideas:

The neoconservative lines were first broken two years ago when Iraq War architects Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz were ushered out of the Pentagon—a virtual decapitation of the cadre that planned the war. Scooter Libby’s indictment and subsequent departure from Dick Cheney’s side was a further blow. By last summer, George Will, the dean of establishment conservative journalism in Washington, had turned openly against the group. Noting Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol’s call for the U.S. to use the Lebanon war as a pretext to bomb Iran, Will remarked, “The most magnificently misnamed neoconservatives are the most radical people in this town.” Kristol received more of the same medicine when he appeared on National Public Radio with Gen. William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Kristol certainly wants to make [Lebanon] our war. He’s the man with remarkable moral clarity. He tends to forget the clarity he had on getting us into the mess in Mesopotamia. I think if you look at his record, you’d wonder why anybody would allow him to speak publicly anymore.” Thus moral clarity—that robust quality the neoconservatives had long ascribed to themselves—is returned as mockery.

Mockery translates, as Digby's important post showed, into lack of deference.

And now, the prediction (and we will check back):

In the short run at least, neoconservatism is wounded and is likely to present a different public face. The soaring language about how it is America’s destiny to spread democracy throughout the globe, the efforts to define an American global empire as something greatly to be desired—this will dropped, a casualty of the Iraq fiasco.

But will matters get Civil? Apparently not:

What won’t be dropped is the neoconservatives’ attachment to Israel and the tendency to conflate the Jewish state’s interests (as defined in right-wing Israeli terms) with America’s. So one can look forward to neoconservative agitation on two fronts: a powerful campaign to draw the United States into a war to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential and an equally loud effort in support of maintaining Israeli dominance over the West Bank and denying the Palestinians meaningful statehood. Those who argue effectively for a more even-handed American policy towards Israel and Palestine will risk the full measure of smears linking them to historical anti-Semitism. The archetypical neoconservative argument will no longer be Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol’s call for American “benevolent global hegemony,” but Gabriel Schoenfeld’s attack on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in Commentary, an essay that sought to connect the pair’s work to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And, of course, it's all about the Benjamins. The funding:

Perhaps most importantly, neoconservatism still commands more salaries—able people who can pursue ideological politics as fulltime work in think tanks and periodicals—than any of its rivals. The millionaires who fund AEI and the New York Sun will not abandon neoconservatism because Iraq didn’t work out. The reports of the movement’s demise are thus very much exaggerated.

 Bingo!