Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (38 page)

Thus, Liberal Manhattan began worshipping Giuliani both out of terror and also to detract from President Bush’s spectacular performance. There was no question, for example, but that
Time
magazine would make Giuliani Man of the Year. It might have been the mastermind of the attack, Osama bin Laden, but it sure wasn’t going to be Bush. The characterization of Giuliani as a heartless brute vanished into thin air like the blather it always was.

Most of the time, liberals do not imagine the world is real. Their contribution to political debate is worthless, since even they do not believe the things they say. The more shocking and iconoclastic they are, the more fashion points they accrue. Liberal Manhattanites believe in redistribution of their own wealth and ceaseless police brutality like they believe in Martians. It is very possible that Giuliani’s critics never seriously considered the consequences of a single thing they said. September 11 was real. It took a terrorist attack for liberals to suspend their usual hateful palaver.

In a fascinating case study of liberal hate and paranoia, Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the
New Republic
and contributing writer for the
New York Times Magazine,
actually sought the company of conservatives. And not just any conservatives. He went to the belly of the beast—or the “enemy,” as he put it—attending a Christian Coalition gala in honor of Pat Robertson’s seventieth birthday.
⁸
When Sullivan breathlessly reported back to liberals the breaking news that Christian Coalition members are people, too (“They seemed neither fanatics nor bigots”), the left was forced to come to terms with its own bigotry.

Just kidding. Sullivan’s own small step forward turned out not to be a giant leap for liberalkind. The precise reaction he received from his liberal friends was redoubled hatred and loathing. As Sullivan reported, they “viscerally compared the event to a Nazi rally, and said that I might have met many personally charming advocates of bigotry there as well.” After an agonizing exegesis on his own soul searching (“Most human goods are alloyed with most human failings”), Sullivan cheerfully resolved that Robertson was “intolerant” but “not evil.”

Having himself ventured onto enemy territory, Sullivan concluded by proposing that Christian conservatives meet and spend time with “some of the radicals they claim to be fighting against.” Then they “might see that the bogeymen of the cultural left are not quite as terrifying as they thought,” but “are human beings, too.” This might not change their minds, he said, but “it might change their tone.”

In point of fact, conservatives do spend time with the radicals they oppose—and lots of it. It can’t be avoided. Liberals are forever leaping out at us from our TV screens, newspapers, magazines, movies, and college lecterns. We know liberals and we know what they think. Unlike Sullivan’s exotic incursion into a right-wing gathering, any conservative can already attach names and faces to entire colonies of liberals. Ironically, regular church-going, middle-class Americans are far more cosmopolitan than the self-styled sophisticates of the left.

This isn’t merely to say that liberals have near-exclusive control over all major sources of information in this country, though that is true. Nor is the point that liberals are narrow-minded and parochial, incapable of seeing the other fellow’s point of view, though that is also true. And it’s not that, as a consequence, liberals impute inhumanity to their political opponents and are unfathomably hateful and vicious. That’s true, too.

The point is that conservatives in America are the most tolerant (and long-suffering) people in the world. They already have “met and spent time with” liberals. They do it every day, day in, day out, their entire lives.

Andrew Sullivan spends a few hours at a conservative gathering and it’s a milestone. Conservatives are bludgeoned with opposing views their every waking moment, and merely for refusing to join the cult, they are denounced as “intolerant.” By contrast, liberals have absolutely no contact with the society they decry from their Park Avenue redoubts.

The day after seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt died in a race at the Daytona 500, almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page. Stock-car racing had been the nation’s fastest-growing sport for a decade, and NASCAR the second-most-watched sport behind the NFL. More Americans recognize the name Dale Earnhardt than, say, Maureen Dowd. (Manhattan liberals are dumbly blinking at that last sentence.) It took the
New York Times
two days to deem Earnhardt’s death sufficiently important to mention it on the front page. Demonstrating the left’s renowned populist touch, the article began, “His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.”
⁹
The
Times
went on to report that in vast swaths of the country people watch stock-car racing. Tacky people were mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South!

Except for occasional exotic safaris to the Wal-Mart or forays into enemy territory at a Christian Coalition dinner, liberals do not know any conservatives. It makes it easier to demonize them that way. It’s well and good for Andrew Sullivan to talk about a “truce.” But conservatives aren’t the ones who need to be jolted into the discovery that the “bogeymen” of their imaginations are “not quite as terrifying as they thought.” Conservatives already know that people they disagree with politically can be “charming.” Also savagely cruel bigots who hate ordinary Americans and lie for sport.

NOTES

one. liberals unhinged

1. Peter Perl, “Absolute Truth; Tom DeLay Is Certain That Christian Family Values Will Solve America’s Problems. But He’s Uncertain How to Face His Own Family,”
Washington Post Magazine,
May 13,2001, p. W12.

2. “Dangerous Delay,”
News and Observer
(Raleigh, N.C.), March 26,1997, p. A18.

3. Peter Perl, “Absolute Truth,” p. W12.

4. Passim. This refers to the fact that DeLay built a half-million-dollar Houston pest control company before entering politics.

5. Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; The God Squad,”
New York Times,
June 20,1999, Sec. 4, P-15.

6. Ibid.

7. Katie Couric,
Today,
March 6, 2001. Couric interviewed Senator Arlen Specter just weeks after Specter had warned darkly that the ex-president could be impeached, even though he was out of office, for selling presidential pardons. Couric asked him if he had any regrets. Specter had, after all, voted to acquit Clinton two years earlier. But those weren’t the regrets she was asking about. She said: “You know you, you angered a lot of feminists when you accused Anita Hill.... And you accused her publicly of, quote, ‘Flat out perjury.’ Any regrets?”

8. Katie Couric,
Today,
June 8,2000. Couric asked Heston if there were not “any other position the NRA could take in terms of trying to decrease the number of school shootings.” Heston cited the millions of dollars the NRA spends on arms safety education (including the runaway hit
Eddie Eagle
video). When Couric dismissed education, Heston asked her what she would suggest. She replied: “I don’t know, perhaps greater restrictions.”

9. Matt Lauer,
Today,
June 12, 2000. The cherubic, earnest Lauer casually observed: “I feel strange saying, I never stopped to think about the fact there is no official U.S. policy on vacation time.”

10.
New York Times,
April 11,2000.

11.
Salon,
April 30, 2000. Ehrenreich noted that “its message is a timeless one that bears repeating every century or so: The meek shall triumph and the mighty shall fall; the hungry and exhausted will get restless and someday—someday!—rise up against their oppressors. The prophet Isaiah said something like this, and so, a little more recently, did Jesus.”

12. Dan Rather,
CBS Evening News,
August 17, 2000. Rather attributed rumors of an impending indictment of Bill Clinton to a “carefully orchestrated,” “Republican-backed” leak, one day before a Carter-appointed judge admitted that he had been the source.

13. Lewinsky 8/26/98 Deposition, at 18-20, cited in the Starr Report, “The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr on President Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair,” with analysis by the staff of the
Washington Post
(1998) at 329.

14. Bryant Gumbel, “Hugh Hefner and Christie Hefner Discuss the Controversy Surrounding the Democratic Convention’s Fund-raiser, Which Was to Have Taken Place at the Playboy Mansion,”
The Early Show,
August 15,2000.

15. Director Robert Altman quoted in the
New York Post
(from the
London Times):

NOTES,
pp. 4-10

“When I see an American flag flying, it’s a joke. This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully—he can’t even speak! I just find him an embarrassment.”

16. Michele Kayal, “Flag Flying Causes Stir at Palace in Honolulu,”
New York Times,
November 25, 2001. (Quoting Dan Boylan, a political analyst at the University of Hawaii-West Oahu: “This is when people start acting very, very dumb in their patriotism and flag waving.”)

17. Felicia R. Lee, “Flag-Waving: Reading Between the Stripes,”
New York Times,
September 30,2001. (Quoting David Nasaw, a historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center: “New York has just been too much of a cosmopolitan town for flag-waving.”)

18. Clyde Haberman, “60’s Lessons on How Not to Wave Flag,”
New York Times,
September 19, 2001.

19. Barbara Walters and Jami Floyd, “Abortion Clinics in U.S. Targeted by Religious Terrorists,” ABC’s 20/20, November 28,2001.

20. Frank Rich, “How to Lose a War,”
New York Times,
October 27,2001.

21. Ibid. Though Rich claimed that abortion clinics had plenty of experience with “home grown Talibans” and, thus, Planned Parenthood could have provided leads on “the convergence of international and domestic terrorism,” no anthrax had ever been sent to an abortion clinic, though a white powder had been. The mailer of the harmless white powder was a bank rob-ber-cum-anti-abortionist who was already on the FBI’s most wanted list. Among the critical advice Rich said Planned Parenthood could have imparted to Ashcroft was that offering a reward for the capture of terrorists would never work: “The sight of Mr. Ashcroft and other federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for anthrax terrorists [was] a laughable indication of how little grasp they have of the enemy.” The mailer of the white powder was captured by the FBI about one month later—in response to widely circulated wanted posters offering a $50,000 reward.

22. Bruce Ackerman, “On the Home Front, a Winnable War,”
New York Times,
November 6, 2001.

23. Former senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas in his defense of Clinton during the impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. The
New York Times
called it “a speech of rare eloquence.” R. W. Apple, “The Trial of the President: The Defense—In the Chamber,”
New York Times,
January 22,1999.

24. James Carville and Paul Begala, “A Battle Plan for the Democrats,”
New York Times,
May 27,2001.

25. Statement of Senator James Jeffords, “Declaration of Independence,” May 24, 2001, Burlington, Vermont, at www.senate.gov/~jeffords/524statement.html.

26. Keith Olbermann,
The Big Show,
MSNBC, August 18, 1998. (Quoted in editorial “And the Winner Is...,”
Union Leader
[Manchester, N.H.], December 31,1998.)

27. William Tuohy, “Jesse Jackson Competes with Queen on TV; Britain: As She Hails N. Ireland Progress on BBC, American Assails Tories on Another Channel,”
Los Angeles Times,
December 26,1994, p. A4.

28. LexisNexis search of
New York Times
archives from December 1994 through January 1995 for “Jesse Jackson and Germany and fascism and South Africa” produces no documents.

29. Michele Parente with William Douglas, “Promoters of GOP Pact ‘Worse Than Hitler,’ “
Newsday,
February 19,1995, p. A20.

30. Paul Richter and Edwin Chen, “Biden Vows to Oppose Foster, Then Flip-Flops,”
Los Angeles Times,
February 11,1995, p. A4.

31. Fred W. Lindecke, “Schroeder Lambastes Limbaugh; Coloradan Urges Shows to Offset ‘Rush’ Radio,”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
March 7,1995, p. 2B.

32. Chris Matthews, “Attorney Alan Dershowitz and Former Democratic Pollster Patrick Caddell Discuss Election Reform,” CNBC’s
Hardball with Chris Matthews,
July 31,2001.

33. Kenneth J. Cooper, “Plan to Curb Caucuses Draws Plenty of Heat; House Democrats Say Advocacy Would Suffer,”
Washington Post,
December 8,1994, p. A7.

34. Joe Hallett, “Gore Hits Hard in Michigan,”
Columbus Dispatch,
November 6,2000, p. 1A.

NOTES,
pp. 11-17

35. Rob Morse, “Those Other F-Words,”
San Francisco Examiner,
February 14,1999.

36. Maria Romash, Eric Hauser, Steve McMahon, Peter Perm, Dick Morris, Sean Hannity, and Alan Colmes, “Race for the Democratic Presidential Nomination,” Fox News Network, January 5,2000, Transcript #010501cb.253. (“But I think the point that Donna is trying to make and has been trying to make is to be inclusive rather than exclusive, to bring in people from all walks of life, from all colors. And that’s what makes a good campaign.”)

37. See, e.g., James Gerztenzang, “Powell Warns Gore Not to Play the ‘Race Card,’ “
Los Angeles Times,
January 7, 2000.

38. L. Brent Bozell III, “Pooh-poohing Election Results,”
Washington Times,
November 26,1994, p. Dl.

39. “Interview with Joycelyn Elders,”
Playboy,
June 1995 and passim.