Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (22 page)

Over the years, the
New York Times
has bemoaned “a disappointing” Supreme Court decision upholding a local ordinance requiring go-go dancers to wear pasties;
¹²²
it has denounced Mayor Giuliani for “grossly distorting] the First Amendment” by threatening to withdraw taxpayer money from a pornographic exhibit of the Virgin Mary;
¹²³
it has criticized the “Child Online Protection Act” for requiring credit cards for pornographic websites as a violation of our First Amendment rights.
¹²⁴
But University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein’s book
Republic.com,
detailing the bright side of censorship, won fulsome praise from the
Times.
¹²⁵
Sunstein had proposed censoring only the Internet. The
Times
is ever-vigilant against deft manipulations of the First Amendment to protect the likes of Matt Drudge.

Sunstein’s book argued that the Internet had created the intolerable situation of allowing the reading public choice. As Sunstein darkly put it: “Consumers are able to see exactly what they want.” This must be stopped. His point—in his own words—was that “a commitment to consumer sovereignty may well compromise political sovereignty.” A clearer statement 01 left-wing fascism is hard to come by. Whose “political sovereignty” will be compromised exactly?

Though Sunstein strained preposterously to suggest that it is not just conservative websites that threaten democracy as we know it, his “both sides” argument was transparently phony. The dangerous world he imagined consisted of “liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis.”

How, precisely, would a conservative go about eliminating liberal points of view from his life? You would have to be a survivalist in Idaho to escape the liberal sound chamber. As a start, one would have to cut out public

schools, colleges, the evening news, sitcoms, movies, children’s cartoons, book reviews,
Lifetime: TV for Women,
Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel,
People
magazine,
Vanity Fair,
the
New York Times, Time, Newsweek,
and, indeed, all major newspapers and magazines.

It isn’t compartmentalization that liberals are worried about, it is the capacity of Americans to escape the Orwellian drivel. Restricting oneself to only leftist propaganda, day in and day out, simply requires taking no action. Like the mass-marketing solicitations advise: You do nothing! Don’t tune in to Rush Limbaugh, don’t subscribe to
Human Events,
don’t seek out conservative websites.

But Sunstein’s insight that the Internet allowed people “to limit their exposure to like-minded viewpoints” raised a red flag at the
New York Times.
That’s not free speech, it’s conservative kooks! The
Times
was rapt with admiration for the idea of censoring the Internet and hailed Sunstein for raising “important and troubling questions about the effects of the Internet on a democratic society.”

Unlike child pornography and totally nude dancing—which are the very heart of the First Amendment—the
Times
noted the Internet offers “a powerful new weapon to fringe groups and reinforces extremism.” The Internet must not be permitted to interrupt important commentary that preserves the political sovereignty of liberalism. Among the important commentaries that could be disrupted by the Internet are these:

“I had heard that [Reagan] was a very open-minded, broad-minded person, that he cared about human rights... but the record is abysmal.”
Lesley Stahl,
CBS News
White House correspondent on Howard Cosell’s

Speaking of Everything,
April 10,1988.
¹²⁶

“Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free. Some of Cuba’s health care is world-class. In heart disease, for example, in brain surgery. Health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.”

Peter Jennings, ABC’s
World News Tonight,
April 3,1989
¹²⁷

“The North Pole is melting... something that has presumably never before been seen by humans and is more evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate.”

The
New York Times,
August 19,2000
¹²⁸

“A front-page article on Aug. 19 and a brief report on Aug. 20 in
The Week in Review
about the [North Pole] misstated the normal conditions of the sea ice there.... The reports also referred incompletely to the link between the open water and global warming. The lack of ice at the pole is not necessarily related to global warming.
”

The
New York Times,
Correction, August 29,2000

“[T]he media consortium... decid[ed] on October 22
—
for the sake of national unity in the current political crisis
—
not to release an in-depth analysis of the Florida election ... which, according to inside sources, gave the state election to Al Gore.
”

Keith Kelly, the
New York Post,
December 5,2000.
¹²⁹

(The media consortium study was not completed for another year, at which point it was promptly released, showing that Bush had won on any count.)
¹³⁰

“Elvis, the first rock star. Clinton, the first rock star President.... Clinton had a talent for convincing anyone listening to him that he was speaking only to them, just as Elvis convinced someone in the 100th row that he was singing only to them. Presley drew on black culture for inspiration. Clinton draws on black culture for solace.”

CNN political analyst Bill Schneider,
Inside Politics,
August 16,2001
¹³¹

By disrupting the constant drumbeat of liberal propaganda—Reagan was a brute, Cuba has excellent health care, Santa’s home is melting, Gore won the election, and Clinton is Elvis—the Internet had become a threat to “democracy.”

The first chapter of Sunstein’s book was posted on Freerepublic.com— a website that is wildly popular on the basis of the now-discredited “consumer sovereignty” principle. One Freeper responded, “I’ve been exposed to a massive excerpt from
Republic.com,
a book written by a liberal, on a conservative niche website. Without that conservative niche site, which I visit often, I would not have read his stuff.”
¹³²

With only slightly more subtlety than Professor Sunstein, in 1996
Time
magazine noted with alarm that a computer user can “totally customize his or her daily supply of information.”
¹³³
This “suspect” development meant that news was “moving away from the universal.” If the universal experience of liberal hectoring was not so unpleasant, Americans might not have turned to the Samizdat media with such zeal. The new “individualized” nature of information,
Time
said, means “news is no longer a common experience.”

See, that’s just the sort of thing conservatives are talking about. The “news” never was a “common experience” for people who didn’t think Ronald Reagan was a contemptible dunce.

Time
expressed alarm that news sources now included the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Internet websites. (MTV was thrown in for cover.) Like-minded Americans were meeting and communicating with one another! And not just any Americans. As
Time
explained, these were paranoid right-wing kooks. If liberals were not already scared out of their wits, the magazine stated that “right-wing militia groups”—i.e., mainstream conservative chat rooms—were being “nourished by their own books, periodicals and E-mail lists.” Though stopping short of Professor Sunstein’s call for regulation of the Internet,
Time
did raise questions about what this meant “for our understanding of the world around us, for our sense of community.”

Hillary Clinton has also expressed concern about the “accessibility and instantaneous information on the computer.”
¹³⁴
Too much free speech! This was in a press conference on February 11, 1998—or two weeks after Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story being suppressed by
Newsweek.
Not surprisingly, Mrs. Clinton raised the need for some “kind of editing function or gate-keeping function” for the Internet. Saying, “It is just beyond imagination what can be disseminated,” Mrs. Clinton said, “we are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this.” There are, she announced, “competing values.” To wit; her electoral viability versus the First Amendment. So the First Amendment’s got to go, the children need her.

Celebrated First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams also never saw the dark underbelly to free speech until the Drudge Report. Abrams was quoted in the
Wall Street Journal
saying, “If one were rewriting libel law today, one would try to write it to assure that the false statements of Matt Drudge were treated as libel.” More likely you’d rewrite the First Amendment to take account of Floyd Abrams’s clients. Abrams has defended the false statements of:

• ABC
¹³⁵
. NBC
¹³⁶

•
Fortune
magazine
¹³⁷

• Consumer Reports
¹³⁸
and

• political candidates
¹³⁹

Matt Drudge evidently cries out for a higher standard of accuracy than every other information source in America. In any event, Drudge seems to be meeting the new special high standard of accuracy reserved for the Drudge Report. His only alleged misstatement that was ever tested in a court of law concerned a statement about Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, for which Blumenthal sued Drudge for libel. The case ended with Blumenthal paying Drudge money.

A Clinton-appointed federal judge actually made a finding of fact that Drudge is “not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer.”
Hustler
magazine is journalism protected by the First Amendment.
¹⁴⁰
Penthouse
and the
National Enquirer
are journalism protected by the First Amendment.
¹⁴¹
Indeed, even the
New York Times
is deemed “journalism” protected by the First Amendment. The dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism noted with some consternation that “no journalist or journalism organization protested after this federal judge took it upon himself to determine who can be called a journalist.”
¹⁴²

To the contrary, media “experts” treated Drudge like a cancer that had to be excised so real journalists could get on with the important business of calling Reagan stupid. Joan Konner, publisher of the
Columbia Journalism Review,
said Drudge is “by no reasonable measure working in the public interest.” Marvin Kalb, then-head of the Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard, dismissed Drudge as “a conveyor of gossipy information.”
¹⁴³

When defending pornographers, lawbreakers, or traitors, one of the left’s favorite cliches
¹⁴⁴
is from Justice Powell’s opinion in
Gertz v. Welch:
“Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an idea may seem, we depend for its correction ... on the competition of other ideas.”
¹⁴⁵

Liberals love the sound of the ringing peroration “there is no such thing as a false idea.” But the moment they are confronted with ideas other than their own—on the Internet, on radio, and in books—liberals discover boatloads of false ideas. Not only that, but “the competition of other ideas” turns out to be nothing but trouble. In a true competition of ideas, it turns out the American people are appalled by theirs. So now they tell us a robust, free, unregulated marketplace of ideas is a threat to “democracy.”

SEVEN

the joy of arguing with liberals:
you’re stupid!

If liberals were prevented from ever again calling Republicans dumb, they would be robbed of half their arguments. To be sure, they would still have “racist,” “fascist,” “homophobe,” “ugly,” and a few other highly nuanced arguments in the quiver. But the loss of “dumb” would nearly cripple them. Like clockwork, every consequential Republican to come down the pike is instantly, invariably, always, without exception called “dumb.”

This is how six-year-olds argue: They call everything “stupid.” The left’s primary argument is the angry reaction of a helpless child deprived of the ability to mount logical counterarguments. Someday we will turn to the
New York Times
editorial page and find the Newspaper of Record denouncing President Bush for being a “penis-head.”

The “you’re stupid” riposte is part of the larger liberal tactic of refusing to engage ideas. Sometimes they evaporate in the middle of an argument and you’re left standing alone, arguing with yourself. More often, liberals withdraw figuratively by responding with ludicrous and irrelevant personal attacks. Especially popular are non sequiturs that are also savagely cruel. A vicious personal smear, they believe, constitutes a clever counterargument. Your refusal to submit to name-calling means you were overwhelmed by the force of their argument that you are a penis-head.

George Bush doesn’t actually have to be a penis-head for some portion of voters to believe absolutely, without hesitation, that he is a penis-head. That’s the beauty of controlling all major sources of news dissemination in America. It ensures that liberals will never have to learn how to argue beyond the level of a six-year-old.