Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (17 page)

The reason we’re on the air right across the board nationally right now is because Florida’s secretary of state, “who—Republican, as we mentioned before, campaigned actively for George Bush, well connected to the—governor—Bush’s governor brother, Jeb Bush in Florida,... she will certify, as she sees it, who gets Florida’s 25 electoral votes.... Vice President Al Gore leads in the national popular vote. He leads in the Electoral College vote.... What’s happening here is that the certification, as the Florida secretary of state sees it... it will be, in at least the opinion of the secretary of state, that the results will be final. The secretary of state, as she has restated here, in effect, believes that the election certification that she gives should stand.... This is the secretary of state and others certifying the statewide outcome, as they view it.
³⁹

Rather didn’t wait even a decent few hours to issue contradictory propaganda. In the midst of the “her view” miasma, Rather admitted that Harris “has said the certification she wanted to give on November 14th should stand.” So whose idea was the November 24 certification, anyway?

A month after the left’s attempted election grab had been thwarted, Diane Sawyer was still bitter. In an interview, Sawyer even-handedly introduced Harris thus: “From Day One she seemed completely inflexible, insisting on the narrow letter of the law. She enforced strict deadlines even when one county asked for just two hours more, and she tried to block the hand recount of those punched but disputed ballots. The Bush team was thrilled, the Gore team was outraged.”
⁴⁰

Fortunately the Supreme Court was outraged, too—not by Harris following the law, but by SCOFLA’s utter disregard for clear statutory deadlines. Without institutional boundaries to curtail endless navel-gazing, the left would rule by force. The law imposes rules precisely so that liberals cannot endlessly jawbone hypothetical possibilities until they have their way. The Supreme Court, normally revered by the left for its capacity to bypass democracy, had thwarted the will of a determined liberal press.

But the press would have its revenge. The court’s rather unexceptional ruling was widely derided in the media as a “coup d’etat,”
⁴¹
an “injustice,”
⁴²
the “Dred Scott of the 21st century,” and a “delegitimation of the authority of the court.”
⁴³
It was evidence of “political partisanship where there was supposed to be none.”
⁴⁴
The Supreme Court itself was said to be “historically scarred.”
⁴⁵
It was widely claimed that the “right-wing majority cared more about its own retirement schedule than about the institution itself.”
⁴⁶
A Bush presidency had been “rammed down our throats by Antonin Scalia.”
⁴⁷
The blabocracy angrily vowed that the ruling would be “the subject of controversy for years to come.”
⁴⁸
All this from the people who think the court covered itself in honor with a lawless and divided ruling in
Roe v. Wade.

Liberals have used their control of the media to force one U.S. president to resign and to prevent another president from being removed—despite the far more scandalous conduct of Bill Clinton compared to Richard Nixon. A vicious media campaign kept Judge Robert Bork off the Supreme Court and has kept many other conservative judges off the lower courts. The left’s hysterical news coverage curtailed any tinkering with the Leviathan attempted by Newt Gingrich and a Republican Congress. But the 2000 election marked the first time the left had used its hegemony over the media to try to trump the electoral college. When the coup failed, the press blamed John Ellis and right-wing bias in the media.

SIX

samizdat media

Liberals don’t try to win arguments, they seek to destroy their opponents and silence dissident opinions. The monopoly media of television, newspapers, and magazines can inflict liberals on the public without paying a price. Noticeably, however, liberals fail in any media realm where there is competition. In the three media where success is determined on the free market—radio, books, and the Internet—conservatives rule. A competitive marketplace in speech has the ominous effect of producing Rush Limbaugh. Only a monopoly could produce Dan Rather.

It is a source of never-ending irritation to liberals that Americans like to hear conservatives. Liberals are like the dog food company president who furiously demands to know why their dog food isn’t selling. “We’ve got the snappiest jingles,” he rails, “the best agronomists, the slickest advertising campaign, the best billboards, and the flashiest labels! Why aren’t people buying our dog food?” Finally, an employee meekly explains: “The dogs don’t like it.”

Having denied liberal bias in the media by parading Rush Limbaugh as the equivalent of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Bryant Gumbel,
Time, Newsweek,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
and so on, liberals then undermine their own specious equation by training a torrent of abuse on Rush Limbaugh and other popular conservative voices. Thus, Rush Limbaugh has been blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing. The editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
was accused of driving Vince Foster to suicide. Fox News is charged with plotting to steal a national election. Matt Drudge is evidently accused of extracting semen from Bill Clinton and placing it on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. That is what liberals believe psychologically: They simply feel that Drudge’s scoop on Clinton’s “essence” should have been false, just like the Tawana Brawley hoax should have been true.

Katie Couric has blamed conservative speech for the vicious murders of James Byrd Jr. in Texas and Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.
¹
Painting conservative speech as a source of imminent danger helps lay the groundwork for the left’s larger point that conservative speech is not “speech.” But despite the fact that liberals strongly disapprove of conservative speech—and I mean strongly—wherever there is consumer choice, the public keeps choosing conservatives.

Liberals try to extend their monopoly over the elite media to the competitive media with nauseating cross-promotions of any and all liberals. There is absolutely no dreary leftist to come down the pike who will not instantly be acclaimed as a poet. Even the vicious smearing of conservatives is not as insufferable as the suck-up profiles and interviews of liberals:
How can you be so honest?
²
There are fabulous sycophantic write-ups in the
New York Times,
gushing interviews on the
Today
show, celebrity-status profiles in
Time, Newsweek,
and
Vanity Fair.
If the antitrust laws were applied to the endless cross-promotions of leftists in the media,
Vanity Fair
—to say nothing of the
New York Times Book Review
—would be shut down.

Finally, the self-appointed champions of free speech come to the realization that hectoring alone will not shut down the Samizdat press. It must be regulated. The First Amendment protects taxpayer-funded photos of bullwhips up men’s anuses. It says nothing about Matt Drudge. University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein argues in his book
Republic.com
that by allowing people to choose “what they want to read, see, and hear,” the Internet is a threat to “a well-functioning system of democratic deliberation.”
³
It’s never
Debbie Does Dallas
or the publication of classified Pentagon documents that provoke such urgent re-examinations of the First Amendment. When liberals warn that free speech imperils “the capacity of citizens to govern themselves,” you know conservatives must be opening their yaps again.

When impeached former president Bill Clinton identified Rush Limbaugh as the cause of the Oklahoma City bombing, he unleashed all the typical liberal curse words for conservatives. He blamed “loud and angry voices” heard “over the airwaves in America” that were making people “paranoid” and spreading “hate.”
⁴
Clinton couldn’t have been more specific if he had fingered “that guy Al Franken called a big fat idiot.”

It was perfectly clear, for example, to Dan Rather, who said, “President Clinton named no names, but made it clear who’s talking that talk.”
⁵
It was also clear to Bryant Gumbel, who made the very same point the next day on the
Today
show. Lacking Clinton’s nuance, Gumbel said: “The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right.... Right-wing talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and others take to the air every day with basically the same format: detail a problem, blame the government or a group, and invite invective from like-minded people. Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden and encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue.”
⁶
A philosophy professor at Hollins College, Peter S. Fosi, ponderously compared “Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and other conservative media personalities” to “the Hutu broadcasters who urged on Rwandan militias in their deadly business.”
⁷

When conservative talk show hosts did not instantly admit complicity in the bombing, but instead objected to the president’s gratuitous attack, it became a generalized catfight between liberals and conservatives. Ombudsman of the Liberal Consensus Howard Kurtz commented on the president’s ridiculous accusation by criticizing both sides in “this partisan blame game.”
⁸

Paradoxically, about the time President Bill Clinton was denouncing conservative talk radio hosts as “promoters of paranoia” whose “loud and angry voices” led like night into day to the Oklahoma City bombing,
⁹
practically every big-name liberal was clamoring for the opportunity to become the next Rush Limbaugh. The very week the president was blaming talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz was promoting his own talk radio show. Reminiscing about liberals’ favorite mythological event, Dershowitz began fulminating about attacks on speech “in the McCarthy era.”
¹⁰
He was not referring to the president who had just launched a direct attack on the free speech of talk radio hosts—but to the talk radio hosts. (Always advance as if under threat of attack.) It seems the talk show hosts were guilty of “hypocrisy.” When in doubt, accuse conservatives of hypocrisy. Conservatives may give lip service to “free speech and civil liberties,” Dershowitz explained, but in fact they were hypocrites. They were hypocrites not because of anything the talk show hosts had ever said or done, but because, according to Dershowitz, conservatives “would” be “trying to stop the left from speaking” if it were the McCarthy era.

In a classic cross-promotion,
Vanity Fair
included Dershowitz in its 1996 “radio stars” of “Hall of Fame.”
¹¹
Dershowitz’s show was canceled less than a year later. Liberals had tried to extend their monopoly of the elite media to the competitive radio media, but the dogs didn’t like it.

That same year, both Gary Hart and former Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker got their own radio shows. Both were billed as a “response to Rush Limbaugh.” As the silver-tongued Weicker put it, they planned to “respond to the unanswered BS that is all over the country.”
¹²
Hart and Weicker were rhapsodically feted in the establishment media. Finally, the public would be able to hear what liberals think! To mark the occasion, CNN repeatedly ran a Judy Woodruff interview with the intrepid pioneers.
¹³
A few months later, both radio shows had fizzled.

Another Great White Hope for liberal talk radio was Mario Cuomo, former Democratic governor of New York. Cuomo was given a giddy send-off on
CBS This Morning.
In the “adversarial press” tradition, Cuomo was hit with a tough question by CBS host Harry Smith: “Will you continue to use this passion, will you continue to use this eloquence?”
¹⁴
Clinton flack Paul Begala explained Cuomo’s irresistible appeal: “If you were to construct on paper what our side needs, the computer would spit out Mario Cuomo.” Cuomo had it all: “He’s brilliant, he’s articulate, he’s funny, he’s feisty.”
¹³
Naturally, he was touted as the “counterbalance to Rush Limbaugh.”

Cuomo was a bigger flop even than all the other Limbaugh wannabes. Cuomo’s show—”the liberals’ answer to Rush,” as it was promoted—consistently ranked at the bottom of the quarterly Arbitron ratings. The show was canceled just over a year after it began.
¹⁶

Perhaps the most heavily promoted Alternative-to-Limbaugh was Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner. Hightower was regularly compared to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Reagan in the mainstream media (except not a jerk like them!). Thus,
The Nation
avidly hawked High-tower as the “long-awaited relief from Rush-polluted airwaves,” and pleaded with its readers to please tune in!
¹⁷

What put Hightower in the tradition of these “fellow radio stars,” as one newspaper flattered Hightower, was that he had a book. The difference was, of course, that Hightower’s book had “wit and wisdom—as opposed to Limbaugh’s canned recitations of corporate mantras and Reagan’s tortured attempts to forge a print relationship with his father.”
¹⁸
The other difference, based on hard fact rather than liberal sneering, was that Limbaugh’s and Reagan’s books were runaway best-sellers. Limbaugh’s was number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list for over a year. The only “best-seller” list Hightower ever made anywhere was at a single bookstore in Albany. He made that prestigious list for one week.