Aesthetic Insanity

by digby

So I see that the NY Times has teamed up with Drudge and Fox News again, calling any Democrat “crazy” who doesn’t fold himself into a little ball in the corner and meekly take his punishment from the Republicans.

Earlier the wingnuts started hyperventilating that Bill Clinton had completely lost it when he vociferously defended his honor in the face of Mike Wallace’s hellspawn Chris sandbagging him on Fox News after persuading him to come on to talk about the Global Initiative. It made Big Bill a little hot under the collar to have to be rudely interrogated by this Faux journalist who was dutifully following the “Path to 9/11” script and implying that he was responsible for the attacks. Frankly, I would have thought there was something wrong with him if he hadn’t gotten mad.

And now I see that a would-be MoDo named Jennifer Senior is reviewing books written by liberals and calling them “berserk,” unhinged and unglued. Worst of all she feels they confirm all the worst stereotypes about liberals, which is so awfully annoying when you are a smug, contemptuous journalist writing book reviews about politics for the NY Times and everyone confuses you with people who just don’t know how to behave.

The embarrasing books in question are “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration” a polemic written by Louis Lapham, editor of Harpers magazine and “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime” a compilation of columns written by journalist Sidney Blumenthal.

Senior is disturbed by the angry tone:

One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.

Yes, getting angry about usurping the constitution, torture and sending thousands to their deaths in a losing war for inexplicable reasons among a hundred other outrages is aesthetically jarring. Please, children, use your indoor voices. There’s no reason to scream.

I haven’t read Lapham’s book, although this review prompted me to order it immediately. I expect polemics to be filled with righteous indignation and I’m quite sure I will not be offended by the intemperate tone. Indeed, that’s why I bought it. Lapham, apparently, still has a beating heart in his body and a functioning brain in his head.

I have read the other book, “How Bush Rules” by Sidney Blumenthal and I simply don’t get what Senior’s gripe is. It’s a compilation of columns written during Bush’s tenure that lays out in damning detail the case for his total immorality, corruption and incompetence. The truth hurts but it’s still the truth. There are no inconvenient facts to “gerrymander” (which means, what?)

I do agree that Blumenthal is guilty of a very serious misjudgment, however. He sees a difference between the Ken Starr witchhunt and Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Valerie Plame matter. You see, Blumenthal thought that a blatantly partisan special prosecutor fishing around in President Clinton’s pants was inappropriate. Therefore, by Senior’s logic, he must think that all federal prosecutions are inappropriate. The fact that he dedicated his book to Joseph Wilson and included columns about the Scooter Libby jihad (oh, excuse me, that’s so aesthetically inappropriate) … Scooter Libby’s noble whistleblowing campaign to inform the American people what their government was doing, is hypocritical. Surely his previous defense of president Clinton against the Republican smear machine means it would be inconsistent for him to speak out on behalf of another victim of the Republican smear machine. Oh wait.

Anyway, he’s done something aesthetically hypocritical but I can’t quite figure out what it is. And he’s kinda crazy and obsessive, too.

After a while, it’s hard to deny that these columns have a certain cumulative power. But their content has also been curated with one aim in mind, and that’s to cast the Bush administration in the grimmest possible light, rather like Philip Roth telling the story of his protagonist in “Everyman” from the point of view of his illnesses. Blumenthal also has a taste for tiresome epithets — he calls Paul Wolfowitz “the neoconservative Robespierre” and compares Bush (yawn) to a cowboy. And rather than letting damning facts speak for themselves, Blumenthal insists on pushing his arguments to the breaking point. He claims Bush had “plenty of information” to act on before Sept. 11, but fails to produce anything more specific than the findings of the 9/11 Commission. He suggests the tragedy of New Orleans might have been prevented if funds for a flood control project hadn’t been diverted to the Iraq war (as if dozens of other factors hadn’t conspired against the poor city). He even suggests that Rudolph Giuliani became a figure of national reassurance after the Sept. 11 attacks “in large part because President Bush was not to be seen for days.” (Does he really think Giuliani would have been less impressive if Bush had responded with alacrity? Was Blumenthal anywhere near New York that morning?)

Well, this clears something up once and for all. Apparently it is quite common for journalists like Jennifer Senior to believe that it’s their job to mitigate unpleasant facts about President Bush or risk being accused of lacking credibility. Good to know.

Apparently, Mr Bringdown Blumenthal should have included a few columns about some of the “good things” Bush has done to even out the grim ones. I’m not sure what they would be. Those Barney videos are sort of cute; perhaps Blumenthal could have gotten a column or two out of them. After all, as she says “it’s hard to trust a narrator who only and always assumes the worst.” Lord knows George W. Bush has given us little reason to assume the best but he does like to make jokes at others’ expense, so maybe that should count for something. (Senior really enjoys that kind of humor apparently.)

I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but be amused that she faults Blumenthal for not providing more evidence that Bush had “plenty of information” than the 9/11 commission did. After all, all the 9/11 commission found was that Bush sat on his ass for eight months ignoring terrorism while Richard Clark and others were running around with their hair on fire screaming that the terrorists were getting ready to strike inside the United States any day. Surely one needs more evidence than that before one can condemn Bush for his inaction.

Senior delivers the sweeping coup de grace in her final paragraph:

The left has often complained that what it needs isn’t polite speech, but voices as pungent as those on the right. Maybe so. But even the angriest people on the right tend to be funny. Books like this one are a depressing reminder of how important it is for writers to have a slight sense of humor about themselves, if they want to be taken at all seriously.

Oh my goodness yes. The most obvious characteristic of the right’s “pungent” books about liberals being “Unhinged,” “The Party of Death” and “Godless, Slanderous Traitors,” is their self-effacing humor. How refreshing it is to be called a fascist by people with such delightful wit.(And you’ll note that those books are written about their fellow Americans, not the political leadership, as these books about Bush are.) I now understand why the rightwing publishing industry is taken seriously by journalists like Jennifer Senior. They apparently share an aesthetic obtuseness, which explains a lot.

Blumenthal’s book, by the way, is very good. You probably read at least some of the columns in Salon or elsewhere before, but it’s seeing them in their totality, over time, that gives the full picture of how Bush rules. And I have to say that when I read it I didn’t find a thing funny about it. I guess somewhere between the intelligence faking, the waterboarding and the constitution shredding I lost my sense of humor.

.