(This review appears in the July-August 2008 issue of
The American Spectator.)
Right Is Wrong: How the
Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and
Made Us All Less Safe (and what you need to know to end the
madness)
By Arianna Huffington
(Alfred A. Knopf, 388 pages, $24.95)
“Grahver, we’ve got to fuckus,” she exclaimed at one of our
Saturday Evening Club dinners more than a decade ago. Arianna had
arrived late that night, and she was understandably agitated,
having been forced to take a seat at the far end of the table, a
good ways from the center of the action where Grover Norquist, in
his customary spot directly across from host Bob Tyrrell, enjoyed
a clear advantage controlling that evening’s discussion. I was
seated right across from her, reveling in her undecipherable
Greek accent and the unintentional humor it never fails to
provide.
Indeed, it revealed compelling facets of her elegant, if girlish,
high-pitched charm. Thanks to her latest book, Right Is
Wrong (her eleventh, unless I’ve lost count), I can
measure how far her Americanization has come. If her salty
language was once accidental, she’s now one of the guys in
tossing out words like “blowjob” (in defending Bill Clinton),
“wack-job” (in attacking the “twisted” GOP) and “erectile
dysfunction pills” (she’s for them). She loves baseball talk, at
least in the opening chapter, before pinch-hitting for her
initial ghostwriter. “Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rummy, Rove…this
Murderers’ Row of lethal bat-swingers has already guaranteed a
place for itself in the Fear-Mongering Hall of Shame with Ruthian
blasts…” I prefer when she underwrites, as in “Cheney cleared
the bases on Meet the Press.”
On the other hand, I am concerned that Arianna has been all too
willing to deracinate herself, shunning her one unmistakable
asset, her Greekness, as if it were her (for lack of a better
word) Achilles’ heel. True, in her new book, she does on occasion
allude to her ethnicity, but strictly for tactical reasons. So
“George Tenet and I are both Greek,” she notes, but only to throw
out a Greek term at him, filotimo, in order to
suggest that this former CIA director, like all the non-Greeks in
the Bush inner circle, lacked “honor, conscience, and integrity,”
which she, as someone who knows a Greek word or two, exemplifies.
She also identifies with Socrates, “my compatriot,” she calls
him, despite their age difference, and even invokes Thucydides to
condemn the Iraq war, an effort that she quickly sabotages by
basing her understanding of his History of the Peloponnesian
War on the account in Wikipedia.
See what happens when a writer allows her name to evolve from
Arianna Stassinopoulos to Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington to
Arianna Huffington? Somewhere along the way it loses its
connection to intelligent design (another object of her scorn).
No doubt, she’d be the first to argue that the great success
she’s had at her Hollywood website would never have come about if
it were called “The Stassinopoulos Post.” I suspect George
Stephanopoulos would disagree.
Not that I want to get George in trouble. Luckily, Tim Russert is
the one Sunday host Arianna truly seems to loathe. Because he
never has her on, he gets variously abused as “priapic” (Arianna
is nothing if not single-minded), a “conventional wisdom zombie,”
“credulous,” and (back to the erectile mode) “Russert
Interruptus.”
ARIANNA’S FRUSTRATIONS SHOW no signs of abating. Another way they
reveal themselves is in the many juicy little hypocrisies that
sprinkle her book. “Bush speaks English — after a fashion, it’s
true…” she writes, not hearing herself. She condemns the
administration’s supposed “warrantless mass eavesdropping on
American citizens,” yet gleefully recounts the time she listened
in on a cellphone conversation Bill Kristol was having aboard an
Amtrak train to Washington. She calls Newt Gingrich “the original
barbarian at the GOP gate,” without explaining why back in 1995
she wrote an article called “Why Newt Must Run” for president
(for Bill Kristol’s magazine—and sent out advance copies of the
piece without informing her editors). She dismisses Bush’s
sex-education efforts to “preach abstinence,” but praises Colin
and Alma Powell’s establishment-approved “highly successful youth
abstinence program.” Forgetting how she turned herself into a
gold digger, she says it’s Bush voters who were “all right with
firing gay Americans from their jobs.”
In a more serious vein, such is her resolute hatred of all things
Bush, neoconservative, conservative, “nea-conservative,”
right-wing, Iraq war-related, and now even all things McCain,
whom she sees as someone out of <I>Dr.
Strangelove</I>, she actually defends Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
implying he became a Holocaust denier and America hater only in
response to administration policies. As for the torture state
institutionalized by the Bush presidency, she reminds readers
that the Gestapo itself wasn’t big on torture. I think she gives
credit to Andrew Sullivan for that insight. Ultimately, she
concludes, torture became a staple of Bush rule because of some
Salem witch hunt-like compulsion on the part of the “radical
Right” or maybe simply as a “by-product of the well-known Bush
laziness: the 9-5 workday, the long summer vacations, the
impatience with detail.”
Something tells me she’s still f—king with us.
