Guilty (41 page)

When he was faced with an actual question by Fox News's liberal host Chris Wallace, Clinton erupted in a sociopathic rage worthy of a Keith Olbermann “Special Comment.” Wallace asked, “Why didn't
you do more to put bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business?” Displaying the grace and dignity for which he was renowned, the former president threw a hissy fit. He said, “First I want to talk about the context in which this arises,” saying, “I'm being asked this on the Fox network” and “I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn't do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush's neocons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden…. All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much— same people.”

Needless to say, no “right-wingers” or anyone else ever said Clinton was “too obsessed with bin Laden.” The
Washington Post
declared in the first paragraph of an article on August 21, 1998, “President Clinton won warm support for ordering anti-terrorist bombing attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan … from many of the same lawmakers who have criticized him harshly as a leader critically weakened by poor judgment and reckless behavior in the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.” Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was quoted saying of the attacks targeting bin Laden and al Qaeda, “I think the President did exactly the right thing…. By doing this we're sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists….” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, another Republican, said, “[The attacks are] appropriate and just.”
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But continuing his finger-wagging rant, Clinton told Wallace, “So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.”

“Well, wait a minute, sir,” Wallace replied, “I want to ask a question. You don't think that's a legitimate question?”

“It was a perfectly legitimate question,” Clinton said, “but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of.” Later he bleated, “You people ask me questions you don't ask the other side.”

Actually, Wallace had asked virtually the same or similar questions of Colin Powell (“Wouldn't we have been better off if we had finished
the job in Afghanistan before going into Iraq?”)
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and Donald Rumsfeld (“What do you make of his [Richard Clarke's] basic charge that pre-9/11 this government, the Bush administration, largely ignored the threat from al Qaeda?”).
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Indeed, just two weeks earlier, Wallace had grilled Bush's secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, asking her:

Wallace had simply asked Clinton what we in the news business call “a question.” Somehow Rice and various other members of the Bush administration had managed to answer Wallace's questions without whining that he was picking on them.

Democrats are more comfortable with nonquestions, accompanied by an apology for even asking something that resembles a question, as Kate Snow did to Bill Clinton on ABC's
Good Morning America.
Snow said to Clinton, “Pretty simple question.
And maybe you don't want to answer it right now and I respect that fully.
But if you want to answer it, do you personally have any regrets about what you did campaigning for your wife?”
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I wish I could get a question like that someday.

After Clinton played the victim on Fox News, liberals rallied to his cause, celebrating him for—what else?—his bravery in standing up to the “conservative hit job.” Various Democrats paraded through Fox News studios over the next few days to denounce Fox for being a right-wing hit machine, and rudely asking a Democrat the same question that had been asked of Republicans.
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The indignity.

ALL LIBERALS ARE DYING TO ACT AS IF THEY ARE BEING PERsecuted. These most fawned upon humans in the history of the universe have massive McCarthyism-“victim” envy. It's one thing to be
adored, but they want something more: to have courage. Or at least to be admired for having courage. This presents a bit of a problem, inasmuch as liberals will never be subjected to the tiniest criticism. Still and all, they are consumed by the conviction that they have enemies because they are speaking truth to power. Consequently, they are always playacting, simulating a dialogue with imaginary enemies. Liberals do this in public, and they're not endearing little three-year-olds.

The all-time, number-one Academy Award winners for whining liberals being called “brave” are the members of the country music group the Dixie Chicks. According to Nexis, the Dixie Chicks have been mentioned in the same sentence as “courageous” or “brave” hundreds of times in the past few years. Meanwhile, Ron Silver, the actor-turned-patriot after 9/11, who then saw his acting career stall, has been called brave once.

Lead singer Natalie Maines's bold defiance came in 2003, the year of the Dixie Chicks' sixty-city world tour, when Maines sucked up to her Bush-hating London audience by saying, “Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” What an odd coincidence that the only city Maines attacked Bush in was London! In a way, it was lucky for the group that Maines claimed to be embarrassed by Bush in London and not in Asheville, North Carolina. Hey—maybe … no it couldn't be …

Attacking Bush in London was courageous in the sense that it is courageous when performing in Chicago to openly defy the crowd by shouting, “How about them Bears?!!!” It shows the same raw guts as performers in Gainesville, Florida, wearing hats emblazoned “Go Gators!” It's the sort of crazy let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may valor that stand-up comics exhibit in New York when they say, “Anybody here from Brooklyn?”

Here's a little bravery chart I've worked up:

Insulting President Bush in Fort Worth: Heroic

Insulting President Bush in Missouri: Possibly brave

Insulting President Bush in Austin: Not brave

Insulting President Bush in London: Gushy suck-up

Please, America, don't hate the Dixie Chicks for being anti-Bush. Hate them for being hacks.

Just to be completely clear that there was not one ounce of valor in what Maines did: When she was telling her London audience she was embarrassed about the U.S. president, she had absolutely no reason to imagine anyone in America would ever hear about it. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who can always expect his anti-American remarks abroad to make news back home, a girl band's onstage chitchat doesn't generally receive international coverage. As the
New York Times
reported, for the first several days after the concert, no one mentioned Maines's nasty remark about the president. Bush's ambassador to Great Britain, William S. Farish, attended the show and warmly greeted the Dixie Chicks afterward. Only after the Drudge Report published Maines's America-hating crowd-pleaser about a week later did Americans find out about it. Ten years earlier, Maines could have sucked up to her leftist European audience without anyone in America ever knowing.

Fans were so appalled at Maines for entertaining the antiwar Brits by attacking the U.S. president on the eve of war that country music stations began treating the Chicks the same way the establishment media treats conservatives. Album sales dropped by 42 percent in one week. In response, Maines apologized to Bush for being disrespectful, but explained that, in Europe, they hate Americans: “We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war.”
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So her defense was that it wasn't her fault because she was just telling the audience what it wanted to hear. That, my friends, is what we call “speaking truth to power.”

People in small-town America have no access to media bullhorns but exercised their freedom of speech by calling in to country music radio stations. So naturally the Dixie Chicks became First Amendment heroes in places like New York and Los Angeles for defying these tacky Americans. A
Los Angeles Times
columnist primly declared that those protesting Maines's remark were “violating her most important right and the foundation of this country—her freedom of speech.”
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In January 2004, MTV's Rock the Vote awarded the Chicks the Patrick Lippert
Award for their “enduring commitment to preserving and protecting freedom of expression.”
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To liberals, our precious right to speak means rich celebrities get to say whatever they want without being criticized.

Woeful tales of the Dixie Chicks' suffering at the hands of jack-booted Americans living in small towns across the nation turned out to be good for business. The group had the eighth-highest-grossing concert tour of 2003, and “the most lucrative country tour of all time,” according to the Associated Press's David Bauder, who then added, incongruously, “despite being dogged by controversy over a remark made about President Bush.”
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No, the word is not “despite;” it's “because.”

The deluge of television profiles, magazine cover stories, and newspaper articles about Maines's dauntless courage was irritating enough the first time around. But then Maines did the exact same thing again in 2005—uncannily, just before the release of the Dixie Chicks' next album! This time, she announced to
Time
magazine—oh yes, she got another interview with
Time
magazine for bravely attacking Bush— she was taking back her apology to Bush from two years earlier.

Maines was like the character played by Lili Taylor in the movie
Say Anything,
who wrote sixty-three songs denouncing her ex-boyfriend Joe. Bush didn't know who Maines was, but years later, Maines was still neurotically writing songs about him—“Joe lies. Joe lies. Joe lies. When he cries. When he cries. Joe lies….”

Maines called her 2005 song to her imaginary ex-boyfriend George Bush “Not Ready to Make Nice.” In the song she lamented her martyrdom—“I've paid a price / And I'll keep paying”—and also touted her own courage and resilience: “I'm not ready to back down / I'm still mad as hell.”

What price had she paid again? The Dixie Chicks had been a nationally recognized group since 1998, when they released a slew of chart-topping songs, winning a Grammy Award for best country album in 1999 and many more awards over the years. But until they insulted Bush in London, they had been mentioned in the
New York Times
only in passing, making only two headlines in the Arts and Business sections—and
never on the op-ed page. After insulting Bush, the Dixie Chicks' coverage in the
Times
doubled overnight. They were in seven headlines, at least two editorials, and roughly 7 million op-ed columns praising them for their bravery. On the op-ed page alone, the Dixie Chicks were mentioned in articles by Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Brent Staples, Bob Herbert (twice), and Frank Rich (three times). One
Times
editorial about the brave Dixie Chicks asserted that they “caused trouble (and ultimately earned greater respect).”
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Grandstanders are not born, they're made. It's learned behavior. After watching the Dixie Chicks get attention cheaply, soon all sorts of has-been musical groups were trying to outdo one another in the venom they could hurl at President Bush.

A few weeks after Maines made her anti-Bush remarks in London, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam smashed a Bush mask onto the stage and stomped on it. Then Madonna made a music video in which she threw a grenade at a President Bush look-alike.
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Before the year was up, Bruce Springsteen had told a concert audience, “It's time to impeach the president and put in somebody that knows what they're doing.”
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John Mellencamp, R.E.M., Lenny Kravitz, and the Beastie Boys jumped to release antiwar songs.

Madonna later withdrew the grenade video, but quickly made up for lost time with a stream of Bush-bashing in her tour the next year, including a video of Bush and Saddam Hussein impersonators sharing a cigar. This was “true to her rebellious nature,” as one newspaper put it.
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A few years later, Madonna's tour included a video presentation comparing Republican presidential candidate John McCain to Adolf Hitler, while comparing Barack Obama to Gandhi.
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What will such a rebel do next? Take on … global warming? Her courage takes my breath away.

Just before this orgy of anti-Bush mock violence began, the
Chicago Daily Herald
had solemnly intoned, “Fear is in the air.”
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Yes, there was fear that celebrities would not get on the nightly news. Fear that music columnists across the nation would not call them brave. There was deep fear, my friends, that they would not make a bold anti-Bush statement fast enough to make their fellow musicians
look like squares. These celebrity suck-ups would claim to be appalled by Abu Ghraib, but they were perfectly willing to torture the rest of us with their bottomless self-righteousness. The cover of the June 2006 issue of the music magazine
Blender
headlined a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer of the punk group Green Day, “I'm not afraid to criticize America.”
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How about pulling that in the old Soviet Union? Then I'D be impressed.

Forget gulags—these thin-skinned liberal narcissists can't survive sixty seconds without someone telling them they're fabulous. When a fan booed Pearl Jam's Vedder as he was demonstrating his way with words by stomping on the Bush mask, Vedder was completely taken aback. Then Vedder shouted down the dissenters with a microphone and 50,000 amps, saying, “I don't know if you heard about this thing called freedom of speech, man.” This qualified as one of the most profound public statements ever punctuated with the term “man.” While complaining that his free-speech rights were being infringed, he announced—in a worldwide exclusive—that the following year Americans would no longer be allowed to speak! “It's worth thinking about [freedom of speech], because it's going away,” Vedder said. “In the last year of being able to use it, we're sure as [expletive] going to use it and I'm not gonna apologize.”
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