WASHINGTON -- We are at that delicious moment in a modern
Democratic presidential administration when the bizarre
fantasticos who decorate each chaotic regime make their painful
appearance -- though this administration is bringing a whiff of
the ominous. Let me explain.
In the Carter Administration there was Midge
Costanza, the White House aide who sent crazy memos
to the White House staff insisting that they visit the Jefferson
and Lincoln memorials to "reenergize." She did it herself in the
early hours, and at 4:00 AM at the Jefferson Memorial, the
Washington Post reported, she became
characteristically hysterical: "Every time I came across 'man' or
'men' I changed it mentally. I said 'IT WAS PERSON, TOM. IT WAS
PERSON! OKAY, TOM. ISN'T IT IRONIC THAT IT TOOK A WOMAN TO BE
REENERGIZED RIGHT HERE?'" Then she lamented to the
Post that Mr. Jefferson was "brilliant,"
though "he wasn't fully informed." Soon she resigned. Also in the
Carter Administration there was the delightful Dr. Peter Bourne,
special assistant to the President for health [!] issues, whose
visit to a nocturnal cocaine party attended by Hunter Thompson
and David Kennedy (now dead of cocaine abuse) was leaked to the
press. Bourne survived that sticky wicket, but he did not survive
once it was reported that he was issuing bogus prescriptions for
controlled drugs. He resigned.
In the Clinton years the list was longer, but my favorite
was Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Her indiscretions were many until her
comic finale, the very public espousal of her fellow sex
educators' latest progressive cause, masturbation! She was an
expert on the subject and very eloquent. Now we have
environmental czar Van Jones, National Endowment for the Arts
spokesman Yosi Sergant, and -- yet to resign --White House
communications director Anita Dunn. Their eccentricities are
beyond masturbation, beyond shouting at stone monuments, beyond
cocaine with the famous. Jones joined the Communist Party in the
1990s, not the 1890s; and he implicated the Bush Administration
in 9/11 or at least raised it as a possibility. Sergant exhorted
artists on a conference call to provide governmentally funded
propaganda for the President. Dunn extolled Mao Zedong as one of
her two favorite "political philosophers," though neither was a
philosopher. One was a saint, and Mao was a sadist.
He was also a bloodthirsty tyrant responsible for the
death, imprisonment and torture of at least 70 million people. In
a fatuous address to young people she never mentioned any of
this. Dunn's outburst is a first. Of all the brutal murderers of
the 20th century -- say, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Castro --
none has been mentioned as an exemplar by any other White House
staffer, save today's White House communications director. Allow
me a prediction. This administration is going to turn out more
zanies than the last two Democratic administrations combined. Yet
-- and here is the ominous part -- they are going to present a
real threat to liberties that Americans take for granted,
particularly freedom of speech.
Dunn's other controversial outburst is her singling out Fox
News as a political enemy against whom the White House will push
back. She is not the only member of this administration to speak
this way. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has denied that Fox is a
"legitimate news organization," and White House senior advisor
David Axelrod has said Fox is "not really a news organization."
The threat here from these government officials is to freedom of
speech.
It is all of a piece with the assault on Rush Limbaugh
during various leading Democratic supporters' and -- amazingly --
journalists' efforts to deny him part ownership of a professional
football team. The charges against Limbaugh that circulated
freely through the media were false. He never spoke approvingly
or even jokingly about slavery. He never spoke positively about
James Earl Ray. He, actually, does not talk much about race. Two
of the improbable moral forces who spoke out against him, Al
Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, have on the record made racist
statements, particularly anti-Semitic statements, and been caught
in scandals that they never should have survived (Tawana Brawley,
the Atlanta murders Jackson that blamed on a nationwide
conspiracy -- to name but two).
Limbaugh was very perceptive in responding to the brouhaha
by saying in the Wall Street Journal that
it represented a hatred of conservatives and an attempt to keep
them from "participating in the full array of opportunities this
nation otherwise affords each of us." But there is a more general
threat here. It is against the First Amendment. Journalists had
better take note. It was a surprising spectacle to see
journalists advancing the assault on Limbaugh. More surprisingly
was how many of the self-appointed journalistic monitors, for
instance the Washington Post's Howard
Kurtz, took it all in stride.
