Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (20 page)

The media swoon put Stephanopoulos’s book on the
New York Times
best-seller list for fifteen weeks, five of those at number one. (D’Souza had received an advance of $25,000 for his book that spent fifteen on the bestseller list, though, admittedly, not at number one.) On the best-seller list at the same time as Stephanopoulos’s
All Too Human
was Bill Gertz’s
Betrayal
—another Regnery book—which spent seven weeks on the list. This was also without being excerpted in
Newsweek,
reviewed in the
Times,
or featured on the Conan O’Brien show, the
Today
show,
Good Morning America,
or
CBS This Morning.
It was certainly without a $3 million advance.

And so it goes. Matt Drudge’s book,
The Drudge Manifesto,
received no monopoly media attention—no adulatory book reviews in the
Times,
no appearances on the morning shows, the late-night shows, or any network shows at all. Yet the book sailed onto the
New York Times
best-seller list and remained there for four weeks. Released concurrently with
The Drudge Manifesto
was a book by
Nightline’s
Ted Koppel. Koppel got a
Times
book review and appearances on the
Today
show and
Larry King Live
to promote his book, which barely made the list for one week. It must be the “broadcasting celebrity” of conservatives that propels their books onto the bestseller list.

Kelly Flinn, a liberal heroine for being both an adulteress and a girl Air Force pilot, got a $1 million advance for her book,
Proud to Be.
The same liberals in the publishing industry who feel “ambivalence if not aversion to things military”—as the
New York Times
put it
⁷³
—were enthralled by this modern-day Bathsheba. The reading public was not, and the book bombed.
⁷⁴

In the appropriate liberal comedian category, Whoopi Goldberg received a whopping $6 million advance for her book. It briefly graced the bottom of the best-seller list (at numbers 15,10,15, and 9) in what the
New York Times
called a “dizzying tumble from grace.”
⁷⁵

The one near-exception to the rule that only liberals are eligible for mind-boggling advances is David Brock, who received an enormous advance for his book on Hillary Clinton. This was hardly undeserved inasmuch as his previous book had spent eleven weeks on the
Times
best-seller list (while being slammed by the critics). But between the advance and the publication of the book, Brock became a liberal. His book crashed and burned when it was spurned by conservative readers. Thus, the Brock exception merely demonstrates the axiom that conservatives read books and liberals don’t— an unalterable fact that will never, ever be acknowledged by mainstream publishers.

Though publishers incessantly complain that big advances are often not repaid in book sales, they refuse to acknowledge a half-century of marketing research demonstrating that conservative books tend to sell quite well while liberal books require major blockbuster promotion merely to avoid publishing disasters. Liberals compete for advances in the millions of dollars. Conservatives are happy to be published at all.

In addition to lucrative advances for books that don’t sell, liberal writers can always be assured of a position on the op-ed page of any of various major newspapers, where a writer need be popular only with his editors. Liberals succeed by impressing an oligopoly of fellow liberals rather than winning in the marketplace of ideas.

Arthur Hoppe annoyed readers of the
San Francisco Chronicle
with his pompous liberalism three to five times a week for forty years. In one of Hoppe’s crowd pleasers he wrote that when he heard American troops were bogged down in Vietnam, “I nodded and said, ‘Good.’ And having said it, I realized the bitter truth. Now I root against my own country.” Letters denouncing Hoppe for his anti-Americanism, even threatening newspaper cancellations, never made Hoppe’s position at the
Chronicle
any less secure. Though it was asserted that Hoppe had a “loyal, loving following,” there is no evidence of much of a following outside of the
Chronicle’s
editorial board. All eight of Hoppe’s books bombed.
⁷⁶

Anthony Lewis’s bitter left-wing screeds were published biweekly, year after year, decade after decade in the
New York Times
for half a century. This is despite a dearth of evidence that anyone read them. Though he occupied prime real estate on the op-ed page of the Newspaper of Record, only one of Lewis’s four books ever became a best-seller. Lewis did get a favorable mention for his book
Make No Law
on the
Times’s
“And Bear in Mind” list of editors’ recommendations.
⁷⁷
That same week, two authors who could never hope for positions as regular
New York Times
columnists were on the bestseller list—D’Souza and O’Rourke.

It would be interesting to compare liberals and conservatives on a grid— one axis for “number of words published in elite newspapers” and the other axis for “weeks on a best-seller list.”

In reviews that are often as compelling as their books, unsuccessful liberal authors use their premiere positions in the pages of the monopoly media to describe best-selling conservative authors as follows:

• Windbags, no-talent hacks, and laughably inept flops (the
Washington Post’s
Tom Shales, none of whose books ever made any best-seller list, on Bernard Goldberg’s number one book,
Bias,
on the
New York Times
list);

• Smear artists who are repulsed by female sexuality (Frank Rich, whose book
Ghost Light
was a midlist failure, on David Brock’s best-selling
The Real Anita Hill
⁷
*);

• Writers of “hatchet” books
(Newsweek
columnist Jonathan Alter, whose books were commercial failures,
⁷⁹
on Barbara Olson’s best-selling
Hell to Pay*
⁰
);

•
A blowhard recycling his radio monologues in a rant of opinions, gags, and insults with a few facts or near-facts, who applies ad hominem ad nauseam, unsubtle slobberings and slaverings, sprinkled in like the meat in last week’s stew
(Times
book reviewer Walter Goodman, whose own books flopped, on best-selling champion Rush Limbaugh).

Conservative books may be snubbed in the elite media, hidden by bookstores, and regularly spurned by major publishers, but at least with books, we know who the public wants to read.

While publishing houses are understandably wary of conservative books that instantly skyrocket onto the
New York Times
best-seller list, the evidence suggests they are a bit overanxious to publish liberals. In the rush to provide the public with yet more liberal bilge, editors apparently dispense with fact-checking.

Books that become publishing scandals by virtue of phony research, invented facts, or apocryphal stories invariably grind political axes for the left. There may be publishing frauds that are apolitical, but it’s hard to think of a single hoax book written by a conservative.

Perhaps the most famous left-wing hoax was
I, Rigoberta Menchu.
Menchu’s purported account of her torment at the hands of the Guatemalan military was uncritically accepted by the left, and used as a bludgeon against the Reagan administration for sending aid to Guatemala. Menchu herself met with State Department officials “to urge an end to American aid to Guatemala.”
⁸¹
Her alleged autobiography won the Nobel peace prize, was translated into twelve languages, inspired fifteen thousand scholarly papers, and was required reading at colleges across America. Menchu was the recipient of fourteen honorary doctorates.

And then it was exposed as a hoax by anthropologist and Guatemalan expert David Stoll of Middlebury College, who examined archival material and interviewed survivors of the events described by Menchu. He found that her book was a fantasy—an utter fraud from beginning to end. Thus, for example, on the very first page of her Nobel Prize-winning book, Menchu claimed to be an uneducated, illiterate peasant. Indeed, the book had to be translated from tapes of Menchu’s oral history. It turned out Menchu had attended prestigious boarding schools run by nuns. She claimed to have engaged in arduous low-wage labor in coffee and cotton fields as a child. In fact, she belonged to a relatively prosperous farming family. She vividly described being forced to watch family members starve or burn to death. These events, too, never occurred.

As one of Menchu’s native countrymen described it, “The book is one lie after another, and she knows it.”
⁸²
Stoll’s refutation of Menchu’s account was later confirmed by the
New York Times.**

Menchu first denied the allegations of a hoax, then blamed the attacks on racism, and finally blamed the co-author to whom she had dictated her story. (A check of the tapes indicated the lies were Rigoberta’s, not the translator’s.)

The director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute brushed off the scandal, saying “all autobiographies embellish to a greater or lesser extent.” There was, he assured the public, “no question of revoking the prize.”
⁸⁴

Another prize-winning hoax was the anti-gun
Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture
by Michael A. Bellesiles. He claimed to have reviewed more than ten thousand probate and criminal records to make the stunning claim that only about 14 percent of men owned guns in colonial America and most of those guns were unusable. America’s gun culture, he said, was “an invented tradition.” The jacket flap on his book boasted: “This is the N.R.A.’s worst nightmare.” Neither his publisher nor the reviewers needed to know more. Bellesiles’s conclusion was instantly and uncritically embraced by the elite media despite questions raised about his research by Second Amendment scholars such as Gary Kleck, Glen Reynolds, and Don Kates.

Arming America
was granted a major pre-release promotion in the
New York Times
“Week in Review” section entitled “The Lock and Load Myth: A Disarming Heritage.” The article boasted, “Mr. Bellesiles’s book may change the terms of the debate.”
⁸⁵
Upon its publication, the book was giddily reviewed in the
Times
by Garry Wills, who gushed, “Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America.” He praised Bellesiles for marshaling “overwhelming evidence” that proved America’s view of the gun was a “superstition” as pervasive “as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.”
⁸⁶

Charlton Heston wrote a letter to the editor complaining of Wills’s overeager acceptance of Bellesiles’s “ludicrous argument.”
⁸⁷

Naturally,
Arming America
was repeatedly included in the
Times’s
“And Bear in Mind” list as well as the annual “Notable Books” list for books by liberals, where Bellesiles was again hailed for having “rattle[ed] some time-worn myths.”
⁸⁸
The New York Review of Books
raved that Bellesiles had “done us all a service if his book reduces the credibility of the fanatics who endow the Founding Fathers with posthumous membership in what has become a cult of the gun.”

The trustees of Columbia University awarded Bellesiles one of the three 2001 Bancroft Prizes in American history and diplomacy for
Arming America.
⁸⁹

But after a year of praise and awards and glorious press for
Arming America,
it turned out Bellesiles had fabricated his research. Other scholars had tried to review Bellesiles’s research, but the data didn’t match. Often the records he claimed to have reviewed didn’t exist. There were literally hundreds of errors and invented facts in Bellesiles’s book. He claimed to have reviewed San Francisco probate records for 1849 to 1859. It turned out all those records had been destroyed by a fire in the earthquake of 1906.
⁹⁰

When questioned about his research, Bellesiles said he couldn’t respond because his notes had been lost in a flood in his office at Emory University. (Other faculty members found that claim incredible.) When factual errors were found on his website, he claimed it had been hacked. When a sympathetic colleague offered to search through the probate records on his own time and duplicate Bellesiles’s work in order to defend him, Bellesiles never returned his call.

Another liberal publishing fraud,
Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President,
was pulled from the shelves shortly after publication when the author, whose book relied on his personal credibility, turned out to be a convicted felon. The author, Jim Hatfield, made the extravagant claim that he had nailed down Bush’s alleged cocaine conviction—a long-rumored incident that had eluded scores of talented and battle-worn journalists. St. Martin’s Press released the book just as George W. Bush was embarking on his presidential campaign in 1999.

It raised no flags at St. Martin’s Press that top-flight investigative reporters from the mainstream media—where nine out of ten reporters voted for Clinton—had unearthed no evidence of the purported cocaine bust. An unknown, unpublished author who refused to divulge his sources struck New York liberals as completely credible. He claimed to have the goods on George Bush.

Though the author of
Fortunate Son
was not known in publishing circles, it turned out he was well known to law enforcement. He was a two-time convicted felon, still on parole for a solicitation of murder conviction. For his most recent criminal conviction, Hatfield had paid a hit man $5,000 to kill his female supervisor, because—according to a witness—”he was enraged about the fact that this incompetent woman was his supervisor.”
⁹¹