Over the summer reporter Eli Lake of the Washington Times wrote a series of provocative stories about U.S.-Russia relations and the alleged failure of “reset,” the Obama administration’s policy to improve ties to Moscow. The most sensational ran on Page One of the Times on July 22 and led to several follow-ups. It alleged that a bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, the previous September had been “traced to a plot run by a Russian military intelligence officer, according to an investigation by the Georgian Interior Ministry.” The Russia officer was identified as Yevgeny Borisov.
“If true, a Russian-sponsored attack on a U.S. Embassy would constitute the most serious crisis in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War and put to lie any ‘reset’ in bilateral relations,” Lake quoted GOP Sen. Mark Kirk as saying of his story. A few days later, Lake reported, Kirk and four other senators — Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and John McCain — sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding intelligence community briefings on the incident.
Lake’s original report on the bombing was sourced exclusively to government sources in Georgia, which fought a war in 2008 with Russia, its mortal foe. For “balance” he included a quote from the Russian embassy denying any official involvement. The story was highly favorable to the Georgian government’s interests, as are a number of other stories that Lake has written about Georgia in recent years. During that period the neoconservative lobbyists at the Washington firm of Orion Strategies, which has received more than $1 million in fees from Georgia’s government since 2004, have worked closely with Lake.
Orion is run by Randy Scheunemann, a former advisor to Donald Rumsfeld who helped set up the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was a leading advocate for the U.S. invasion in 2003. The committee in turn was created by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose other leaders included Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard. Scheunemann was John McCain’s foreign policy advisor during his 2008 presidential campaign, and later worked for Sarah Palin.
In 2010, Orion hired Michael Goldfarb, a McCain presidential spokesman who previously worked for PNAC and who was a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard (and who even as a lobbyist continues to periodically write for the magazine). Lake is also an ardent conservative whose reporting championed the Iraq war.
Orion seeks to create a media echo chamber on Georgia and Russia. Essentially it works like this: Tbilisi’s lobbyists generate contacts and information that they feed to sympathetic journalists. Orion frequently arranges interviews with Georgian officials and, not infrequently, stories centering on their charges magically appear soon afterward. Orion has wined and dined some reporters on its tab or picked up their travel expenses. There’s certainly nothing illegal about that but it’s worth noting that lobbyists are barred from maintaining these sorts of relationships with members of Congress because it so clearly presents, as we say in Washington, at least the appearance of impropriety.
Orion is friendly to and works with government officials and politicians who its reporter friends regularly cite (especially McCain). Orion also works very closely with experts and organizations cited by these reporters, like the Foreign Policy Initiative, whose board of directors includes William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocons from the PNAC and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
The journalists pick up on and spread each other’s work and Goldfarb, naturally, hawks their stories at his Twitter feed. Just last week, he called a new Lake story a “must read.” The piece at the Newsweek/Daily Beast, featured an exclusive interview with Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who alleged that the bombing at the U.S. Embassy was “ordered at the most senior levels of the Russian government.” He was quoted as saying that Putin “is crazy about planning the individual details of special operations … I cannot imagine somebody touching a topic as sensitive as Georgia is for Russia, especially for Putin, without Putin having firsthand knowledge or command of it.”
Orion helps create a collective media reality that policymakers have to respond to. Other foreign governments also play this game, as do liberal and conservative interest groups, but rarely as well or so brazenly.
Disclosure records filed by Orion show that between mid-2009 and mid-2011 it set up seven interviews with senior Georgian government officials for Lake, who quoted them prominently in stories that centered on their various allegations. Lake also attended 10 events in Washington with Georgian officials or Hill staffers and had three email or phone discussions with Goldfarb about Georgia. (Orion is more thorough than most lobby shops in recording its media outreach, but that number seems improbably low given all the other help it provided Lake.) And on seven different occasions Goldfarb billed his firm for meals or drinks with Lake, usually with other journalists along, and four times with Georgian officials as dining or drinking companions.
In May of 2011, Goldfarb paid $977.24 for a dinner at Morton’s steakhouse, attended by Georgia’s Minister for Reintegration Eka Tkeleshuili, Lake and several other journalists, including Dan Halper of the Weekly Standard. This was almost surely not the last contact between Orion and Lake before the embassy bombing story ran, but lobby disclosure records are filed biannually and Orion’s last disclosure covered the period only up through June 30.
Meanwhile, in September of 2010 alone Goldfarb billed Orion $300 for a dinner at Buck’s Fishing and Camping with Lake and another reporter; $172.62 for a tab at Heritage of India for Lake, Georgia’s deputy national security advisor, and Svante Cornell of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program; and another $460 bill for “refreshments” for the latter group that same night, at Morton’s. (The previous month Lake had quoted Cornell to buttress one of his anti-Russian pieces.)
Lake’s stories have had impact, especially the report on Russia’s alleged bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi, and they have been widely circulated in the mainstream media, and even more in the conservative media. Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard called the story a “big scoop.” Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post complained afterward that Moscow’s “human rights atrocities, campaign of intimidation and even violence haven’t caused the administration to rethink its policy of appeasement, dressed up as ‘reset’.”
Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project, concluded that while evidence for “Russian culpability in the incidents was compelling,” it was unlikely that President Dmitry Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “would be so stupid as to order these small, nasty and counterproductive operations. These acts caused mercifully little damage in Georgia and a lot of political damage to Russia in Washington.”
Indeed, Lake, seeking to bolster his story, reported a few days later that “U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a classified report late last year that Russia’s military intelligence was responsible for the bomb at the U.S. embassy.” He quoted an unnamed U.S. official on this classified report as saying, “It is written without hedges, and it confirms the Georgian account.”
Yet he soon filed another story that quoted an administration official as saying there was “no consensus” on responsibility for the Tbilisi blast. And then on Aug. 4 he filed yet one more dispatch saying that the CIA concluded that Borisov, the Russian officer who allegedly coordinated the attack, was “acting on orders from Russian military intelligence headquarters” but that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research “assessed that Mr. Borisov was acting as a rogue agent.”
In other words, Lake softened his big story, and while it might be true it was perhaps too thin to have initially run on the basis of Georgian government sources. A New York Times story that followed Lake’s reporting said the “intelligence community has apparently been unable to reach a clear consensus about who is responsible for the bombings, which has revived old differences in Washington about what the United States relationship with Russia should be.”
In an email, Lake said his reporting “speaks for itself.” He acknowledged dining and drinking with Goldfarb on the seven occasions cited but said he had paid for his share of the bills.
Lake is now the national security correspondent for Daily Beast/Newsweek. Goldfarb declined to comment
Orion’s belt
In addition to Georgia, Orion Strategies has represented Macedonia and Taiwan, and a few domestic clients. Scheunemann is by all accounts an effective lobbyist. “He understands Washington well,” one of his competitors told me. “He’s good at persuading people and [his firm is] especially good with the media.” The latter is primarily due to Goldfarb, who has many reporter friends and regularly drinks with them, and a circle of conservative policy types, at Morton’s steakhouse.
Georgia and Russia fought a war in 2008 that was generally portrayed in the American media as a David vs. Goliath tale, with spunky little Georgia in the role of the former and longtime boogeyman Russia serving as the latter. Suffice it to say that the truth is more complicated than that. The fact that Georgia is strongly pro-U.S. and has sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan has no doubt helped Tbilisi sell this fairy tale to the American media.
Georgia and its lobbyists, led by Orion, have also peddled stories supporting the need for American arms sales to Tbilisi and the utter failure of “reset.” Once again, the truth is messier. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is certainly corrupt and oppressive and anti-democratic, but Mikhail Saakashvili’s Georgia exhibits the same problems, if to a lesser degree. The State Department’s human rights report has “widespread allegations of intimidation and pressure, flawed vote-counting and tabulation processes,” and says that Georgia is “dominated by a single party.” It noted a “lack of due process, government pressure on the judiciary, and that individuals remained in prison politically motivated reasons.” Even the neocon-leaning Washington Post editorial page has said “that the Russian government’s repression and corruption “does not preclude cooperation” and that the Obama reset has “achieved gains.”
Jennifer Rubin, a writer for Commentary until late 2010, is another friend of Orion. She is one of a number of right-wing versifiers whose flimsy reporting — in her case little more than eager repetition of GOP talking points and unsubstantiated terror porn — have landed them jobs at the Washington Post. Orion’s lobbyists have briefed her and set up interviews for her, and she has attended their Washington events for Georgian officials. In February of 2010, when Rubin was still at Commentary, Goldfarb billed Orion $321.88 for drinks at the posh Ten Penh restuarant, for her and several other journalists.
Rubin is a reliable mouthpiece for Georgia’s anti-Russian themes. During the week of Dec. 13, 2010, Goldfarb contacted Rubin to discuss Georgia. Eight days later, Rubin wrote an item saying that in regard to the Russia reset, “We need to examine what are we giving up and what are we getting.” She proposed the U.S. government consider “robust assistance to Georgia.” On Jan. 4 she published another item on Russia, citing a story by Lake and quoting Jamie Fly of the Foreign Policy Initiative (hear the echo?), who told her that, “Despite U.S. efforts to placate Russia in return for support on Iran, Russia has done little more than it did during the Bush administration to halt Tehran’s march toward a nuclear weapon.”
During the week of May 29 of this year, Goldfarb logged a conversation with Rubin about “Georgian security.” On June 3, she wrote a story for Washingtonpost.com that suggested it “might be an excellent time to explore” whether Russian reset was “all give and no get for the United States and the West.” Rubin’s story cited Senators Echo and Echo (McCain and Lieberman) complaining that a ‘reset’ consists “largely of acceding to Russian demands with no corresponding progress in Russian human rights or conduct toward its neighbors.”
In an email reply Rubin wrote: “My views on Russia, human rights, Eastern Europe, Georgia, etc. are long standing and well known. I invariably take the side of democracies against tyrannies.”
(Incidentally, Rubin is one of many media junketeers who have trekked off to the Middle East on the tab of pro-Israeli organizations, the true masters at spinning and pampering journalists. Earlier this year she and a group of media colleagues attended the Herzliya Conference “With the region experiencing great upheaval and Israel facing a variety of domestic and international challenges, this is a particularly opportune time to hear from Israelis and listen to Israeli officials,” she wrote at the time. Airline and travel expenses, she disclosed, were picked up by the Emergency Committee for Israel whose board includes Kristol and whose chief advisers include Goldfarb.)
Goldfarb also logged multiple contacts with Matthew Continetti, an associate editor at the Weekly Standard, including five meals or drinks he paid for from his Orion expense account. In March of 2010, the Orion lobbyist had a “lunch discussion” on Georgia at the Blue Duck Tavern with Continetti and two others from the Weekly Standard. The same month he and Continetti dined –on Goldfarb’s tab, according to disclosure filings, for $209.68 –at Shelley’s Backroom.
Two months later, Orion paid for Continetti and several other journalists and John Noonan of the FPI to travel to Tbilisi and for their lodging there. Goldfarb accompanied them (as did Scheunemann) and reported spending $1,125.06 on drinks and meals for Continetti and other members of his posse. The following month Continetti wrote an embarrassing story (even by the promiscuous standards of the Weekly Standard) titled “In Russia’s Shadow: The surprising resilience of Georgian democracy.” It praised Saakashvili’s government for its policies on everything from electrification to economics.
“Right now the big domestic initiative is an economic freedom bill. If it passes, referendums will be required for all tax increases, and Georgia’s debt-to-GDP ratio will be capped at 60 percent. Mention these reforms to American libertarians, and their mouths water.”
Continenti’s byline acknowledged that he “visited Georgia on a trip sponsored by its government,” which doesn’t change the fact that this was more an exercise in public relations than journalism. Essentially, his story was a piece of propaganda bought and paid for by lobbyists for the Georgian government.
Continetti has written a number of other stories on Georgia that didn’t mention his ties to Orion, including an August 2010 story that cited Lake’s reporting and carried the headline of “Time to Reset ‘Reset’; Russian intransigence on every front.”
Continetti did not reply to a request for comment.
Loving Georgia
In February of 2009, James Kirchick, an assistant editor at the New Republic, wrote an article called “Pravda on the Potomac; Russian propaganda descends on Washington,” which criticized Moscow’s use of P.R. firms to manipulate the American media. In order to “whitewash its increasing authoritarianism,” Kirchick wrote, Russia’s public relations flunkies had spent “a lot of time trying to soften up the press” and sought to “wine, dine, and flatter” journalists and VIPs “into a certain sympathy for the Russian perspective.” Moscow’s handlers, especially Ketchum Inc., had scored “press coups” by setting up interviews with Russian government officials and had even capitalized on their personal relationships by reaching out to politicians they knew.
Orion does precisely the same sort of work with journalists that Ketchum does, yet Kirchik has worked closely with its lobbyists on behalf of Georgia. He joined the Goldfarb-financed gatherings at Ten Penh and Buck’s Fishing and Camping mentioned above. Orion has arranged interviews for him with Georgian officials. Apparently the press is being educated by lobbyists who work for the side you’re on, but is being “softened up” when they work for the other side.
Kirchick also was one of the journalists along with Goldfarb and Continetti on the Georgia junket — which took place little more than a year after his “Pravda on the Potomac” article ran. His “Letter From Tbilisi: Russia on their Mind” hailed “the young and exuberantly pro-Western” Saakashvili. He described Georgia as “a small, embattled democracy in a tough neighborhood.” The piece said “government ministries in Tbilisi feel like the offices of McKinsey & Company.” (Which apparently is a good thing.)
Kirchick, who noted in the story that his trip was sponsored by Georgia, said in a phone conversation from Prague, where he is based:
Most governments lobby in Washington; the question it comes down to is how you view that government. I don’t think it’s hypocritical to write about Russian lobbying, which was new at the time, and then go on the trip to Georgia as long as I disclosed that it was sponsored by their government. I’m an opinion journalist and I’m obviously more partial to Georgia than to Russia. The suggestion that I wrote anything more supportive of Georgia because I went on the trip or Goldfarb bought me a drink doesn’t hold up.
Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy has had frequent contacts with Orion on Georgia as well; Goldfarb logged 12 discussions by phone or email, as well as three interviews with Georgian government officials, including the president and the prime minister. In March of 2010, according to disclosure filings, Goldfarb spent $884.95 on hockey tickets for a game at the Verizon Center that Rogin attended.
More than other reporters discussed here, Rogin has been fair-minded in his items on Georgia and he reaches out to all sides. Yet on balance his stories are broadly sympathetic to Tbilisi. These include one titled “Russia threatens to wreck the reset” and another in March of last year that was based on an “exclusive interview” with Saakashvili arranged by Orion. It was, predictably, a softball affair.
“I meet with a wide variety of officials and consultants as part of my regular reporting duties in a variety of settings, and I’m confident my stories reflect my commitment to objectivity and include the widest range of views available,” Rogin said in a reply by email. He said that the Georgian ambassador to the U.S. was supposed to attend the hockey game but didn’t turn up.
Hacks and reporters
In the end, I found it unpleasant to write this story. When I first heard the broad details about it — from a source that is pro-Russian but not a lobbyist and no one I knew previously — it sounded like a fast, simple slam dunk. It didn’t turn out that way and when I examined Orion’s disclosure records I discovered that I knew and liked a number of the journalists that Goldfarb worked with, especially Eli Lake, whose politics and journalistic conclusions I generally disagree with but who is a tireless reporter who breaks important stories. One of the magazines in question has commissioned my work. When Howard Kurtz attacked me for an undercover piece that exposed sleazy Washington lobbyists, Kirchick defended me. Orion also represents an organization affiliated with George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which funds some of my current research (though not this article).
Which, in part, is exactly why working in Washington is so difficult. It’s a small town where politicians and lobbyists and P.R. specialists and journalists know each other and socialize together, and especially when they share a given political point of view. It frequently leads to groupthink and can be ethically challenging.
I’m not proposing here that journalists working with Orion are writing anything they don’t believe or that Goldfarb bought them off with a meal (or sometimes a few). But I also can’t buy Kirchick’s position that it all comes down to who’s doing the lobbying and how that jibes with your personal opinion. That may be true for hacks like Rubin. But those reporting on and analyzing complex foreign policy issues for the public consumption should be more critical, not less, of points of view they are sympathetic to.
Essentially, the argument is that it’s OK to keep this sort of company with lobbyists because everyone else does. That doesn’t seem adequate, even if true. Other explanations I heard (often on a not-for-attribution basis and sometimes from journalists not cited here but familiar with Orion’s work) also seemed unconvincing: They said they were friends of Goldfarb, sometimes pre-dating their Georgia reporting, and so they alternated picking up the check or thought it was OK for him to pay their bill.
The point here that it isn’t that Russia is the good guy and Georgia is the bad guy. It’s that the situation is more complicated than it often appears in the American media, which stems in part from the outsize influence of Orion. The government of Georgia is well served by that relationship, the American public not so much.
Ken Silverstein is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and an Open Society fellow. Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
More Ken Silverstein.
I understand your desire to get your famously hot body back. Even we mere mortals, who somehow managed to get impregnated despite never once making it to the Maxim 100, have gazed longingly at our pre-pregnancy pants, yearned to set our draw-stringed maternity clothes on fire, and gasped a “What the HELL?” when getting a load of our doughy postpartum selves in the mirror. And we never had to get in shape for a Victoria’s Secret show. We didn’t even coin the word “bootylicious” to describe our own assets.
So, Beyonce and company, I can only imagine the disconnect you feel, seeing yourself all squishy after having that baby of yours, and the pressure you must be under. But I am begging you all, knock it off. The world already will hold you under a cruel microscope the second you dare to step out in public. So, Miss Sasha Fierce, you don’t have to joke, as you did during your comeback gig this past weekend, “Y’all have no idea how hard I worked! I had to lose 60 pounds. They had me on that treadmill. I ate lettuce!” Adding that you’re now going to get “chocolate wasted” doesn’t mitigate the message. This is what one does after having a baby: One gets on a treadmill and eats lettuce.
The stampede from sexy, pregnant and naked on a magazine cover to instant bikini body has become a celebrity rite of passage. Last year, Mariah Carey promptly flaunted her abs for Shape — and became a Jenny Craig spokesperson after giving birth to her twins. After having her two children, Melissa Joan Hart — tired of “blogs about me discussing how fat I’ve become” — dropped down to 113 pounds and did the bikini cover for People. Jamie Pressly did one for Shape. Kendra Wilkinson did it for OK! a mere eight weeks after giving birth, showing off both her “easy diet” and her infant. Elisabeth Hasselback appeared on Fitness, swearing she “lost weight without dieting.” Jennifer Lopez showed up on Us, smiling that she had her “best body ever” after her twins. Jessica Simpson hasn’t yet debuted her post-baby body, but her deal with Weight Watchers suggests she won’t be letting herself go all “fat Betty Draper.” Instead she’ll be more January Jones. And Heidi Klum, a multi-time champion of the Skinny Mom Olympics, did a Victoria’s Secret show five weeks after having her son Lou. Five weeks!
At five weeks after giving birth, you’re still sitting on inflatable donuts and junk is leaking out of your yoni. If you’re breastfeeding, your rack is engorged, and your nipples are cracked and caked with Lansinoh. Assuming you haven’t had a C-section tummy tuck, your abs look like raw pizza dough. And if you don’t have a personal trainer, it’s going to be like this for a while. That’s the reality of new motherhood.
There’s so much pressure on you as a new mom that the last thing you need to have hanging over your head is some expectation of what your body is supposed to look like. I actually think that the scrutiny of new mothers’ bodies has gotten out of control. Every new mother just gets a free pass. I’m actually angered by the “posing in a bikini six weeks after having my baby” [trend]… Who cares if our boobs are hanging low and we have a little more junk in the trunk? We created a human being, everybody. Let’s celebrate!
This is why Jenna Fischer is fantastic. Sure, being honest and focusing your energy on stuff like getting some rest and taking care of your new baby means you might not make the cover of MILF Monthly. And you might, like Jennifer Garner, have the gossip pages wonder when you’ll ever lose the baby weight a whopping two months after you’ve given birth to your third child. But consider the healthy role model you could be to other mothers — and to your own children.
A woman can have a baby and, in time, be just as fit as she was before. But it’s not a competition. It’s not a race. And the tabloid obsessiveness about mothers and their bodies – and the celebrity culture that feeds into it – is not just unnatural, it’s unhealthy. It tells women that their value in the world, even after the miracle of childbirth, is always exactly how bangable they are. Real life should not be an Alan Tudyk scene from “Knocked Up.” (It should be an Alan Tudyk scene from “Firefly,” but that’s another story.) And right after having a child, any woman — even Beyonce herself — should be entitled to a little extra jelly.
It’s not as if one expects subtle political discourse from Hustler. But come on.
Larry Flynt’s venerable publishing enterprise has, throughout its history, championed freedom of expression in its own unique way. In 1984, Flynt famously went all the way to the Supreme Court over the right to run a parody ad of inexhaustible loon Jerry Falwell reminiscing about losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Tasteless? Yes. An obvious lampooning of a public figure? Also yes. But when Hustler recently ran a photo of conservative writer S.E. Cupp Photoshopped to look like she was performing oral sex, that was something altogether different.
The Cupp photo exists as a “celebrity fantasy” – i.e., an imaginary hate bang. And though Hustler takes pains to cover its butt, noting that “No such picture of S.E. Cupp actually exists. This composite fantasy is altered from the original for our imagination, does not depict reality, and is not to be taken seriously for any purpose,” it ponders, grossly, “What would S.E. Cupp look like with a dick in her mouth?”
Of course, the usual conservative suspects have come out of the woodwork for this one, pointing an accusatory finger at what the Blaze helpfully refers to as “the liberal media” for this. Yes, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, Hustler – it’s all the same to us! On Wednesday, Glenn Beck begged, “Is this wrong, Democrats? Is this wrong?” — as if Democrats were responsible for what Hustler publishes. Who put that penis in that lady’s mouth? Probably Obama. And Cupp herself, on Beck’s show, seized the opportunity to condemn the National Organization for Women, and to add, “I wish that these media entities that perform this kind of misogyny would just come out and do what Hustler did, instead of beating around the bush and pretending to be fair, pretending to be above that. They’re not above that. This is exactly what they do every single time.”
Way to seize the moment, Cupp — except that liberals don’t like fake blow-job putdowns either. Nor do you see a lot of them out there in, say, the Nation. Want proof from the despised “liberal media”? How about how Audrey Ference explained in the L Magazine, “It’s Not Cool to Photoshop a Dick into a Woman’s Mouth, Even if You Disagree With Her Ideas. In These Times’ Lindsay Beyerstein, meanwhile, condemned the photo as “beneath contempt.” And on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan noted that “More than 50 years after the women’s movement began, we’re still trying to silence women with dicks.” Even the always combative hosts of “The View” unanimously welcomed Cupp Thursday, with Whoopi Goldberg saying, “This is offensive. This is not the dialogue that we have when we disagree.” So Cupp and company, please extend your detractors the courtesy of believing that we think this is gross too? True liberals don’t pretend that degradation is social commentary.
Flynt, for his part, defends the photo, saying “That’s satire” in an email to the Daily Caller. That “satire,” by the way, consists of the aforementioned blow-job pic, accompanied by the sad commentary that Cupp’s “hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.”
It’s pretty obvious that a company whose porn movies are cleverly titled “This Ain’t” – as in “This Ain’t Celebrity Apprentice” and “This Ain’t Dancing With the Stars” — is not trying terribly hard to distinguish itself from the people it’s lampooning. Also: apparently “Dancing With the Stars” porn is a thing. So Hustler may hide behind the false equivalency that sticking a penis in Cupp’s mouth because she hates Planned Parenthood is the same as its movie parodies or its glorious, long ago triumph of putting Jerry Falwell in an outhouse. But it’s not. It’s a photo of a real person, for starters, which means it can and likely will be distributed across the Internet pell mell and willy nilly without its disclaimer. Second, it’s exactly the kind of crap women have to contend with on a near constant basis — that we exist to be objectified, screwed and shut up.
Sticking a penis in the mouth of a woman whose opinions you don’t like isn’t satire, especially when you’re in the business of putting penises in women’s mouths all the time. It’s aggressive. Worse, it’s stupid. But at least both the image and the lame excuse for it achieve something Hustler and editors know a lot about. They suck mightily.
It’s adorable the way Old Media keeps forgetting that we live in the age of transparency. Hey, Sony Pictures Television, your metaphoric fly is undone.
You’d think that after that ranting, complaining voice mail that “Community” star Chevy Chase left showrunner Dan Harmon went viral this spring they’d have learned. Or maybe after Harmon responded to his dismissal just last Friday by spilling his guts on Tumblr. You’d think the muckety-mucks would have figured out by now that the best you can do when there’s tension in your little creative family is to be forthright and creative about it.
Note, for example, how the show’s star Joel McHale spent the spring diplomatically – and wittily — handling the talk-show circuit after Chase’s meltdown, joking that the voice mail had to be fake because “there’s no way Chevy could figure out voice mail.” See, it’s glib and funny and sounds magically off-the-cuff! Get it? The cast of “Community” — which includes the incredibly on-the-ball Danny Pudi, Alison Brie and Donald Glover – knows how to handle itself.
So here’s what you don’t do. You don’t send an email saying you “wanted to forward some messaging we hope our cast will find helpful as they navigate questions that will undoubtedly come up.” Oh God, “forward some messaging.” This won’t be good. And sure enough, in a memo obtained Wednesday by the Hollywood Reporter, the talking points sent from Sony to the cast reads like a ransom note. A poorly written one. My friend Jay at the Takeaway suggests reading it in the dean’s voice, but in my head, I can’t hear anyone but Chang.
“We’re hoping that the news will lose some steam over the next day, especially if we’re not perpetuating the topic in any way,” it reads. Then it goes on to suggest the cast just tell the press, “We’re also excited that we’ll be back on NBC’s schedule in the fall and are looking forward to working on those episodes,” “I am looking forward to starting our next 13 episodes of ‘Community,’” “We’re looking forward to working with David Guarascio & Moses Port on a new season of ‘Community.’” Also, guess what? “We’re looking forward to the stories our characters will find themselves in come Sept.” I’m not sure I even understand that last sentence, but you get the gist. Coming this fall! “Community”! REMAIN CALM AND STOP PERPETUATING THE TOPIC.
As one Hollywood Reporter commenter brilliantly opined, maybe now “the cast will all recite the entire memo, verbatim, in interviews. Like hostages reading off cue cards.” It’s just like when Avery Jessup had to do the news in North Korea! Wait, what well-regarded yet low-rated NBC sitcom are we talking about here?
This kind of thing is insulting on so many levels. Primarily, it’s a dis to the cast and team of “Community,” who this weekend managed to tweet gracefully their gratitude to Dan Harmon and his “dementedly awesome brain” without coming off like network-destroying loose cannons. And don’t even get me started on how idiotic Sony must assume the press is to send out something like this. Guys, it’s not all one big Mario Lopez-fueled parade of butt-kissing out there. Worst of all, it’s a shameless slap to fans, who expect that the people who give us a weird treasure like “Community” know how to be funny and sarcastic and sad and real when there is a major shakeup in their ranks — oh, and who also know enough about social media to know you can’t stop a dumb email from getting around. It’s not about sticking to some rote company line. It’s about cultivating the very authenticity that makes “Community” so friggin’ special, and respecting the fans who watch it. And it’s about getting that the title of the show isn’t just about a mythical college. It’s about us.
Alex Pareene's annual Hack List is so popular -- and useful -- we thought we should spread it out over the year. This column is a regular feature taking a deeper look at our media's most pernicious hacks, which we'll rank in order at year's end.
Tim Russert was not the unalloyed saint of tough journalism that his celebrators describe in posthumous tributes, but he was at least a classic American success story, of the sort that we still enjoy pretending is common: Blue-collar kid from Rust Belt town becomes enormously successful thanks largely to brains and hard work. The story of Luke Russert, alas, is a much more common one in American life: No-account kid of successful person has more success thrust upon him.
Pretty much immediately upon the death of his father, Luke Russert inexplicably had a full-time broadcasting job, supplanting his part-time broadcasting job co-hosting a satellite radio sports talk show with James Carville. (That was a real thing that actually existed. Can you imagine a human who would want to listen to that?)
Russert isn’t the only famous child in media. He isn’t even the only famous child at NBC, which also employs Jenna Bush Hager and Chelsea Clinton (who renewed her three-month temporary contract earlier this year, despite barely producing any work for the network). Fox has Peter Doocy, Chris Wallace and, here in New York, Greg Kelly. ABC has Chris Cuomo, and CNN Anderson Cooper. A.G. Sulzberger is a reporter for the New York Times. Some of those people are fine journalists, by the way. Nepotism has always been a major force in journalism and media — it is a fact of life and one that would be exhausting to be continually het up about — and plenty of nepotism beneficiaries are wonderful writers and talented people. If you’re raised by interesting people and get a good education at home and at the finest schools, you really ought to turn out pretty smart. But Russert is emblematic of the sort of nepotism that gives nepotism a bad name. He’s not a wonderful writer or a particularly talented person. And unlike Chelsea Clinton and her very silly “reporting good news about people who do charity or something” beat, he’s actually got a real journalism job that someone else without the name Russert could be doing much more effectively. He’s not even particularly good on TV.
Russert in some respects more closely resembles a second-generation politician than a typical dynasty hire in journalism. Like Al Gore and Harold Ford Jr., he is a graduate of St. Albans — the elite Washington all-boys private school that molds little moderate politicians and self-consciously imitates the old New England boarding schools that used to serve the WASPs who ran the country — and like a junior Kennedy he’s decidedly less impressive than his tragic father. Russert spent his college years at Boston College acting basically like a well-off young meathead. (His sole notable achievement during those years was being the subject of one of the Internet’s very first “embarrassing Facebook photo of the child of a notable person” stories.) He was hired at NBC, in what most took to be a slightly unconventional corporate expression of grief, within months of his graduation with a communications degree.
He seems dimly aware that nepotism won him his job, but in denial as to the fact that it’s allowed him to keep it. As he told Howard Kurtz in 2010:
He knows what some colleagues and detractors say — that he wouldn’t be in this job if not for his last name. “I just try to really block that out,” Russert says. “The news media is a results-oriented business. I don’t think a company like NBC would pay me if I wasn’t qualified and wasn’t able to produce on this level…
“There will always be people who will say, ‘Oh, he’s only gotten where he is because of his father,’ and that certainly helped. But I’ve been able to stay here because of me.”
Denial of his extraordinary genetic luck for the sake of his self-respect is a common trope with poor Luke. He was using the same line in 2008, barely after he was hired: “Did my name get my foot in the door? Absolutely, I’ll be the first to admit that. But has my performance and ability got my butt through the door? Yes.” (In the same interview, Russert revealingly compared himself to Joe Buck, a second-generation sportscaster with an astoundingly enviable career, whom no one on Earth actually likes.) He also claimed to have absolutely no clue how he managed to score two much-sought-after (unpaid, natch) internships as a college student, at NBC and at Michael Bloomberg’s City Hall. “I went through the application process like anyone else,” he told the Times. (Russert had at least one other killer internship, too, at ESPN.)
But our target here is Russert, and he is not personally responsible for NBC’s decision to bequeath him a broadcasting job. If we focus on the work and not the means by which Russert got the job, things don’t look much better. Initially, at least, the grown-ups on the air always seemed to be holding Russert’s hand as he tried to remember his lines, as if he were a child and not a fully grown college graduate and professional. It’s obvious that everyone who knew his father loves Luke. But everyone’s affection for the kid is not transmissible through a television set, alas, and Russert’s appearances seemed like some rich guy’s kid’s piano recital suddenly taking place in the middle of a professional orchestra’s concert.
His initial role was as MSNBC’s semi-official “young person” correspondent, because reporting on what he himself was seemed the least ridiculous thing to have Luke Russert suddenly doing in a national cable news network’s presidential election coverage. And in his role as a young person reporting on what young people think of presidential politics, Russert sounded like an old person — like an old Washington lifer — talking about what he thinks the young people today are all about. (No self-respecting young person, to use one brief example, uses the term “millennial.“)
Here’s an early report:
This is like a master class in pointless political pseudo-analysis. All the resources and staff of MSNBC at his disposal, and the package still looks and sounds like it was put together for a high school civics class presentation. (I mean, except that Larry Sabato shows up halfway through. I guess it is professional Washington journalism!) Kids are turning off their reality TV and tuning into the real-life Amazing Race! Facebook and stuff, some experts say! Only time will tell. For MSNBC, I’m a person with no business having this job.
(This is the piece that Russert concluded by making a minor gaffe that set the right against him, for a moment: The “smartest kids in the state” go to UVA, he told Matt Lauer, so they naturally favor Obama. This was actually just poorly stated conventional wisdom, not really “liberal bias” — by “the smartest kids in the state” he meant, he later explained, kids “from affluent, highly educated households.”)
Months after hiring Russert, Steve Capus, president of NBC News, called him one of the network’s “rookies of the year,” which doesn’t reflect well on NBC’s 2008 rookie class. (Russert returned the favor with effusive praise for his boss.)
On the basis of his impressive reporting and ease in front of the camera still being named Russert, Luke was promoted, after the election, to congressional correspondent. That’s the contempt with which NBC News views the occupation of journalism. To make Luke Russert a congressional reporter is to say, “We believe that this job requires no particular knowledge, training or skills. If a German shepard could be trained to speak, it could perform this work.” (That’s true of most cable news work, granted, but it really doesn’t have to be.) Proper reporting on the House of Representatives is actually difficult and largely thankless work, generally done by very hardworking and underpaid reporters. The assignment was transparently NBC’s attempt to help Russert develop chops, and what it has yielded thus far is the time Charlie Rangel called Luke dumb, which MSNBC turned into a two-day story.
NBC seems to be keeping Russert employed in the hopes that he’ll eventually develop an ability to simulate gravitas. Hopefully “Meet the Press” will still be on the air by the time Luke has mastered his serious face.
His Twitter feed presents a perfectly dull person with perfectly banal thoughts. When he drifts into attempted solemnity it’s usually more amusing than his actual attempts at humor. (More quality insight, right here.) It’s precisely what you would imagine the result would be if the elite Beltway press somehow collectively raised a child from birth — which is, in effect, what actually happened. He subscribes to every shibboleth of Washington conventional wisdom and shows fealty to all the proper institutions.
When Jeff Himmelman wrote that the legendary Bob Woodward had misrepresented a few facts in “All the President’s Men,” Russert was outraged on behalf of the institution of Bob Woodward:
Pathetic the chattering class is trying to sell books and papers on issues of no substance attacking the most storied career in journalism.
Luke. “The chattering class” is you. (And Bob Woodward, whose singular goal for the last 35 years or so has been “trying to sell books.”)
A popular reoccurring trope in Russert tweets and interviews is his deep respect for the politicians he is lucky enough to cover. “No matter how much I disagree w pols,” he writes, “I always respect their desire to stand up for their views & put their family through hell 2 win.”
To Kurtz, again:
Unlike most journalists, he describes covering Congress as “a real honor.”
“I have a real respect for them. While a lot of folks view them as the epitome of everything that’s wrong with America now, it takes a lot to put yourself out there in the public sphere, and your family.”
What if some pols’ views, if they even have any to speak of, are not worth standing up for? Was putting the family through hell worth it then? The 435 people who make up the House of Representatives are, on average, no nobler or wiser than any randomly selected group of 435 Americans. In many cases the members of Congress are much dumber and more craven than the people they represent (they’re also, on average, richer, whiter and much more likely to be male). To Luke Russert, though, they are noble public servants, and to love America is to respect its political elite. This is a classic symptom of Beltway myopia: mistaking the politicians for democracy. The greatest moment in politics, for Luke Russert, was the time the president argued in circles with Eric Cantor for a while, on TV, and no one came away having changed their mind.
Because he is being groomed to be a simulacra of his father, and because he is merely a jukebox for the cliches and conclusions of the elders grooming him, Russert can get tripped up when attempting to be Broderian on the fly. Dylan Ratigan threw him for a loop when he challenged him on the eternal wiseness of bipartisan-approved “free trade” deals — Russert just laughed, nervously and idiotically, when faced, for what was probably the very first time in his life, with actual arguments againstmaking it easier for American corporations to gain access to cheap and easily exploitable foreign labor.
Ratigan: My Colombian, the Colombian deal’s my favorite. That’s a big job creator. Whaddya say we do a deal with the only country in the world that openly murders all labor organizers, to ensure that they will never ask for a raise ever.
L’il Luke: Well, Colombia, though, in all fairness, Colombia has had massive strides in improvement in terms of their security. I mean, you’re bringing up something that George Miller–
Ratigan: But I’m saying the murder rate of union organizers on a per capita–
L’il Luke: Well, that’s why there’s Democratic opposition in the House for it right now and they have to figure out that, you know, technicality there.
Just a little technicality! A minor bump on the road to a reassuring, job-creating compromise!
If you look at the backdrop, Dylan, just look at the stats. Federal revenue now is at its lowest level since 1950. If you extend the Bush tax cuts the way the Republicans want, you get $3.8 trillion added to the deficits. If you add them the way Democrats want, you get $3 trillion added over the next three years. If you don’t do anything to Medicare or Medicaid or social security, those programs will not be solvent.
Both parties don’t want to tell the American people it’s time to drink their tough medicine.
Both parties are going to try to take 2012 as the avenue to have this debate further. But as this debate goes on and on and on, the real difficult decisions, the real ideas of how are we going to cut this deficit, they go unanswered.
All so folks can can get re-elected, continue to get their $174,000 salaries, and the beat goes on and on. The special interests get rich, the parties can argue and argue and argue.
Really, nothing sums up contemporary American media and politics better than a twerp like Luke Russert sternly announcing that we’ll all soon have to get used to taking our “tough medicine.”
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Gosh! When did I end up in bed with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? Could it be because I did specialize in blowing things up while serving my country for four years as an airborne combat engineer? I also watched human beings blown up. I had friends and Navy SEALs I was in battle with blown up. My own intestines exploded on the first of my four combat embeds, three in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Took seven operations to fix the plumbing. I later suffered other permanent injuries.
Yet now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too.
You see, I’ve published articles saying I do “believe in global warming.” Yes, I’ve also questioned the extent to which man-made gases have contributed to that warming and concluded that expenditures to reduce those emissions would be as worthless as they’d be horrifically expensive. No matter; just call me “Ted.” Or “Charlie.” Or “Fidel.”
This is nuts! Literally. As in “mass hysteria.” That’s a phenomenon I wrote about for a quarter-century, from the heterosexual AIDS “epidemic” to the swine flu “pandemic” that killed vastly fewer people than seasonal flu, to “runaway Toyotas.” Mass hysteria is when a large segment of society loses touch with reality, or goes bonkers, if you will, on a given issue – like believing that an incredibly mild strain of flu could kill eight times as many Americans as normal seasonal flu. (It killed about a third as many.)
I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.
But no longer. That was the old right. The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger.
Extremism in the defense of nothing
Nothing the new right does is evidently outrageous enough to receive more than a peep of indignation from the new right. Heartland pulled its billboards because of funder withdrawals, not because any conservatives spoke up and said it had crossed a line.
Last month U.S. Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican recently considered by some as vice-president material, insisted that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party, again with little condemnation from the new right.
Mitt Romney took a question at a town hall meeting this month from a woman who insisted President Obama be “tried for treason,” without challenging, demurring from or even commenting on her assertion.
And then there’s the late Andrew Breitbart (assassinated on the orders of Obama, natch). A video from February shows him shrieking at peaceful protesters: “You’re freaks and animals! Stop raping people! Stop raping people! You freaks! You filthy freaks! You filthy, filthy, filthy raping, murdering freaks!” He went on for a minute-and-a-half like that. Speak not ill of the dead? Sen. Ted Kennedy’s body was barely cold when Breitbart labeled him “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.”
The new right loved it! Upon his own death shortly after, Breitbart was immediately sanctified and sent to lead the Seraphim. He was repeatedly eulogized as “the most important conservative of our time never to hold office,” skipping right past William F. What’s-his-name Jr.
There was nothing “conservative” about Breitbart. Ever-consummate gentlemen like Buckley and Ronald Reagan would have been mortified by such behavior as Breitbart’s – or West’s or Heartland’s. “There you go again,” the Gipper would have said in his soft but powerful voice.
Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism. The most prominent work of history’s most prominent conservative, Edmund Burke, was a reaction to the anger and hatred that swept France during the revolution. It would eventually rip the country apart and plunge all of Europe into decades of war. Such is the rotted fruit of mass-produced hate and rage. Burke, not incidentally, was a true Tea Party supporter, risking everything as a member of Parliament to support the rebellion in the United States.
All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” Turning people against each other. Taking seeds of fear, anger and hatred and planting them to grow a new crop.
Conservatism has also historically emphasized empiricism. Joe Friday of “Dragnet” must have been a conservative: “All we want are the facts, Ma’am.” When President Reagan famously said, “Facts are stupid things,” he meant to quote President John Adams’ observation that “Facts are stubborn things.” But how much fact was there in Heartland’s billboards, whose shock purpose has been likened to tactics of the hard-left animal activist group PETA, with whom I’ve repeatedly locked horns. Or in West’s assertion? Or Breitbart’s tirades? Rush Limbaugh compared Breitbart, who never wrote a single investigative report, to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the dynamic duo who brought down the thoroughly corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon. He actually said Breitbart’s work was superior. Oh, dear!
I know these words coming from somebody identified with the right are heresy – as defined by this new right. An invite to a marshmallow roast with you as guest of honor. Or worse. It’s to be labeled with the ultimate epithet: RINO. Republican in name only. GOP Sen. Scott Brown bears that mark of Cain. Coming from super-liberal Massachusetts, he only has a 74 percent American Conservative Union rating. There you go, then!
So there’s an auto-da-fé out there right now with my name on it. Torquemada is holding the torch; the wieners and s’mores are flying off the shelves. Truth be known, though, I haven’t considered myself a Republican since 1982. Why? That was the year of the massive Reagan tax hike. I figured that’s what liberal Democrats are for. Tore up my donor card and never gave again. By being a conservative at that time, I was a RINO. By being one now, I’m also a RINO. A very curious animal, that.
The hate, anger and fear machine
A single author, Ann Coulter, has published best-selling books accusing liberals, in the titles, of being demonic, godless and treasonous. Michelle Malkin, ranked by the Internet search company PeekYou as having the most traffic of any political blogger, routinely dismisses them as “moonbats, morons and idiots.” Limbaugh infamously dispatched a young woman who expressed her opinion that the government should provide free birth control as a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
As a conservative, I disagree with the political opinions of liberals. But to me, a verbal assault indicates insecurity and weakness on the part of the assaulter, as in “Is that the best they can do?” This playground bullying – the name-calling, the screaming, the horrible accusations – all are intended to stifle debate, the very lifeblood of a democracy.
Meanwhile, these people who practice shutting down the opposition through shouts and smears accuse President Obama of having dictatorial dreams? A recent email I received, based on accusations from umpteen right-wing groups, blared in caps-lock fury: “BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA HAS SIGNED A MARTIAL LAW EXECUTIVE ORDER!” This specific message, from a group calling itself RightMarch.org, goes on: “THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! BARACK OBAMA IS TRYING TO VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION, BECOME A DICTATOR, AND TAKE AWAY OUR RIGHTS!”
Outrageous, indeed. Obama’s order updated a National Defense Resource Preparedness act, which was essentially identical to one signed 19 years earlier and actually originated in 1950. It granted no authority to Obama that he did not already have under existing laws.
President Obama is regularly referred to as a Marxist/Socialist, Nazi, tyrant, Muslim terrorist supporter and – let me look this up, but I’ll bet probably the antichrist, too. Yup, there it is! Over 5 million Google references. There should be a contest to see if there’s anything for which Obama hasn’t been accused. Athlete’s foot? The “killer bees”? Maybe. In any case, the very people who coined and promoted such terms as “Bush Derangement Syndrome, Cheney Derangement Syndrome and Palin Derangement Syndrome” have been promoting hysterical attitudes toward Obama since before he was even sworn in.
No, I’m not cherry-picking. When I say “regularly referred to,” interpret literally. Polls show that about half of voting Republican buy into the birther nonsense (one of the more prominent hysterias within the hysteria). Only about a fourth seem truly sure that Obama was actually born here. In her nationally syndicated column Michelle Malkin wrote regarding Limbaugh’s slut remarks, that “I’m sorry the civility police now have an opening to demonize the entire right based on one radio comment.” In a stroke she’s expressed her disdain for civility and declared the new right’s sins can be dispatched as an itsy-bitsy little single faux pas, “one radio comment.”
No, Michelle, incivility – nay, outright meanness and puerility – rears its ugly head daily on your blog, which as I write this on May 23 has one item referring in the headline to “Pig Maher’s boy [Bill Maher]” and another to “Jaczko the Jerk,” [former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko]. She calls Limbaugh target Sandra Fluke a “femme-agogue” and her supporters “[George] Soros monkeys.” Pigs? Monkeys? Moonbats? It’s literal dehumanization.
Sure, there are enough hate-and-anger mongers on the left to go around. Among the worst was Keith Olbermann, who once called Malkin a “mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” Very edifying, Keith! But as the Christian Science Monitor reported, his ratings recently collapsed from an average of 354,000 viewers a night when he debuted on Current TV, to 58,000 viewers by the first quarter of 2012. He was recently fired. Again. Air America was intended to counter right-wing talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh. I was on Al Franken’s show while he made fun of a soldier from my first battle who is now permanently paralyzed. Touché, Al! But Air America also failed.
Malkin, who revels in playing the victim, says that she’s been called all sorts of horrible things, many based on her Filipina heritage. But most of what she cites come from email or anonymous comments on blog sites. It wasn’t usually from paid professionals with large audiences, like her, aimed at paid professionals like her. It’s thus hard to compare with the host of the most popular talk show host in history taking shots at an unknown 22-year-old woman. (She’s hardly that now; Limbaugh himself promoted her to a national spokeswoman.)
Incivility is hardly the domain of the new right. American society grows ever coarser. But this is cold comfort. Conservative ideology demands civility of conservatives; demands, yes, self-policing. Let others act as they will, bearing evidence of the shallowness of their positions. It also demands respect for official offices, such as the presidency. When our guy is in office, you give him that modicum of respect – and when your guy is in office, we do the same. The other party is to be referred to as “the loyal opposition,” not with words the FCC forbids on the air.
Muckraking becometh buckraking
In the grief-fest at Breitbart’s death, forgiven (and indeed practically forgotten) was his crucial role in building the single most popular liberal website, the Huffington Post. Some of Breitbart’s friends admitted he was absent of ideology. “I don’t recall Andrew Breitbart ever mentioning electoral politics,” wrote Tucker Carlson. “It bored him.” Breitbart’s inspiration, then? George Washington through Benjamin Franklin – printed in primarily green ink on cotton stock.
Limbaugh pulls down a stunning $38 million annual salary. Leaked Heartland Institute documents revealed it’s gotten over $14 million in the past six years from a single individual. RightMarch.com accompanied the Obama-cum-tyrant message with an offer to “Blast Fax” every member of Congress for $139 – for a profit of about $139. Surely these people have their fingers crossed that President Obama is reelected.
I personally know a lot of the leaders of this new rabid right. Most are very nice on a personal basis. Honestly, you’d be shocked. Unlike Breitbart, some began as real conservatives. One called me her mentor in her first book and attended my wedding. Many once sang my praises. Again, unlike Breitbart, Malkin was once a true investigative reporter. You can still see elements of actual research in Ann Coulter’s work, too.
But when times changed, and it became profitable to move from honorable advocacy to shrill name-calling, they changed too. They cashed in their reputations, as well as their ideology, for lucre. Those who didn’t – because conservatism runs against screaming, extremism and sensationalism – began disappearing from the talk shows, magazines and store shelves. They were replaced by pod people.
Conservatism, RIP
You cannot be identified by what you oppose, only by what you stand for. But this curious creature’s main claim to the title of “conservative” is that it hates liberals – as do liberals and lots of others on many points of the political spectrum. Obama is routinely bashed in such places as the Nation. The right-wing Nation?
Indeed in any violent anti-democratic revolution – Jacobite, Bolshevik, National Socialist – the first goal is to eliminate the real competition, those with ideals. The guys who really believed in liberty, fraternity and equality or rule by the proletariat were identified, isolated and eliminated early on to leave only two extremes to choose from. “It’s us or the Bourbons! It’s us or the Romanovs!” In Germany, the conservatives and liberals were dispatched to the labor camps before the Nazis felt safe to send the Jews to the death camps.
The new right cannot advance a conservative agenda precisely because, other than a few small holdouts like the American Conservative magazine or that battleship that refuses to become a museum, George Will, it is not itself conservative. Pod people are running the show. It has no such capability; no such desire. I find that disturbing for obvious reasons. But, based on my own conversations with liberals, I think – nay, I know – that if more of these allegedly godless, treasonous people understood real conservatism a lot would embrace many conservative positions.
Thus everybody realizes government spending has lost its airbrakes. But while the new right screams the most about big government, it nonetheless supported President George W. Bush as he presided over the largest expansion of government spending since uber-liberal FDR and left us with a massive debt before President Obama was sworn in. Why? Silly rabbit! Because the left opposed him.
The same has been said for the right’s otherwise seemingly unfathomable enchantment with Sarah Palin; it’s a defense of their damsel in distress. The veracity of the left’s claims about her are irrelevant. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Or so thought that uber-liberal FDR about good ol’ “Uncle Joe” right to the end, even as conservative Winston Churchill tried desperately to convince him otherwise. And so fell the Iron Curtain.
Eating its own
Obsessed with attacking, the new right will carpet-bomb positions of the old right if the left comes around to it.
Thus the right has traditionally opposed government subsidies. My first cover story was in Buckley’s National Review, arguing against ethanol subsidies that ultimately grew to $6 billion annually. But when the Senate sought to repeal the subsidy last year, right-wing guru and Jack Abramoff henchman Grover Norquist fought it – with the stunning argument that cutting a government subsidy is actually a tax hike in disguise!
And how ironic that for decades liberals unfairly accused conservatives of “McCarthyism” to shut down debate. (Oh, how I remember!) Yet now the right countenances a prominent congressman who has literally outdone “Tailgunner Joe.”
McCarthy’s infamous list comprised only 57 Communists who were merely State Department employees, not “78 to 81” of the nation’s top elected officials.
Pity the poor Onion; there’s nothing left to satirize.
Gridlock
Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse.
Drastic action is required now, nay yesterday, to start bringing expenditures in line with income. About half our government spending is fueled by borrowing, and that spending accounts for a fourth of GDP. Without borrowing, then, our GDP would drop 12 percent or more – well into depression range.
Excluding the very top earners, household incomes have been declining for a decade.
The real employment level has been trending downward since the mid-1980s. Unemployment for a year or more, the kind that just sucks the heart and soul out of people, is about double what it was in late 2009 – and yet in the 1960s it was essentially nonexistent.
For many, the American dream became a nightmare long ago. It’s little wonder that Americans are afraid and angry.
One member of the new right seemed to acknowledge that reckless character assassination was merely stalemating the system. “Let’s come back to the issues,” he told NPR in an interview last year. “Let’s come back to talking about how do we set the conditions here in Washington, D.C., for long-term sustainable economic and job growth.” Unfortunately, that was congressman Allen West.
The right didn’t create this reservoir of fear, anger and hate. But it has both tapped into it and roiled it. Indeed, the right-wing mass hysteria is what sociologists call a “moral panic.” It occurs when a society is undergoing a wrenching transformation. Somebody then comes along and creates a “folk devil” both to provide an explanation for bad conditions, real or imagined, and a target. Kill the devil; eliminate the bad conditions. But the right has no serious incentive to help solve or ameliorate these problems. Indeed, as with the reelection of Obama, it will benefit from their continuation or worsening.
So animosity has now reached levels both hysterical and historical. The last time anything like this occurred was during World War II, when at least it was aimed outward. Before that? Just before the Civil War.
Back then a tall bearded Republican declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Just another one of those idiot, moron, “duplicitous bastard” RINOs.
Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, journalist and former paratrooper who has written for National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The American Spectator, Human Events, Forbes, Forbes.com, Reason, Policy Review, The Spectator (London), The Sunday Times of London, The Wall Street Journal op-ed page and many other publications. His web site is www.fumento.com.
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Eli Lake and Bill Kristol 
Beyonce (Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly) 
Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs in "Community." 
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock) 
