Caveat lector

STIRRING THE RUBES! Hillary Clinton is un-American. It says so right in today’s Times:

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2003

ANOTHER FEIN MESS: Conservative pundit Bruce Fein is just plain un-American. So, of course, is the Washington Times, which puts Fein’s work into print. How do we know such a thing about Fein? We know it because, in this morning’s Times, the traitorous fellow says this:

FEIN: The initial Nov. 15 transformation plan [for Iraq] and impending revisions bear the earmarks of Bush administration desperation to be done with Iraq before the 2004 presidential elections…The administration seems eager to concede whatever revisions are necessary to provide a “decent interval” between the scheduled dissolution of United States sovereignty next June and the deluge that will ineluctably ensue.

How do we know that makes Fein un-American? Because on the front page of this morning’s Washington Times—in the very same paper which includes Fein’s column—Hillary Clinton is slammed as “un-American” for having offered a similar thought. James Lakely was trying to gin up the rubes, and he hammered recent comments by Clinton. Here is his opening paragraph:

LAKELY: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, fresh from her own trip to Iraq, accused President Bush yesterday of conducting the war by a “political calendar,” saying he had dispatched the wrong “mix of troops” to secure the country and that victory “is not certain.”

LAKELY: Republican consultant Scott Reed called the comments “un-American.”

“Any member of the U.S. Senate should be supporting our troops 100 percent,” Mr. Reed said. “It sounds like Senator Clinton has been stung by the fact that President Bush overshadowed her trip to Iraq and left her as an after-story. So to break into the debate, she's had to take the low road.”

So there you have it, the troubling news—the Washington Times is un-American! Tony Blankley went and found Fein, and threw the un-American fellow into print. In time the news will surely reach Reed, and he will utter his latest fine statement. We look ahead to tomorrow’s Times, when Lakely—doing what’s right, as always—drops a dime on his own paper.

STIRRING THE RUBES: Corrupted rags like the Washington Times exist to stir up the rubes. How utterly stupid will the James Lakelys be? Here’s another troubling comment by the deeply un-American Clinton:

LAKELY: Mrs. Clinton also told the Associated Press while touring Iraq on Friday that the United States could not be certain of victory in Iraq.

“We have to exert all of our efforts militarily, but the outcome is not assured,” Mrs. Clinton said.

For the record, Lakely seems to be wrong on a fact. We find no record that Clinton said this to the AP; she seems to have made the comment in a phone interview with Douglas Turner of the Buffalo News. But many clowns of the rube-stirring right were eager to play fast and loose with her comment. For example, here was Sean Hannity on last night’s Hannity & Colmes, having familiar problems with the truth:

HANNITY: What does it mean when Hillary Rodham Clinton goes over there at the same time [as Bush], as saying, questioning the Bush administration’s policies, as she did, and says there are questions about his policies at home and says, “We exert all of our efforts militarily but outcome is not assured?” She said that to the troops.

The Fox gang is eager top stir up the rubes—to get their true-blue juices flowing. Of course, they’re also eager to boost their ratings—to put lots of dough in the jeans.

ATTACKING THE TROOPS: When will Clinton start supporting the troops? When she appeared on Monday’s Today show, she attacked them right out of the box:

CLINTON: Well, Katie, first of all, the military is doing a terrific job. I don’t think we can overstate how committed and devoted they are to trying to bring about security. But it is still a very dangerous place as this incident on Sunday clearly demonstrates. They don’t have enough of the right mix of troops in our opinion. We visited with not only the military, but the civilian-American representatives. And it became clear that we need more MPs, we need more intelligence, we need more civil affairs. We need a bigger presence. And as we train the Iraqi civil defense corps and the army and the police, we are still going to have to be there in large numbers in order to make sure that that works. Clearly, what we are doing now is not an effective strategy. We need to get the UN back in as quickly as possible to internationalize this. But I can’t say enough positively about what our American military are doing on the ground. And it’s not just with respect to security. They are the ones who are reopening the schools, fixing up the hospitals, creating the relationships with Iraqis on the ground that I think will give us a better chance than we currently have.

CLINTON: I think it was both, Katie. I applaud the president for going to Baghdad and seeing our troops. Any time our troops are in a conflict situation, the commander in chief's presence makes a huge difference. It sends a message that these young men and women are doing a job that is important to our country. On the other hand, it is not a substitute for a plan about how we’re going to not only enhance security, which was the number one concern that everybody talked to about, especially the Iraqis that I met with. And it is not also a plan for how we’re eventually going to create more legitimacy to a move towards self-governance for the Iraqis.

EPILOGUE—BERNIE LOVES BRUCE: Is there a bigger fake in current punditry than Fox’s new pseudo-Democrat, Tammy Bruce? Last night, the “Fox News Contributor” guested with O’Reilly. And she offered a phony self-description:

BRUCE: Well, first of all, let me say as a Democrat and as a feminist and as a progressive, and as an openly gay woman, I also have an investment in progressive politics.

Poor Bernie! He can’t begin to understand why Bruce can’t get more props from the press! According to Bernie, the media will “quickly turn on longtime friends when they get a little too independent in their thinking.” And “Exhibit A is Tammy Bruce.” How perfidious is the press? “As president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW in the 1990s, Bruce enjoyed huge clout with the media,” Bernie says. “But then Tammy Bruce made a big mistake. She began saying the ‘wrong’ things.” In fact, Bruce did take some stands which NOW leaders rejected, and she lost her job as NOW chief in LA. Here’s how bad things got after that. Bernie is quite flabbergasted:

GOLDBERG (page 145): It makes sense that Tammy Bruce, as a dissident feminist, might have shaky relations with the NOW establishment. But what surprised her was how quickly, after she broke with NOW, her once warm and cuddly relationship with the media also went sour. “I found out,” as she puts it in The New Thought Police, “what it’s like trying to get your message out when you’re on the ‘wrong’ side of an issue.”

Why did newspapers “shun” Bruce’s book? Here at THE HOWLER, we can’t really say. But how about this possibility—how about the chance that they “shunned” her book because it was incoherent, bizarre, just god-awful? In fact, The New Thought Police is a wreck of a book. In fact, the laughable book only serves one purpose—it shows how hard a faker like Bruce will struggle to become a Fox icon.

Truly, Tammy Bruce will do and say anything to establish bona fides with the right. How hard did she pander in The New Thought Police? Early on, she chose a novel target—she trashed civil rights icon Rosa Parks. After offering short, gong-show passages designed to show that Betty Friedan and Martin Luther King were both Communists, Bruce presents a puzzling tale about the troubling Parks:

BRUCE (page 17): Most Americans believe that the civil-rights struggle was full of serendipity, that it was a spontaneous grass roots movement of average people who wanted to make a difference and improve their lives. Rosa Parks, for example, has been portrayed as an Everywoman who happened to take the bus one day in 1955 and somehow crashed through the barriers of her run-of-the-mill life by deciding not to relinquish her seat to a white man.

BRUCE (page 18): Parks was a veteran activist and officer of the Montgomery NAACP. In actuality, she wielded great power in the chapter; she was the one who had noticed Martin Luther King Jr. and asked him to join the executive committee. She was at the meeting where the Montgomery NAACP leaders considered the possibility of using Colvin or Smith as the test case.

In December 1955, six weeks after the NAACP’s rejection of the teen-agers, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Parks told Time magazine, “I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home.” That may have been true for Colvin and Smith but certainly not for Parks. Rosa Parks was a “bus rider” the way Betty Friedan was a “housewife.”

In short, you get two choices with Tammy Bruce. Either Bruce is totally out of her mind, or she was willing to say and do anything to get the attention—and the money—of the Scaife Right. Bernie, of course, just can’t imagine why the press wouldn’t review her cracked book—the crackpot book which has elevated Bruce to her current position on Fox. On Fox, Bruce now poses as a “progressive Democrat,” providing fake fairness and balance. On Fox, Bruce tells us she’s a “progressive Dem”—then lauds everything Bush says or does.

Readers, you live at a time of exceptional clowning. It’s a time when complete fakes and frauds—people just like Bruce and Goldberg—will do and say anything to get that Scaife Dough. Meanwhile, Tim Russert fawns to this crackpot world with his fake, clowning interview in Arrogance.

One last bit of clowning-clown brilliance: When Goldberg appeared at the Miami Book Fair last month, he expressed his outrage at the way the New York Times covered the matter of women-at-Augusta. Should women be allowed to join Augusta? That would be fine with him, Bernie said. But here was his gripe with the Times—and yes, he feigned real anger:

GOLDBERG: They made a crusade out of it. They raised it to the level of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They made it into a Rosa Parks being forced to ride in the back of the bus issue. And it’s certainly not that, and I think it’s disrespectful to our civil rights history.