Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Read online

  This was Salon.com. It wasn’t like this was an alt weekly with ads for hand jobs. For many people, this was a respected publication. That these people allowed for such a story to be published, sending the message that it was open season on Christian conservatives, without so much as a Columbia Journalism Review symposium labeling such behavior outrageous and asking how best to shame Salon for so completely abandoning journalistic standards… it was a new low. If a conservative writer had done the same thing to a Democratic candidate, that writer would not only be shunned—he’d need a criminal defense attorney.

  I believe strongly that this was the moment in which the politics of personal destruction—especially in the age of New Media, where the Old Media were on their way out—took over the business. The New York Times and Time and Newsweek were all finally figuring out that they were clinging to each other in desperation as they plummeted off the financial cliff. Their downfall was the result of their failed business model combined with their failed ideology. But their foot soldiers were now firmly embedded in the New Media, where the left’s partisan hackery could operate on a whole new front. Drudge had taught them the power of the Internet. Now, with all its collusion and single-minded advocacy intact, the Complex was firmly established on this new frontier.

  It was all about to reach the breaking point with the election of George W. Bush.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Democrat-Media Complex Strikes Back

  I had watched Bill Clinton get his hand stuck in the cookie jar (or in a humidor, to be more precise), and I had watched the forces of the New Media hold him accountable in a way the Old Media would not. I had also studied the perfection of the politics of personal destruction under the Clintons. In particular, I witnessed a shameless president turning the national tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing into a political opportunity to attack a personal enemy. Before the real culprit, Timothy McVeigh, was even arraigned, Clinton had blamed talk radio (read: Rush Limbaugh) for fomenting the climate that led to this isolated incident. It was disgusting. And it was effective.

  By 2000, I knew these people inside and out. I knew how they operated all too well.

  Early in that election cycle, I spoke with John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, sensing that the Clintons had crafted the plan to control the Democratic National Committee by putting lackeys like Terry McAuliffe in charge. Sensing also that they were looking for revenge after the New Media had maligned and nearly destroyed the Clinton presidency, I predicted that their strategy would be to isolate somebody for destruction as a cautionary tale to conservatives. Clearly targeted were those on the right who had been emboldened by the emergence of talk radio and the Internet as communications tools for the masses. The message sent to the New Media conservatives would be clear: you punched us, and we will punch you back twice as hard.

  “George W. Bush,” I said to John, “is making a huge mistake with his ‘uniter not a divider’ line.” Using his lieutenant governor—Bob Bullock, a Democrat—as a campaign prop in order to demonstrate his goodwill was a mistake. Establishing the standard that he was the good guy who could work with the other side? A mistake.

  “It’s a mistake because they’re going to use that ‘uniter not a divider’ line as a means to mock him and pillory him, undercut his affability and his frat boy good nature, his charming-nickname-for-everybody-in-the-room style,” I told John. “They’re not going to grant him his legitimacy; they’re not going to grant him his humanity. They’re going to take his personable friendliness—his biggest skill set—and turn it against him. They’re going to try to destroy George W. Bush. We are about to witness one of the greatest assaults on an individual in the history of the country.”

  It started right from the beginning. Even before Bush stepped into office, the left used Florida as its first launching pad. The Gore people picked their targets: Bush, Dick Cheney, Katherine Harris. Mark Fabiani, a Gore adviser, told the New York Times candidly: “We needed an enemy.”1 It was raw hysteria plus total media conformity. It didn’t matter that Bush won Florida by every possible count, and it didn’t matter that even the New York Times and USA Today and every other major publication ran stories tabulating the “uncounted” votes and recognizing Bush’s victory (on page 16B, by and large). What mattered were the front-page stories emphasizing that Gore had won, Bush had stolen the election, and the Supreme Court was in the pocket of the big corporations that wanted their man in the White House.

  Bumper stickers appeared reading “Not My President” and “Selected, Not Elected” and “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Gore.” The academics all rallied around the cause. Princeton University professor Fred Greenstein labeled Bush a cowboy moron who had no basis for governing as a conservative: “Bush is very good at claiming victory. He has a ‘Marlboro Man’ approach to communication. His idea of having a mandate is to say ‘I have a mandate.’ ”2

  After the Supreme Court rightly ruled that arbitrary ballot counting was unconstitutional, the New York Times put the opening stamp of disapproval on the Bush presidency before it had even begun, holding Bush’s feet to the fire on bipartisanship and claiming that Bush would have to abandon his political principles in order to attain legitimacy: “To make deals with the Democratic leadership in Washington, the President-elect is going to have to bridge some ideological gaps. But this seems to us a time to take Mr. Bush at his harmonious word…. A Presidency that starts out under a cloud of doubt can transform itself into a success at the vital center of politics, where most Americans would want it to be.”3

  As the new president entered the White House without the usual bipartisan grace notes from the losing side, the exiting Clintonistas vandalized many of the offices they were vacating and, in an act of pure spite, removed the W from computer keyboards. Bush, the uniter, refused to pursue the matter. Eventually, of course, Bush would learn too late that magnanimity was not a winning strategy against this crowd.

  The first eight months of the Bush presidency were spent by the New Media fighting to rebuff liberals of all ilks: pundits, writers, commentators, all arguing that Bush had stolen the election and that this wasn’t a real presidency and that he was just plain stupid. While the Clintons properly fought to lay the predicate that their daughter, Chelsea, was off-limits—John McCain was rightfully chastised for an uncalled-for and cruel joke at Chelsea’s expense—the same press immediately targeted the Bush daughters for ridicule. The press pursued Jenna in particular and framed her as a wild party child, and even Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston took to Rolling Stone magazine to make Jenna the butt of an unfunny joke.

  The same Larry Flynt who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to tear down Republicans to save Clinton called Bush “the dumbest President we have ever had.” Martin Sheen, who many in West Los Angeles thought was the real president because of his role on The West Wing, called Bush a “moron.” Michael Moore predictably stated, “Once you settle for a Ronald Reagan, then it’s easy to settle for a George Bush, then it’s real easy to settle for Bush II. You know, this should be evolution, instead it’s de-evolution. What’s next?” Flynt, Sheen, and Moore never graduated college (Flynt didn’t even graduate high school).4 Bush graduated from Harvard Business School.

  Maureen Dowd, whose writing can be buoyant and insightful, picked up the “Bush is stupid” mantra in her column immediately after Bush’s election. Commenting on President Bush’s visit to Yankee Stadium in May 2001, Dowd wrote, “Some days, it’s fun to be the boy toy of the military-industrial complex…. Doesn’t W. realize that EVERYBODY in the world HATES us?… Gerhard Schroder thinks that he and W. had no communication when they met, and that W. had trouble remembering his name. Tony Blair has to call Bill Clinton to find a sympathetic ear.” She accused Bush of “trying to turn Alaska into a giant oil rig and give more riches to the rich.” She accused him of “rewarding his contributors with the Pentagon.”5 There’s that bipartisan feeling Bush was talking about!

  They we
re well on their way to destroying Bush.

  Then 9/11 happened.

  September 11 obviously changed everything. It stopped the left from bleeding the country dry with its cynical partisanship veiled as “objective” and “neutral” coverage and commentary. The liberal model of separating Americans into different categories as a means toward empowering group leaders to tell their followers what to think, what to believe, and how to fight everyone else was over. They couldn’t pit Americans against each other anymore, and that scared the hell out of them, because that was how they’d gotten themselves elected for decades. September 11 took the pendulum and swung it away from polarization and toward unity; it brought America back to its natural state of E Pluribus Unum for a very short time, a time in which even Democrats were awkwardly forced to hold hands with Republicans and sing “God Bless America.”

  Nothing was clearer to me at that time than the artificiality of the feeling, the fact that Democrats were caught in an unpredicted, unpredictable moment in which their tactics for gaining and holding power and manipulating situations were frozen solid. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to handle things, because it had been a lifetime since the honest Democratic Party was taken over by the far-left operatives.

  Into that void stepped George W. Bush. He acted as a real leader, and he brought the country back together. He was no-nonsense, and he wasn’t the cowboy the Complex had made him out to be. “When I take action,” he said on September 13, 2001, “I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”6

  When he spoke on September 20, 2001, the Democratic angst was already evident that this president had beaten their politics of personal destruction. “Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom,” Bush said. “Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” And as Bush spoke, the camera panned to Senator Hillary Clinton—a woman President Bush had greeted with a warm hug in the Oval Office just a week before, after the attacks—and Hillary was sitting there and her arms were folded tightly. It was such a telling moment, because Hillary isn’t like Bill, with his shit-eating grin, his good ol’ boy charm. She’s a bad actor. And you could tell right away that her well-funded, well-oiled, John Podesta–led machinery was of no use to her at a moment when Americans were connected like never before, when wedges were blunted and impotent.

  The Democratic Party, which had put on a face of TLC moderation during the Clinton years, which had been headed up by the greatest triangulator and faux-moderate in American history, had painted itself into a corner. It was one thing for Americans to embrace the soft socialism of the Democratic Party and their hatred for the American military when we were in the context of a peace dividend, when foreign policy was considered of secondary importance. It was okay during the 1990s that the Democratic Party had an obvious disposition against a strong foreign policy, and that but for Joe Lieberman and a very few others, the people in the Democratic leadership were primarily motivated by concerns of “social justice” and economic equality—socialism in everything but name—and that they wanted to decrease funding for the military because they were naïve doves. But when 9/11 happened, the Democratic Party’s position became untenable—it granted the Republican Party a default dominant position in perpetuity if national security and terrorism were going to be the top story of our time.

  So for a time, the Democrats stayed silent. In fact, just for show, they rallied around Bush. The New York Times reported, “Many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naïve and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising him and his advisers’ performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs expertise an issue in the campaign, did not win.”7

  That created an obvious vacuum for the left. The Democrats were too busy pretending to like Bush and a strong America to soldier on. The vacuum was filled by the extreme left, which would include groups like MoveOn.org and ascendant left-wing group blog the Daily Kos. I witnessed that process beginning to take shape around September 20, at the Los Angeles Federal Building, which is just south of my house. I walked down there with my family, and I saw all of the placards that four years later became mainstream slogans, pushing the politics of personal destruction against George W. Bush. These were radical leftist movement people, people aligned with Marxist pro-Stalinist organizations like International ANSWER, whose antiwar marches were unchallenged by a pliant media. Why the pass when it was clear that if the KKK had organized an antiwar rally, there would have been major media blowback?

  I remember looking at Susie and saying, “This is going to be the resurgence of the professoriate and the Baby Boomer left. This is what they’ve been waiting for. This is going to be their last stand to fulfill their self-appointed ’60s revolutionary mission.”

  They had been gathering. They had maintained their existence within the protective walls of college campuses. Their gray ponytails got more gray as time went on, but they never shed their belief systems. If you walked through the hallways of UCLA and looked at the professors’ and lecturers’ doors, you would have known they were still true believers in the 1960s world, and that they had allies in positions of power in unions all over the country and in Hollywood. These were people who had never met an antiwar storyline they didn’t love. An alliance of preexisting, seemingly marginal, left-of-center remnants of a bygone era simply walked through the front door and took over the Democratic Party. The marginal political world of the alt weeklies that I used to read had taken center stage.

  And I knew the tactic they were going to use: the media. They were going to aim the pop culture at selected MTV youth, Abercrombie & Fitch youth, brandishing antiwar bumper stickers and T-shirts. They were going to imitate the means and methods of the ’60s. They were going to use their propaganda techniques, their stronghold in popular culture.

  Hollywood led the way—that was a natural. They did it with a two-pronged strategy: they lampooned Bush, and they accused the right of attempting to silence them. (This while they wouldn’t shut up about their supposed lack of free speech.) Celebrities spoke first, because when 9/11 temporarily distracted us from our pop-cultural obsession, they, narcissists that they are, demanded the limelight back, and anti-Americanism and left-wing sloganeering became their de facto script for the Bush years.

  Hollywood is a leftist colony. It was easy for Hollywood people to be the first “brave voices” to say “politically unpopular” things on soapboxes because their jobs were protected, because their bosses believed what they believed in. After 1972, in which Richard Nixon won and George McGovern lost (a fact Hollywood never really accepted—the late New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael said she couldn’t believe Nixon had won, since everyone she knew had voted for McGovern), America sent a message to the left: we’re not interested. So Hollywood decided to send a message to the country. The natural aging process was culling out patriotic Hollywood, with John Wayne and Gary Cooper dying and Jimmy Stewart coming to the end of his career, and the paradigms of the Western and the pro-war movies were giving way to the anti-Vietnam consensus. The counterculture took a foothold in the ’60s in Hollywood, with the radical leftists inside the business taking over completely. They didn’t just take over the business—they took over the art, infusing movies and television with antiheroes instead of heroes: Easy Rider instead of Casablanca, Midnight Cowboy instead of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

  Growing up in Hollywood—going to school there, where my administrators invited Tom Hayden to come speak without the slightest concern that many in the country considered him a traitor for legitimate reasons—I knew these people. They were my friends’ parents, who voted for Hayden even though they owned million-dollar houses. These people, who hung out with the richest of the rich, gave
license to their sense of entitlement and noblesse oblige by hanging out with political radicals while simultaneously wearing the outfits and haircuts of conformists. They started to sneak into traditional society pretending they were something they weren’t.*

  They were the first to start raising the anti-Bush flag once more. This was long before the Iraq War. They were concerned first and foremost with tearing down this rube, this symbol of American exceptionalism and unity.

  The Iraq invasion took place in March 2003. In February 2002, just months after September 11 (Bush’s approval rating was still around 80 percent at this point), TV’s fake president Martin Sheen said, “George W. Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if you’ll pardon the expression.” George Clooney said in January 2003, “The [Bush administration] is run exactly like The Sopranos.” Dustin Hoffman injected conspiracy-theory leftism in February 2003: “I believe that the administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country, and I think that’s reprehensible.” Robert Redford said something similar in December 2002: “Coyote? The group of ’em, a pack of coyotes—tricky, cunning, making sure to take care of themselves but doing it in a wily way, making sure they never get caught.” Jessica Lange said in October 2002 while accepting a film award, “I hate Bush. I despise him and his entire administration. It makes me feel ashamed to come from the United States—it is humiliating.”8 Ed Harris went after Bush with a hammer and tongs: “Being a man, I have got to say that we got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity. He’s a good old boy, he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck. That is not the definition of a man.”9