KISS OF DEATH: When a newspaper publishes a single
letter about a controversial topic, the point of view expressed in
that letter is usually that paper's last word on the subject. Hence
the letter that ran in yesterday's "Washington Post" under the
headline "Mr.
Brock's Misadventures" doesn't augur well for the little hit
man. "I cannot imagine anyone remotely interested in truth in
journalism buying Mr. Brock's latest compilation of inventive or
otherwise scandalous stories," the correspondent notes, evidently
confirming the prevailing consensus that no matter what the fellow
is toast.
Even more dismissive was Howard Kurtz's lumping of Brock
today with Monica and Condit.
Now how for a bit of New McCarthyism. A Frank Rich type at the
"New Yorker" reviews
the Brock book and, other than insisting that conservatives owe all
decent Americans an apology for being what they are, decides the
American right is the second coming of the Communist movement. For
years fellow-travelers like this Frank Rich type denied there was
anything wrong with Communism to begin with; but now with little
else to say they decide that the only thing as nefarious as the
Communists is the right. What happened to comparisons to the old
standby Nazi party? The following really is from a single
paragraph. Marvel at its paranoid assurance:
"... Indeed, the milieu that Brock describes is reminiscent of
that of American Communism in the nineteen-thirties and forties.
Obviously, organized American conservatism offers no moral
equivalents of what the Communist Party U.S.A. and its front groups
made it their business to defend or deny: totalitarianism, the
Gulag, the tens of millions of murders committed by the Stalin
regime. But the social and structural affinities are striking, and
Brock himself touches here and there on some of their more obvious
manifestations. (He notes a portrait of Lenin that Grover Norquist
displayed on his wall as a symbol of ruthless commitment, and he
remarks on the fact that some of his erstwhile comrades, such as
Horowitz, made the transition from far left to far right without
the slightest alteration in political style or temperament.) Like
the American and other Western Communist parties in their heyday,
the American conservative movement has created a kind of
alternative intellectual and political universe -- a set of
institutions parallel to and modelled on the institutions of
mainstream society (many of which the movement sees, or imagines,
as the organs of a disciplined Liberal Establishment) and dedicated
to the single purpose of advancing a predetermined political
agenda. There is a kind of Inner Movement, consisting of a few
hundred funders, senior organization leaders, lawyers, and
prominent media personalities (but only a handful of practicing
politicians), and an Outer Movement, consisting of a few thousand
staff people, grunt workers, and lower-level operatives of one kind
or another. The movement has its own newspapers (the Washington
Times, the New York Post, the Journal's editorial page), its own
magazines (The Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review,
Commentary, and many more), its own broadcasting operations (Fox
News and an array of national and local talk-radio programs and
right-wing Christian broadcast outlets), its own publishing houses
(Regnery and the Free Press, among others), its own quasi-academic
research institutions (the Heritage Foundation, the American
Enterprise Institute), and even its own Popular Front -- the
Republican Party, important elements of which (the party's
congressional and judicial leadership, for example) it has
successfully commandeered. These closely linked organizations (the
vanguard of the conservative revolution, you might say) compose an
entire social world with its own rituals, celebrations, and
anniversaries, within which it is possible to live one's entire
life. It is a world with its own elaborate system of incentives and
sanctions, through which -- as Brock discovered -- energetic
conformity is rewarded with honors and promotions while deviations
from the movement line, depending on their seriousness, are
punished with anything from mild social disapproval to outright
excommunication."
Is this the thanks the American right gets for never deviating
from its anti-Communism?
PRIVATE THOUGHTS:A day late, the "New York Times"
yesterday ran an AP report
on the Rev. Billy Graham's unfortunate -- and anti-Semitic --
remarks to President Nixon thirty years ago that were discovered in
the most recent release of Nixon tapes. It's bad enough he
complained to Nixon about supposed Jewish domination of news media,
but to have added, "No, but if you get elected a second time, then
we might be able to do something," leaves him open to the worst
interpretation of just what he meant by that. Most appalling,
though, was his saying: "A lot of Jews are great friends of mine.
They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know that
I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I
really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no
power and no way to handle them." So where Nixon famously disliked
many Jews because they disliked him, Graham evidently disliked Jews
because they did like him. What a terrible commentary.
A DIXIECRAT PONTIFF AND PINCHER: It's no secret
the "New York Times" reports with little sympathy on the Catholic
Church. But yesterday's Week in Review item broke new ground. Over
a story
on the growing number of saints canonized in recent years, the
headline read: "The Saints Just Keep Marching In." (Imagine if John
Ashcroft has said something similarly flippant about Islam.) But
the story itself was even dumber: In the very first paragraph,
reporter Melinda Henneberger notes that John Paul II is 81 and
ailing -- "but may yet turn out to be the Strom Thurmond of popes."
How many layers of ignorance and contempt does that crack reveal?
Just as good was Henneberger's suggestion that "with pedophiliac
priests back on Page 1," the church "seems to need all the role
models it can get." Is cultural perspective dead the "Times"?
HYPOCRITE OF THE DAY: "I have no doubt that Mr.
Pickering is a nice individual, in his own way," said Kweisi Mfume
in a Sunday "Washington Post" story
story on divided black opinion on the nomination of Judge
Charles Pickering to a federal appeals court. "We have no qualms
with him as a person. It's his record..." -- a strange argument
from someone who didn't allow his record of socially damaging
behavior keep him from becoming president of the NAACP.
topics:
Business, Islam, Books, Law, Israel, Communism, Conservatism
