Washington — I had hoped to make a thus far unmentioned aspect
of the recently deceased Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s life the sole
topic of this column today. Then from Iraq has come news regarding
the hopefully-deceased Geraldo Rivera. Surely his career as a
journalist is dead, but perhaps not. He has suffered so many
near-death experiences, all owing to Rivera’s singularly low
character and shabby journalism. Yet somehow he survives. So to say
the journalistic career of Rivera is dead might be to put the cart
before the ass.
Consider the ass. Before Fox News hired him he had a floundering
cable talk show in the 1990s the theme of which was “The Martyrdom
of President Bill Clinton.” During that ongoing atrocity he was a
constant shill for his hero, Bill Clinton. Time and again he was
caught juggling the truth with the clownishness of a W.C. Fields
ungraced by charm. Remember when he credulously reported in August
1998 that Congressman Paul McHale, at the time the first Democrat
to call for Clinton’s resignation, had faked his credentials as a
war hero? According to Rivera, an “always reliable source” close to
the White House (probably Sidney Blumenthal) told him that McHale
was lying about his military decorations. McHale easily refuted the
charge. Rivera had either conspired in the smearing of a patriotic
veteran or failed to verify the White House leak. Naturally Rivera
provided a weasel-worded apology, but so much for his respect for
the military and for the truth.
During this period I had my own exposure to Rivera’s phony
journalism. He decided that I was part of a conspiratorial coup
against Clinton and so he sent his staff to harass me with evidence
of grim misdeeds. In all my adult life I have never met more
deceitful journalists than Rivera and his henchmen. One of my
colleagues having caught Rivera’s chief thug in a lie hounded the
wretch with a lawsuit until he apologized. I merely marveled at his
disregard for truth and the First Amendment rights of fellow
journalists.
Now Rivera has been caught in another confrontation with the
truth. The American military claims he is being expelled from Iraq
for vaingloriously revealing his position and that of the 101st
Airborne. He insists that he is not being expelled, though Fox News
is removing him from the company of the 101st Airborne and back to
Kuwait. Oh well, those of us who have followed his career know how
lightly he treats the truth and the American military. Ask former
Congressman McHale. Or ask those soldiers who saw him reporting
from Afghanistan some months back. There he was caught falsely
claiming that he was reporting from a spot where American soldiers
were killed under friendly fire, or from “hallowed ground” as he
put it. Actually the “hallowed ground” was hundreds of miles from
his cameras and microphone. After that bogus story was exposed he
again sought refuge in the weasel’s words. Will Fox News give him
another reprieve? Will his viewers?
I have a term for the political culture that surrounds us,
Kultursmog; for this culture is polluted with the
politicized values and visions of a point of view that recognizes
only its own. Rivera, during the 1990s, was a veritable smoke stack
of pollution, spreading the falsehoods that Clinton was a wronged
man when in fact everything Clinton got caught doing was of his own
doing. The obituaries to my old friend Pat Moynihan are another
example of the Kultursmog, though an innocent example.
Practically everything said about Pat in the obits was true, but
what was not mentioned shows the Kultursmog’s capacity to
disfigure the public record. Pat had been one of the first
neoconservatives, which is to say, one of the first liberals to
become so critical of liberalism’s crack-up into extremism that
they took up with conservatives.
For nearly twenty years until the late 1970s Pat was an
intellectual soul mate with Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb,
Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Jeane Kirkpatrick and a score or so
other neocons. These were Pat’s friends and collaborators on all
sorts of intellectual endeavors, mostly aimed at sobering up the
liberals. Pat wrote in their publications: Commentary, the
Public Interest, and the Reporter. In fact he
wrote in The American Spectator, and I considered him a
serious intellectual influence on me. We visited frequently. My
family received a silver bowl from Ambassador Moynihan from our
embassy in India on the occasion of my son’s birth in 1974,
engraved “From Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Patrick Daniel
Tyrrell.”
In those days the neoconservatives’ break with liberalism was a
serious intellectual development. It was noted throughout the
serious news media and in the universities. Yet, two decades later
with the sad news of Pat’s death, no mention of his deep
involvement with these people could be found in the obits. He had
shifted back to the left in the 1980s and 1990s and that was all
that made the newspapers. The Kultursmog befogs anything
that does not fit its world view. Pat once famously said liberals
do not believe conservatives are part of the natural order of
things. And so his adamantine judgment was sustained in the
accounts of his death. Yet reality still exists. At his funeral
services in Washington at old Saint Patrick’s almost the whole
neocon movement was there, all the above-mentioned eminences, save
Kirkpatrick who is out of the country. Now there is a news scoop
for the New York Sun. What is more, the neocons all grieve
his death. We liked Pat and we shall miss him, even if he spent his
last years wandering.
