Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (21 page)

The
Washington Post
described the careful vetting process for a book that would accuse a presidential candidate of having a criminal record: “Nobody at St. Martin’s had met the author until he arrived for the abortive book promotion last October.... No fact-checking was done. Nobody insisted on knowing Hatfield’s sources or on securing supporting material for his sensational charges.”
⁹²

Hatfield claimed the Bush family had purged the supposed cocaine bust from the record, but could produce not a shred of evidence. He had no date for the conviction, no arresting officer, no judge, no county, no general description of his “sources.”
Slate Magazine
soon caught Hatfield describing one of his alleged sources as spitting tobacco into “the ever-present Styrofoam cup”—contradicting an earlier claim that he had talked to his sources only by telephone. The
New York Times
rushed in with a defense of the ex-con author, noting that novelists “John Bunyan, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky all did time.” Not only that, but the
Times
proclaimed: “Perhaps if politicians were more forthcoming, they would be smeared less.”
⁹³
It was Bush’s fault that a convicted felon was libeling him.

St. Martin’s withdrew the book when Hatfield’s solicitation of murder conviction was revealed.
⁹⁴
Hatfield had received a $25,000 advance—not huge but quite a bit more than the typical advance paid to first-time conservative authors whose books end up on the best-seller list.

The
Washington Post’s
explanation for St. Martin’s flirtation with the ex-con’s apocryphal expose on Bush was fascinating. It seems that “publishers often care more about getting books to market and less about accuracy.”
⁹⁵
Again, the profit motive at work! The same “profit motive” that incomprehensibly causes publishers to reject conservative best-sellers also induces publishers to dispense with the most cursory fact-checking for left-wing fairy tales written by convicted felons.

Other books subjected to the rigorous fact-checking methods of publishers about to drop a stink bomb on a conservative include one that said Richard Nixon was a wife-beater
⁹⁶
and another that accused J. Edgar Hoover of being gay and showing up at Mafia parties in drag—startling facts that somehow eluded the rabidly anti-Hoover press of the day.
⁹⁷

One of the more lascivious stink-bomb books was Kitty Kelley’s 1991
Nancy Reagan, the Unauthorized Biography.
Kelley accused both Reagans of having affairs and of smoking pot in the governor’s mansion in the late sixties. The former first lady was said to have carried on a long-term affair with Frank Sinatra in full view of the White House staff. (Her husband awarded Sinatra the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.) Kelley was paid what was at the time the largest book advance ever paid for a nonfiction book.
⁹⁸

Kelley’s book was almost entirely unsourced—and the sources Keller did provide repeatedly denied her claims. As George Will wrote in the
Washington Post,
Kelley’s book exhibited raw “malice, crudeness, mendacity, and ignorance.”
⁹⁹

Yet her book was treated as hard news at the
New York Times
in the heavy-breathing account of then-reporter Maureen Dowd.
¹⁰⁰
A few years hence, Dowd would be hooting that the Starr Report demonstrated only Ken Starr’s “cravings for ecstasy.”
¹⁰¹
Not only was the Starr Report concerned with felonies rather than idle gossip, it was at least based on proven facts rather than unsubstantiated gossip. But the Starr Report was “pornography” (though what Clinton did wasn’t “sex”). Kitty Kelley’s purple prose about the Reagans’ alleged sexual trysts was literally front-page news at the
New York Times.

In addition to a bumper crop of vicious and unsourced books defaming conservatives, books by feminists are often a treasure trove of invented statistics.

Confirming the feminists’ well-known facility with numbers, Naomi Wolf absurdly claimed in
The Beauty Myth
that 150,000 women die each year from anorexia. Comparing death by anorexia to the Holocaust, Wolf fumed: “How would America react to the mass self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons?” Gloria Steinem repeated the alleged anorexia statistic in her
book Revolution from Within.

Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the 1992 book
Who Stole Feminism,
went to the trouble to call the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) to find out that there are approximately one hundred deaths from anorexia each year. Noting that anorexia occurs in an extremely narrow demographic, affecting almost entirely white, upper-middle-class, over-achieving women, Hoff Sommers wryly observed that if 150,000 women had been dying every year from anorexia, “at Wellesley College graduation you would need to have ambulances on hand the way you do at major sports events.”
¹⁰²

Now consider: Only about two million people die of all causes in the United States each year. Auto accidents claim the lives of about forty thousand people annually—including pedestrians.
¹⁰³
How on earth did the purported 150,000 anorexia deaths slip past the editors—to say nothing of the authors themselves?

In a classic liberal sneer, the
New York Times
sniffed that some of Regnery’s anti-Clinton books would not “be likely to pass muster at an assembly of scholars.”
¹⁰⁴
No examples were cited nor evidence adduced for this assertion. Such jeers say no more—and are intended to say no more—than that the
Times
disapproves of conservative books. I’ve just listed a half-dozen mendacious liberal books. What do they have?
¹⁰⁵

On the off chance anyone would dare cite former FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s book
Unlimited Access
as of questionable veracity, there is no evidence that Aldrich was wrong. Indignant denials by the Clinton administration do not constitute disproof. To the contrary, Clintoman denials have historically constituted confirmation.

Even with advance review,
¹⁰⁶
the only story the White House disputed in Aldrich’s book was his claim that Clinton used to sneak out of the White House in the backseat of a car for extramarital trysts at the Marriott Hotel. Aldrich, who obviously had a great many sources at the White House, never budged from his claim that he had a solid source for the story, whom he would not identify because of the source’s continued employment with the FBI. In light of events since the release of Aldrich’s book, leading to Clinton’s impeachment, contempt citation, and disbarment, Aldrich appears to have been vindicated with a whoop.

Liberals don’t believe there is such a thing as “fact” or “truth.” Everything is a struggle for power between rival doctrines. They express boundless credulity for the claims of communist regimes. (“You must admit Cuba has an excellent health care system!”) They respect totalitarian regimes for their power to enforce the “truth” at the end of a gun. And they respect the truth in America as it is enforced in the pages of the
New York Times.
Only a disregard for both market forces and the truth can explain why publishing houses keep rushing liberal hoax books to print, while doggedly refusing to publish “surprise best-sellers.”

Unable to compete and running out of book-advance money to provide liberals with lifetime sinecures, the left is increasingly desperate to censor conservatives outright. It was easy enough before the Internet. Newspaper editors, TV executives, and publishers could simply refuse to hire or publish conservatives. They could jam liberalism down our throats on every television broadcast, morning show, late-night comedy program, and large-circulation newspaper and magazine in the country.

But the Internet has undermined the major media’s capacity to enforce a strict party line. It is not a coincidence that conservative books, always strong sellers, have experienced a boom since books became available on the Internet. Even the left’s precious “campaign finance reform” can only stop conservatives from buying space in the mainstream media outlets. On the Internet, speech is free—and liberalism can’t survive the competition. The same relentless competition of the Web that annihilated the commercial dot.coms has produced near-dominance of the Internet by conservatives.

In a ranking of the nine most-visited websites in the “Politics & New Media” category, conservative sites regularly outnumber liberal sites. Though the rankings vary from month to month, the list for March 2001 is typical: Four of the nine are conservative websites: drudgereport.com (number 2), townhall.com (number 4), freerepublic.com (number 6), and reagan.com (number 9). Only two are liberal websites, coming in at numbers 5 and 8.
¹⁰⁷

Similarly, conservative think-tank sites are consistently over-represented in the top nine “think tank” websites.
¹⁰⁸
Thus, for December 2000, six of the top nine most-visited think-tank sites were conservative groups; only one was liberal.
¹⁰⁹
One month later, in January 2001,
¹¹⁰
the conservative Heritage Foundation was number one, the libertarian CATO institute number two, and Pete Dupont’s National Center for Policy Analysis, number four. There were only two liberal think tanks in the top nine.

The effect of the Internet on the left’s capacity to shape the truth cannot be exaggerated. Consider a few truths forced into the open by the Internet.

•
Newsweek
had a tape of an intern discussing her affair with the president of the United States, but the magazine decided to sit on the story that reflected poorly on a Democratic president. Later that night, the story ran on the Internet, broken by the Drudge Report.

• For decades, the
New York Times
had allowed loose associations between Nazis and Christians to be made in its pages. Statements like these were not uncommon: “Did the Nazi crimes draw on Christian tradition?”
¹¹¹
... “the church is ‘co-responsible’ for the Holocaust”
¹¹²
... “Pope Pius XII, who maintained diplomatic ties with Hitler,.. .”
¹¹³
Then out of the blue one day in 2002, the
New York Times
ran a prominent article describing the Nazis’ virulent crusade against Christianity. That very week, evidence from the Nuremberg trials detailing Nazis’ crusade against Christianity had been posted on the Internet.
¹¹⁴
When a Nigerian student went on a shooting spree at the Appalachian Law School in January 2002, he was stopped by two armed students. In an online article posted on the
New York Post’s
website, economist John Lott wrote that of the 280 stories posted on NexisLexis in the week after the attack, only four mentioned that it was students pointing their own guns at the gunman that ended his rampage. “Much more typical,” Lott said, “was the scenario described by the
Washington Post,
where the heroes had simply ‘helped subdue’ the killer. The
New York Times
claimed the attacker was “tackled by fellow students.”
¹¹⁵
In a Google search of the Web, the vast majority of stories about the shooting focused on how the shooting spree was stopped by armed students—as well as on the major media’s refusal to report that fact.
¹¹⁶
The
New York Times’s
economic columnist, Paul Krugman, the only known economist who hates the free market, ferociously attacked the Bush administration for having received campaign contributions from Enron.
¹¹⁷
Andrew Sullivan revealed on his website that Krugman himself had been paid a $50,000 “consulting fee” by Enron. After receiving his Enron “consulting fee,” Krugman finally had kind words to say about one running dog lackey of the capitalist system. In a 1999
Fortune
magazine column, he enthusiastically compared Enron to Goldman Sachs, the gold standard of investment banking, and gushed that Enron was “making freewheeling markets possible.”
¹¹⁸
The fact that Enron had bought more influence with Krugman than it did with Bush—or as Krugman phrased it: “the people Enron put in the White House”
¹¹⁹
— would likely not be known but for Sullivan’s relentless pursuit of the matter on his website. True to form, Krugman eventually responded by attributing Sullivan’s attacks to a right-wing conspiracy. After enduring decades of liberal sneering about Star Wars, the Pentagon tested the technology and shot a missile out of the sky at 11:09 p.m. on July 14, 2001. The next day, less than two months before a terrorist attack on America, the
New York Times
ran a major front-page, two-inch headline, nine thousand-word article ... on the Florida election.
¹²⁰

The successful dry-run of a missile defense system was mentioned in a short item on page 12 of the Newspaper of Record.
¹²¹
It didn’t matter. The night before, news of the successful test of Star Wars had been blasted all over the Internet. (Drudge Report headline moments after the test: “IT’S A HIT!”)

This is why liberals are in a panic about the Internet. They believe conservatives should be prevented from speaking. Thus, the same pious blowhards who love to prattle about the sacrosanct First Amendment when the speech at issue is obscene or treasonous are constantly issuing lunatic demands for regulation of America’s most dangerous Samizdat media: the World Wide Web.