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_______________DICTATOR OF CHOICE BY DAVID HOROWITZ (11/23/98)
	T hanks to the politically correct liberal media, fascist torturers and mass murderers don't often get the credit they deserve for their good works. Thank goodness for David Horowitz, whose Nov. 23 column on Augusto Pinochet finally sets the record straight. Horowitz's column is, as Horowitz himself will tell you, a model of honesty and intellectual integrity, bravely pointing out that the Chilean economy did very well under Pinochet and that the Chilean people themselves "made the real decision to put Pinochet in power." Most bracing of all is Horowitz's insistence that Pinochet is not a liability for American conservatives, since "the American right's sympathies for Pinochet were muted, and did not involve blindness to the stringencies of his rule." Truly, it takes almost inconceivable courage to write such a thing, given Jesse Helms' personal visit to Pinochet to reassure him of American support after Pinochet's troops had burned alive a 19-year-old man who had returned to the country to seek out his "disappeared" parents. (By contrast, when Jesse Jackson visited Cuba and negotiated the release of some of Castro's political prisoners, the Reagan administration threatened to charge Jackson with violation of the 1798 Logan Act. But here, I don't know whether Horowitz's argument about Pinochet and the American right is due to his courage, or to his curious form of political Alzheimer's.) For over a decade now I have looked to David Horowitz for the American right's most embattled and eloquent defenses of fascism. His Pinochet column may, in this respect, be his best work to date. But I hope Horowitz will not stop here; there's much more work to be done on this front. Adolf Hitler, for instance, has long been synonymous with evil in the liberal American media, but surely his claims on our attention are even stronger than Pinochet's. Horowitz argues, for instance, that Pinochet's coup was legitimate because Allende won by only 40,000 votes; how much more legitimate was Hitler, who actually won his country's fair and democratic election hands down. Likewise, if Horowitz is going to exculpate fascist mass murderers on the grounds that they were good for the country's economies, surely Adolf should be exhibit A: By Horowitz's logic, the German turnaround from the Weimar inflation should be hailed as one of the feats of the century. Of course, as even Horowitz will admit, mistakes were made, in Germany as in Chile. All the same, every argument Horowitz makes in Pinochet's defense can be made a fortiori for Hitler. And for this, American conservatives everywhere owe Horowitz a debt of gratitude -- as Horowitz himself will tell you. I look forward to the column in which Horowitz makes explicit his hitherto implicit defense of the Third Reich, and I hope that neither liberal political correctness nor the blandishments of identity politics will deter him from this important task. -- Michael Bérubé
_______________BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP BY DAVID HOROWITZ (11/09/98)
	I think that it's a real hip marketing strategy for you guys to have a columnist like David Horowitz who does in-their-face pieces about African-Americans. Nobody can accuse you of political correctness. Right? Other ethnic groups vote in blocs, and some of them have the same issues as African-Americans; for example, Hispanics have a higher poverty rate, and the out-of-wedlock births among some other ethnic groups are soaring while among blacks the rate is the lowest in 40 years (I missed Horowitz's column about this), but Horowitz reserves his wrath for African-Americans. He became disillusioned with the Black Panthers and so he takes out his revenge on all African-Americans. One might even use clinical jargon to discuss his problem with African-Americans, and he gets paid for this obsession by the right wing. I say all of this, but I have subscribed to Heterodoxy and plan to subscribe to the magazine again. I read his book about being a radical son and found it to be very useful. He revealed that while the black revolutionaries were wiped out, killed, driven mad, the middle-class white men who provided them with their theories moved on to marry in Beverly Hills, and I know one guy who married an heiress. Others became second thoughters, hired pens for the rich who have problems with the '60s, blacks, women, etc. I concluded that, in the United States, there's more profit in being a white revolutionary than a black one. And so, write on David. And go on with your bad self, Salon. But one suggestion. So as not to look like bullies, why not have a black columnist to balance David's constant scolding of black folks. Then, we'd have a dialogue instead of a one-sided monologue. I'd suggest Playthell Benjamin, who writes for Black World Today. He's as good a literary street fighter as David. -- Ishmael Reed Publisher, Konch Magazine
_______________UNDER THE COVERS BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK (12/01/98)
	Keith Olbermann isn't very funny now, and he wasn't very funny on "SportsCenter." It's kind of weird how the two least funny sportscasters from ESPN (Olbermann and Kilborn) got their own shows. Anyway, "demagogue" is indeed (a transitive or intransitive) verb, meaning either to act as a demagogue or to treat something in a demagogic fashion. I just thought that Mr. Poniewozik (and Olbermann) could improve his vocabulary. -- Peter Butler Today's story on Keith Olbermann was super (I guess it was "super" because I agree with everything that was written). It has been great to have an intellectual media head put the TV-covered political scene in its proper perspective, and to see the hired-gun pundits knocked down a notch or two -- in a subtle, but yet so direct and devastating manner. Those interested in public affairs (not the Prez's kind) are really going to miss Keith Olbermann. -- Thom Coupa SALON | Dec. 4, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| UNCLE ANDREW'S CABIN BY PETER KURTH

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