I’m busy today, but I did happen to just catch Howie Kurtz as he told Wolf Blitzer that the real Talon news story is that “liberal bloggers” went after “Jeff Gannon’s” personal life. (Jeff told Howie that he was being threatened and stalked.) Howie didn’t mention that it was the fact that “Jeff” wrote under an alias that led these bloggers to find his beefcake pics online and that he’d been registering domain names for gay escort services. Apparently, it’s impolite to reveal such things even when the person in question makes a living as a homophobic wingnut.
He and Wolf both agreed that the White House press corps is just full of fiery partisans and there is nothing wrong with them being allowed to ask the president questions. Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone who writes for a front group’s web site being allowed into the White House on a “day pass.” Howie said that in this day and age of blogging you don’t have to write for a newspaper or magazine to be a member of the white house press corps.
Ok. Any of you liberal bloggers in DC who would like to get into the White House and ask Scotty and Dubya some questions, feel free to just show up. According to Howie and Wolf there’s no general rule against it.
There’s growing buzz here in Washington, as well as over on the Internet, about a White House reporter some say was acting on behalf of a conservative group.
Howard Kurtz of CNN’s “RELIABLE SOURCES” and “The Washington Post” joining us from “The Washington Post” newsroom.
What’s going on here, Howie?
HOWARD KURTZ, “RELIABLE SOURCES”: Well, Jeff Gannon is his name. At least that’s the name he uses professionally. It’s not his real name.
And he’s a reporter for a couple of online sites. He’s a self- described conservative journalist. One of the Web sites his work appears on is called GOPUSA. And he pretty much operated below the radar until he got the chance to ask President Bush a question two weeks ago. Let’s take a look at that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
QUESTION: Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you said you’re going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KURTZ: Now, that question, Wolf, kind of put a target on Jeff Gannon’s back. A lot of liberal bloggers began digging into his background. In the last 24 hours, they’ve exposed his real name. They’ve raised questions about some sexually provocative Web addresses that he registered on one of his companies, but never actually did anything with.
And Gannon has now resigned from the two Web sites that he was writing for.
BLITZER: Is there any evidence that there’s a connection, that the White House put him up to this to throw these kind of questions whether to Scott McClellan or to the president? Any evidence of wrongdoing, first of all, on the part of the White House?
KURTZ: No evidence whatsoever. I talked to Scott McClellan about this today, the White House spokesman. He said, first of all, President Bush didn’t know who Jeff Gannon was when he called on him at that news conference.
But McClellan knows who he is. He calls on him at White House briefings from time to time. He says that there are a lot of people in the White House press room who have strong opinions and sometimes put them into their questions and it’s not his job as the press secretary to be deciding who can get into the White House and who can’t based on their political views.
Gannon, by the way, says, sure, he’s very conservative. He makes no bones about that. But he thinks that a lot of the reporters in the White House press room are liberal, and he provides some balance.
BLITZER: What’s the name of the organization, the news organization, he reported for. And what political connections did you discover may or may not exist to that news organization?
KURTZ: Well, he writes for a site called Talon News, which appears to be kind of a straight news site. But all of the stories that he writes also appear on a site that’s called GOPUSA, which, as you might expect, is a conservative site. In fact, it’s motto is: We’re bringing the conservative message to America.
And both of those sites are owned by a man named Bobby Eberle, who is a Texas Republican activist in the state of Texas. So the issue here isn’t really Jeff Gannon’s ideology. He’s the first to tell you that he comes at journalism from a conservative perspective. The issue I think is, should some of his liberal critics, these liberal bloggers, have started investigating his personal life in an effort to discredit him?
It’s fine to disagree with his politics, but did they go too far, I think a lot of people are asking, in dragging in some of this personal stuff?
BLITZER: I used to be a White House correspondent for many years, sat through numerous briefings. There are plenty of journalists that wear their politics on their sleeve, liberals, conservatives. What’s wrong with journalists having these kind of views, being advocacy journalists, if you will?
KURTZ: I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, as long as they make clear what their views are, as Jeff Gannon clearly did.
A lot of people are questioning, well, why does this guy have White House press credentials? Because he doesn’t write for a newspaper or magazine. Everything he writes is simply online. But in the age of blogging, that’s hardly unusual. And he doesn’t have a permanent — what’s called a hard pass. He just gets cleared into the White House on a day-to-day basis, which is a privilege that is pretty much open to any journalist.
So I think it’s absolutely fair game to critique his stories, to argue with what he writes, to question his views. And he does that to other members of the press as well. But what precipitated his resignation is that he says that on behalf — out of concern for his family — and he told me last week that he had been threatened, that he had been stalked — this has gotten so personal that he felt he needed to step down as the White House correspondent for Talon News.
BLITZER: And it does come within the context of some of the other embarrassments, Armstrong Williams and some other issues, which we won’t get into right now.
But Howard Kurtz doing some digging, doing some reporting for us — thanks very much, Howard Kurtz.
KURTZ: Thank you.
Update II:
I hadn’t seen this earlier Kurtz Gannon apologia. He really doesn’t understand the implications of this whole panoply of payola skullduggery, does he? Or perhaps he does …
Campaign Desk points out that Joe Klein is pulling things out of the ether:
Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President by Democrats during the [State of the Union] speech.
“No! No! No!” they shouted, inaccurately, when Bush asserted that the Social Security trust fund would, in a decade or so, start paying out more money than it takes in. If nothing is done, it surely will.
Campaign Desk correctly notes:
Beyond the fact that such “hooting” was far from unprecedented, Klein’s short-term memory must be playing tricks on him. Democrats did not start crying out “No! No! No!” when the president asserted that the trust fund would soon start paying out more money than it takes in. Rather, the Democrats accurately started calling out “No! No! No!” when the president inaccurately asserted that “By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt.” You can hear for yourself on the White House video of the address (Real Media or Windows Media) — the moment in question is about 15 minutes into the speech.
You can also hear the boorish boos of Republicans when Clinton said in the 1997 address that we didn’t need to change the constitution to balance the budget. (Little did we know then that the 90’s GOP balanced budget amendment hobby horse was actually designed to stop themselves from bankrupting the country.)
Here’s a nice little reminder from way back in 1999 of what the country was like in the days when our un-boorish representatives practiced civility and decency:
Reps. Robert Schaffer (R-Colo.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) sent a letter to colleagues last week arguing that they should skip the speech because Clinton “is demonstrating his lack of respect for the Congress and its legitimate role.”
But Schaffer had few illusions that his absence would be noticed: “What happens tonight is Congress and the president coming together to send a message there’s some semblance of normalcy in Washington, and the detestable conduct of the president is somehow tolerated,” he said. “The president doesn’t care and nobody cares. The theatrical production is going to go on unimpeded.”
Klein, no doubt, was sitting in front of a camera somewhere that night, hunched over the desk like a slobbering beast, so intensely focused on Clinton’s manly member that he simply didn’t hear a thing.
President Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, will take on a wider role in developing and coordinating policy in the president’s second term, the White House announced on Tuesday.
Rove, who was Bush’s top political strategist during his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, will become a deputy White House chief of staff in charge of coordinating policy between the White House Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.
I hate to bring this up because it’s so indelicate and all, but can someone explain to me again why we should rely on religion to restore the moral fabric of our nation and smite the pernicious influences of the kinky sex loving Hollywood liberals? I keep forgetting.
Matthew Yglesias points out the growing Putinization of the Republican Party as it again tries to shut down dissent with legal intimidation. That first amendment sure sticks in the craw of the people who are running our government.
The RNC letter reads:
“The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously makes reference to ‘George Bush’s planned Social Security benefit cuts of up to 46 percent to pay for private accounts …’ ”
In his State of the Union address, the president said that “Social Security will not change in any way” for Americans 55 and older.”
Yeah. He said a lot of things. And?
Apparently, at least one of the station owners said he would investigate the ad and if he determined it was false, he would pull it. (The indefatigable Josh Marshall proves that the Move-on ad in question is factually correct and deconstructs the RNC letter to expose the obfuscatory mumbo jumbo that actually proves the case. Jayzuz, these guys never give up.)
Might I suggest that the DNC lawyers send letters to the same stations asking them to issue a disclaimer every time President Bush says that social security is going “bankrupt” or “bust.” Otherwise, somebody might get the idea that these media outlets were in the business of falsely and maliciously spreading misinformation about the status of the social security system.
With their usual up-is-downism, these are the same guys who claim that frivolous lawsuits are killing America. Evidently, it’s only frivolous if somebody has been disabled for life. It’s perfectly acceptable to use the courts to quell dissent.
Matt calls it Putinization. Neiwert calls it psuedo-fascism. I call it Republican totalitarianism. Whatever you call it, it’s long past time that we started to speak out clearly about what is really happening here. Interestingly, some of the most pointed criticism of this nature is now coming from the right:
A reader alerted me to this fascinating article from this month’s American Conservative in which yet another conservative goes off the reservation and utters the F word.
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
[…]
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled … advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
[…]
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible.
Stern is an expert on the rise of fascism in Europe. Here are some of his remarks upon receiving the Leo Baeck medal:
…the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.
We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.
Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.
Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.
German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”
Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised.
‘Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
‘Okay, better? I’ll keep working on it.’
I’m sure the hand-picked audience broke into rapturous cheers and began drooling and speaking in tongues as they always do when in the presence of Dear Leader. However, those who are not members of the Codpiece Cult might be expected to stay implanted on the reservation if they see this “explanation.” If any ads are done, this might be a good little piece of political theatre to show to the non-indoctrinated.
I wrote a post a while back musing about Bush’s newfound confidence:
This is the big story of the second term. Bush himself is now completely in charge. He did what his old man couldn’t do. He has been freed of all constraints, all humility and all sense of proportion. Nobody can run him, not Cheney, not Condi, not Card. He has a sense of his power that he didn’t have before. You can see it. From now on nobody can tell him nothin. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?
During the 2000 campaign, then-Texas Gov. Bush overruled his horrified political handlers and insisted on pressing for Social Security privatization – particularly when speaking to Florida’s millions of geriatric voters.
To this day, Bush adamantly believes the issue was a political plus for him in Florida – a contention considered pollyannaish by many of his closest aides.
Some, in fact, say if he had kept quiet about tinkering with the most sacred of all domestic political cows, Bush would have won the Sunshine State easily, instead of needing the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold his 537-vote victory.
“He still thinks it helped him then,” a senior Bush political adviser remembered. “We all still think he’s crazy.”
Bush keeps reassuring legislators that it’s safe for them to vote for privatization because he ran and “won” on the issue. This report explains why he thinks that. He made the call to talk about it in 2000 and he “won” despite his handlers advice that it was dangerous. Therefore, everyone can feel safe (if they can manage to get the Supreme Court to decide the election for them.)
We know that the butterfly ballots would have tipped that election and if Bush was pushing privatization in Palm Beach County Florida, it would have been right and fair if he’d lost it just for that reason. Nothing could be more stupid. Except, perhaps, trying to actually do it.
I had been giving a lot of thought as to why he thought he could get away with destroying social security after two such narrow wins and small majorities in congress. They own the real estate for sure, but they are far from having a mandate for massive change. Even Tom Delay has been reported to be nervous that this will derail their majority.
Certainly, the polls do not show the kind of support that is normally needed to affect such a huge change:
1. Bush receives a 34 percent approval rating on handling Social Security, with 52 percent diapproval. And among independents, his rating is markedly worse: a mere 23 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval.
2. A question on the seriousness of the problems with Social Security yields just 18 percent saying the system needs to be completely rebuilt (12 percent among independents), with 33 percent saying major changes are needed and 43 percent calling for only minor changes.
3. By 61-29 (66-21 among independents), voters say that keeping Social Security as a program with a guaranteed monthly benefit is more important than letting younger workers decide for themselves how some of their Social Security contributions are invested, with varying benefit levels depending on the success of their investments.
4. By 61-24 (66-16 among independents), voters say Bush’s November election victory does not mean the American people support his ideas on Social Security.
5. By 54-42 (61-33 among independents), voters say they would not be likely to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market if they were allowed to do so.
6. By 50-33 (53-25 among independents), voters say they “disapprove of proposals to incorporate personal accounts into the Social Security program”. (Interestingly, despite the Republicans’ now-religious belief that saying “personal accounts” rather than “private accounts” somehow makes these accounts much more attractive, the half-sample that was asked this same question with private accounts substituted for personal accounts actually had a slightly less disapproving reaction.)
Those numbers put an absolute lie to Bush’s assertion that he “ran and won” on the SS privatization issue. Clearly, he did not.
But, his natural arrogance and tendency to listen to courtiers who flatter his ego means that he sees his narrow win in 2004 as a mandate to dismantle the New Deal. And it appears that he has completely misinterpreted the lessons of his “win” in 2000. He believes that defying the experts on the social security issue has already proven him to be a man of great courage and political instincts that far surpass those who would advise against it.
I suspect strongly that putting social security at the top of the agenda was Bush’s call. He really believes that he “won” on the issue and interprets that to mean that he has the support of the American people no matter what the polls, the experts or even other Republicans say.
Both Napoleon and Hitler thought they could invade Russia in the winter, too.
Kevin Drum nicely deconstructs this tiresome Ward Churchill witch hunt. I realize that we soulless, decaying leftists are supposed to step up and repudiate him (or maybe tie him up and throw him in water to see if he floats) but I’m just too tired. Since I’d never heard of the guy before the right raised him to the status of leftwing icon I don’t really feel like I have much of a stake in his allegedly treasonous three year old book. Anyway, I’m still busy disavowing Jane Fonda and and Joseph Stalin, my personal role models.
Kevin ran a lexis search on the story and concludes that it really took off when the NY Times picked up the story after the right wing noise machine had slavered over it like a bunch of Atkins dieters with a big bowl of bacon grease. It has been blazing since January 27th when Drudge first trumpeted the story and the next day when Rush and O’Reilly both held forth on the topic. By the time the NY Times wrote its piece, it was already known and believed by tens of millions of people — which means they had to write about it; “it was out there!”
Kevin thinks it’s fascinating how an obscure story like this finds it’s way into the mainstream, but it’s much more than fascinating. It’s pernicious. This is also how lies and smears are spread and validated and there is almost no way to tell the difference anymore between a valid story and a right wing feeding frenzy. It’s supremely ironic that the minute the “liberal” NY Times decides to engage, even if it refutes the allegations and sets the record straight, it helps spreads the story everywhere because of its massive influence. Its mere entry into the discourse helps turn a contrived right wing smear job into a national scandal and puts one more nail in the coffin of truth and objective reality. Once people hear what they want to hear, it doesn’t matter if it’s been debunked as a total fraud. They’ll continue to believe it:
Funny thing, memory. With the second anniversary next month of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it’s only natural that supporters as well as opponents of the war will be reliving the many searing moments of those first weeks of battle.
The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. U.S. troops firing at a van approaching a Baghdad checkpoint and killing seven women and children. A suicide bomber nearing a Najaf checkpoint and blowing up U.S. soldiers. The execution of coalition POWs by Iraqis. The civilian uprising in Basra against Saddam’s Baathist party.
If you remember it well, then we have grist for another verse for Lerner and Loewe (“We met at nine,” “We met at eight,” “I was on time,” “No, you were late.” “Ah yes, I remember it well!”). The first three events occurred. The second two were products of the fog of war: After being reported by the media, both were quickly retracted by coalition authorities as erroneous.
Yet retracting a report isn’t the same as erasing it from people’s memories. According to an international study to be published next month, Americans tend to believe that the last two events occurred — even when they recall the retraction or correction.[emphasis added] In contrast, Germans and Australians who recall the retraction discount the misinformation. It isn’t that Germans and Australians are smarter. Instead, it’s further evidence that what we remember depends on what we believe.
“People build mental models,” explains Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Western Australia, Crawley, who led the study that will be published in Psychological Science. “By the time they receive a retraction, the original misinformation has already become an integral part of that mental model, or world view, and disregarding it would leave the world view a shambles.” Therefore, he and his colleagues conclude in their paper, “People continue to rely on misinformation even if they demonstrably remember and understand a subsequent retraction.”
[…]
“People who were not suspicious of the motives behind the war continued to rely on misinformation,” Prof. Lewandowsky said, “believing in things they know to have been retracted.” They held fast to what they had originally heard “because it fits with their mental model,” which people seek to retain “whatever it takes.”
This is where the right wing noise machine is really powerful. They create the “mental model” and then hammer it home day after day after day. People exposed to this mental model are told that the MSM is biased and that liberals are traitors and cowards. You have respected bloggers like Instapundit saying things like:
There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.
while radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh says:
I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?
And then there is something like this coming from a mainstream opinion writer and television pundit Fred Barnes:
At his news conference last week, Bush reacted calmly to their [Democrats] vitriolic attacks, suggesting only a few Democrats are involved. Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what’s permissible and what’s out of bounds in dissent on Iraq.
These statements are not made on rare occasions. This is the ongoing “mental model” that is being promulgated day after day after day by highly successful opinion makers in media both new and old. Bloggers like Instapundit are considered mainstream and thoughtful, not bomb throwing partisans. He is linked approvingly by many establishment web sites and works for MSBNC. After all, he’s not saying anything unusual.
Neither is Limbaugh. MSM media critic Howard Kurtz said, “Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.”
So when these mainstream voices say that Ward Churchill represents the left with his obscure unknown thesis that the 9/11 victims were complicit in their own deaths, the view that the left is soulless is not difficult to accept. See how that works?
And, of course, the true irony is that all this breast beating and calls for dismissal and censorship comes on the heels of years of braying about political correctness in academia squelching free speech and dissenting points of view. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading conservative intellectuals like Walter Williams saying universities are “the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement” and Paul Hollander calling it “the most widespread form of institutionalized intolerance in American higher education.” (I won’t even mention that champion of intellectual diversity David Horowitz.) Well now, it would appear that “political correctness vs academic freedom” comes in all flavors.
And it’s always a-ok for mainstream, influential intellectuals like Frank “cakewalk” Gaffney to say things like “The U.N. is a hateful and anti-Semitic mobocracy” or Michael Ledeen to publicly float a theory that 9/11 was the result of a “Franco-German strategy …based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.” These inflammatory statements at a time of great global unease are not repudiated by anyone. Indeed, such dangerous rabble rousing is completely accepted and in some cases endorsed by the Republican establishment. No one questinos whether such statements might endanger American security or its stated foreign policy. Indeed, one is left to ponder whether it might actually be American foreign policy, considering the fact that those who write these screeds are welcome in the White House.
And that brings us to the crucial difference between Ward Churchill’s politically incorrect ravings and Gaffney, Ledeen and Williams’ politically incorrect ravings — the latter are powerful, well known intellectuals in the conservative movement who are on the inside of government policymaking at the highest reaches. Churchill on the other hand is a nobody.
Liberals have nothing to apologise for. Indeed, intellectual honesty requires that we do not. These conservative critics’ facts are wrong and their analysis is self-serving. They have concocted a “mental model” that is designed to marginalize and intimidate those who speak out against them. I’m not talking about obscure college professors with eccentric views. I’m talking about average Americans with mainstream views that don’t hew exactly to the Republican party line who are now viewed with suspicion as UnAmerican by association with this leftist chimera that sides with terrorists.
There has been some very interesting thinking on this the last week in the blogosphere. If you haven’t read it already, I especially recommend Max Sawicky’s pithy analysis:
…the Right doesn’t cast slurs on people because they are communist, anti-American, or cross some line of non-radical, patriotic acceptability. It casts slurs indiscriminately as a routine task of political warfare. That’s why they lump people like Ward Churchill with for god’s sakes Teddy Kennedy or Howard Zinn. They’re not using a faulty litmus test. They are trying to destroy political criticism.
This is absolutely correct. Someone asked me if I believe that conservatives are acting in good faith when they say things like this:
The Belmont Club: “One could hardly expect that the end of the Cold War, the decline of Europe, the ascendancy of India and China, the collapse of the UN and the advent of terrorism would leave political relations between Left and Right unchanged. But it was the declining vigor of Marxist thought coupled with new conservative ideas that poured the most fuel on the flames. Discourse between Left and Right could only remain civil for so long as Conservatives remained meek or had no counter-pulpit. . . The weakening of the traditional media and the stresses caused by war have created a kind of ‘play’ in the system which now allow unchained weights to crash about. What has changed is that, with the decline of the MSM, there is nothing which prevents incivility from becoming a two-way street. And I’m not sure either the Left or the total system can contain the stress.”
I have no way of knowing if this person sincerely believes that the decline of civil discourse in our politics can be pegged to world events and their supposed galvanizing effect on the right to finally defend itself against a failing Marxist left. I do know that it does not square with the facts or history. The Republicans have been throwing rhetorical nuclear bombs our way and getting away with it for decades. This harsh, no holds barred rhetorical style was ushered into the modern era by Newt Gingrich and other movement conservatives in the 1980’s. It was a conscious, tactical decision designed to intimidate.
From a 1989 article about Gingrich in Vanity Fair:
Gingrich, the new face, quickly recognized an opportunity. The House, which limits the length of debate over legislation, has a rule allowing so-called special orders –permission to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These have long been a means by which congressman could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents, usually matters of trivia. But Gingrich, concerned less with the Record than with the potential television audience, began to use special orders regularly as his platform for advancing ideas and, especially, for attacking the Democratic majority.
At first, his approach gave the impression that he was a brave young crusader, taking on the opposition in heated floor encounters, but, in truth, most of his diatribes were delivered before a virtually empty House. When, in 1984, he escalated his attack on Democrats to the point of questioning their patriotism– accusing them of being “blind to Communism” –Speaker O’Neill lost his cool. In a legendary head-to-head encounter on the floor of the House, the Speaker blasted Gingrich : “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”
That was 21 years ago. These incendiary insults to Democrats’ patriotism did not begin on 9/11. Gingrich went on to institutionalize the demonization of liberals as a political tactic with his “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
If some people are unaware of that or have salved their consciences by creating a myth that today’s harsh political climate was the result of external events, is no excuse. This scorched earth style of politics was quite deliberately put into play for political gain. If these true believers have convinced themselves that the right wing has been meek and mild until it had to bravely step foward and defend the country against terrorists, a little google trip through the 90’s would surely cure that misapprehension.
And I frankly do not see why they should be given any consideration for their sincere belief in a toxic political strategy that wants to see people like me silenced and this country changed in ways that will make it unrecognizable. Shame on them for their unwillingness to step in and take responsibility for what they’ve wrought.
Shame on anyone who says that this is not the history of the last 25 years. I was a witness. I know what happened.
You’d think that the story of a president who cannot appear in a 90 minute debate without the help of an electronic transmitter to feed him his answers would be worthy of reporting in a major newspaper if they had the goods.
What is truly scary about this is that even despite the help, he sounded extremely stupid and unprepared. This is the man with his finger on the button. The NY Times had excellent evidence that he had cheated in the debates and they punted. What would it have taken for the press to feel it was important to reveal this to the public, Bush screaming into his tie “Turd Blossom, I’m dyin’ out here?”
