Conservatives Rush to the Cause of Liberalism

You know something is up when conservative op-ed commentators and politicians begin to sound, well, liberal.

In an earlier post, I quoted John Danforth's denounciation of "Terri-gate" as proto-theocracy. Then there was the recent (and lame) op-ed by David Brooks lightly criticizing the extremist tendencies of Tom DeLay. Lucky for us, Brooks says, the "American People" are actually too conservative to support the revenge-mongering of DeLay and other right-wingers when it comes to the judiciary. Whew! That's a relief. For a minute I thought all those polls on Terri-gate meant that the "American People" had been doing some thinking of late and figured something out. Luckily they're just "dispositionally conservative." In other words, they're not really thinking about it too much, just reacting from "the gut." Brooks meekly looks forward to the day when Dennis Hasstert recovers from surgery and can return a more boring face of leadership to the party (although the policies will of course remain the same).

But today we get none other than William Safire bringing us the alarm-bell-ringing lead review in the NYT Book Review. "Goodbye to Privacy" reviews two new books computer security and personal information privacy in the post 9-11 era. Of the two books review, Safire recommends Robert O'Harrow's No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of our Emerging Surveillance Society (link to Powell's Books), which details the frightening relationships between the hugely profitable private "data mining" industry and the post 9-11 U.S. National Security State. Although I knew most of this before reading the review, it was a little striking to read quotes from corporate types saying "We have created a unique identifier on everybody in the United States. Data that belongs together is already linked together."

Of course, plenty of so-called liberals have made their money on this data mining business (and it is the basis of modern marketing), it has been the Bush administration that has aggressively pursued the relationship between ultra-secret "intelligence" agencies and private industry. Message to Mr. Safire: in case you missed the last 35 years or so, you are partly responsible for creating this monster through your partisan hackery.

Anyway as I started saying: something is definitely up when conservatives run to the rescue of small-"l" liberalism. When you see the first star at night, make this wish: please may the Republican party coalition collapse upon its own internal contradictions. Given that the Democrats are M.I.A., wishing upon a star is probably our most effective course of action.

Remember MLK, Jr.

April 4, 1968

Imagined Conspiracies, Part 2

Do yourself a favor and surf over to the web site that reveals the evil matrix of leftists that is threatening our freedom. (They've actually updated it since I began composing this post last week). Begining on the far left and moving rightward (or is it toward the "center"?) we have Totalitarian Radicals (e.g. 9-11 terrorist Mohammed Atta), Anti-American Radicals (Noam Chomsky, Amiri Baraka, and Jane Fonda), Leftists (Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Howard Dean, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg), Moderate Leftists (Tom Brokaw, Bill Clinton), and Affective Leftists (George Clooney, Springsteen, Donahue, and Katie Couric).

The wonderful thing about this web page is that it allows the authors to produce the effect of guilt by proximity, if not actual guilt-by-association. Venerable leftists like Bernardine Dohrn, Angela Davis, and Alexander Cochburn (and Louis Farrakhan) are all in the same category with several of the 9-11 terrorists and Iraq terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That's right they're all "Totalitarian Radicals." Sure, Dohrn did declare war on the US government back in 1970, but it's kind of a stretch.

But this kind of nit-picking is beside the point. As you take in the entire matrix, you see the real point. Voila! Harmless cultural liberals like Katie Couric (debatable that she's liberal), Garrison Keillor, and Barbara Streisand are all part of this same twisted plot as the 9-11 perps.

It doesn't really matter that these relationships are built on no evidence, or that the categories are incoherent. It's the overall image: rows of mug shots. African American poet Amiri Baraka separated from Mohammed Atta only by Mumia Abu Jamal. How about Katrina vanden Huevel, editor of The Nation--she's practically right next to al-Zarqawi. Granted, this is the result of the alphabetical ordering of mug shots within each category. But the impact is the same, and I'm sure the authors are perfectly happy to let the inference stand.

Read some of the nutty indiviual profiles for yourself. Here are some highlights:

• Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney "voted to legalize the killing of babies after they are born." Hmm, I'm thinking that might be an exaggeration.
  
• Congressmen Jim McDermott: "The only certified psychiatrist in Congress, and representative from a cloudy city with America's highest incidence of winter depression, McDermott advocates Canadian-style socialized medicine." How are these things related?
  
• Film critic Roger Ebert makes the list for the following statement: "I think a lot of working-class people don't understand," said Ebert, "their money is being stolen. . . . [W]e've had a concerted policy of taking money away from the poor and giving it to the rich wholesale, and at the same time, we have the runaway corporations and the greed. I feel ordinary people really should be angry." I think I've heard Pat Buchanan say something like this, too.
  

One of the recurrent themes is a bitterness toward alleged leftists who make too much money, or, coming from wealthy families have sided with working people. More on that later.

Imagined Conspiracies at DiscoverTheNetwork.org

If you've spent the months since November 2004 lamenting the sorry state of the forces of liberalism and progressivism in the U.S., fear not! According to the handy web site DiscoverTheNetwork.org (A Guide to the Political Left), the radical left is going strong in American life, exerting it's influence on the levers of power and marginalizing opposing viewpoints. All the while the leftists have cleverly erased their own political identity in order to further their insidious policy goals:

Since the early 1970s, radical activists began referring to themselves as "liberals" (in part to distance themselves from their failures as a socialist left. A sympathetic media culture went along with this deception, with the result that the word "left" has all but disappeared from the political lexicon. The spectrum of views is now regularly described in the media culture as extending from "liberal" to "moderate" to "conservative" or right, as though a left did not exist or was so marginal as not to matter.

Of course, this is the very dynamic that progressives complain about--the shift of the political spectrum right-ward. But now we know that this is just part of the left's own plan for power. Darn those crafty leftists!

One thing I will say for this site, and for most of David Horowitz's propaganda, is that it is deeply informed by an historical analysis. It is an incorrect analysis, in my mind, but still these people are obsessed with history in a way that left/progressives rarely are. No doubt this is because Horowitz's parents were communists, and he himself is a "reformed" leftist. Only someone raised on the arcana of left sectarianism could cultivate this vision of American society.