The mugging of Leo Strauss began at least 20 years ago - somewhere around the time of Newsweek's article terming him "an obscure philosopher" exercising uncommon power from the grave (he died in 1973) through his "Washington disciples" constituting a "brotherhood," a "club," a "cult." Media, academic, and Hollywood luminaries then, and since, have worried deeply about the influence of a philosopher who wrote, for instance, these four brief samples from a vast oeuvre:

"(How often we are bewildered that Machiavelli, who is) more responsible than any other man for the break with the Great Tradition, should in the very act of breaking prove to be the heir, the by no means unworthy heir, to that supreme art of writing which that tradition manifested at its peaks."

"Confronted by the appalling alternative that man, or human thought, must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes, we are forced to wonder how we could escape from this dilemma."

"(Let us consider the need in free society for) an unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution."

"A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are."

From such thinking and rhetoric about the immutable principles of natural right do conspiracies flow. "Leo Strauss" produces 2.1 million hits on Google; the same words produce 886 hits from the past five years on Nexis, the immense database for newspapers and magazines. Particularly now, during the Bush administration, Strauss' enemies regard him as the godfather of neoconservatives who lamentably have led us into the war against terror and its personifications: Saddam, Arafat, Osama, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, Nasrallah, et al.

So evil is Strauss now deemed to have been, notes The New York Times' Edward Rothstein, that "in 2004 Strauss' face demonically loomed over Tim Robbins' agitprop antiwar play 'Embedded,' at the Public Theater in New York, as he was hailed with brutish chants. Books like "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" (Yale) by Anne Norton have relished telling of his baleful influence."

Anyone drawing the attention of the Big Media and triple-threat Robbins (a writer, producer and actor), anyone roiling the waters in political science departments nationwide and inspiring his legions to self-preserving war against jihadists, must be a conspirator of the First Order.

Has to be - even if it's a conspiracy (hey, could it be part of Hillary's "vast right-wing conspiracy"?) he didn't know he was in.