Best of the Web Today - July 29, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
'Be Very Afraid'
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Whatever happened to the Angry Left? There's scant evidence of it in the Fleet Center, where almost every speaker is mouthing the same strongerathomerespectedintheworld boilerplate. Howard Dean gave a speech Tuesday, which we didn't see, but the consensus among Deaniacs around town is that he was "neutered," an impression the transcript certainly seems to confirm. Yet although Dean was on his best behavior when addressing the convention, when we tuned in to C-Span yesterday, we caught a glimpse of him speaking to grassroots activists at an off-site event, telling them the Bush administration "cares more about burning books than reading books."
President Bush is a Nazi and he's stupid. This town is full of people who actually believe this. The Democratic Party has smartly kept such views under wraps at the convention itself. The fate of John Kerry's candidacy may depend on whether it can continue to suppress them once the convention is over.
Wanting to see the Angry Left in action, yesterday afternoon we headed to the Royal Sonesta hotel here to watch a panel discussion on Iraq featuring Joe Wilson, Reps. Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. (Former senator Gary Hart also showed up, though the invitation we'd received didn't mention his name.)
The event was billed as a "debate," which at first glance struck us as risible. But come to think of it, this group does have differences of opinion about Iraq. Kucinich, for instance, thinks we should not have liberated Iraq. Lee, on the other hand, thinks we shouldn't have liberated Afghanistan either. Kucinich and Lee think we should withdraw the troops immediately; Wilson thinks we should consider withdrawing the troops immediately. And vanden Heuvel doesn't know who her congressman is.
The event was a big draw; the young lady manning the door told us we'd have to wait until someone exited, as the Grand Ballroom was filled to capacity. When we finally entered, Kucinich was already speaking, blathering on about his proposal to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace.
Joe Wilson was next up. In contrast to the endearingly childlike Kucinich, Wilson is a vicious political operative who casually accuses his opponents of felonies. He had some success last year with his unsubstantiated allegation that unnamed Bush administration officials had revealed the name of his wife, purportedly a covert CIA operative, in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But lately he's been undone by his own dishonesty, and yesterday his disintegration continued. Some of our reporting on yesterday's event was incorporated into an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal (link for subscribers):
Is John Kerry part of the vast right-wing conspiracy? To hear Joe Wilson talk, you might think so. The Kerry campaign had been touting the Niger-Iraq "whistleblower" as a foreign-policy adviser--but that changed after both the Senate Intelligence Committee and a British report discredited Mr. Wilson's claims about his wife's role in sending him to Niger and about what he found there.
A search of Mr. Kerry's Web site now turns up no reference to either Mr. Wilson or his wife, Valerie Plame. And RestoreHonesty.com, a Web site the campaign had set up to showcase Mr. Wilson's accusations against the Bush Administration, now redirects browsers to the JohnKerry.com homepage.
But although he seems to have been jilted by Mr. Kerry, Mr. Wilson showed up yesterday in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from the Democratic National Convention, where he spoke to a ballroom filled to capacity with Democratic activists at a forum sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future.
"On my road to Boston," he said, "I was ambushed by a Republican National Committee smear campaign based on lies and distortions. You've seen it in The Wall Street Journal, you've seen it on the right-wing blogs, you've seen it in William Safire's articles."
Such criticism, Mr. Wilson told the crowd, sends a "message" to would-be whistleblowers: "Your government will do everything in its power to destroy you and your family. Be afraid. Be very afraid."
For the record, no one in the government has suggested we say anything about the case. And in truth it is Mr. Wilson who seems intent on stifling dissent. He began his talk by asking "if it is OK if I harbor just a little bit of violence toward a certain journalist"--presumably a reference to Robert Novak, who first reported Ms. Plame's role in Mr. Wilson's trip. Later, referring to this newspaper's view that the special prosecutor investigation of the "leaking" of Ms. Plame's name to Mr. Novak should be shut down, Mr. Wilson hinted that we are part of a criminal conspiracy: "Does this campaign against me not at least give the appearance of being interference in a criminal investigation?"
Knowing what Mr. Wilson thinks of the First Amendment makes it even clearer that Mr. Kerry is right to jettison him from the campaign. And in case Mr. Wilson is worried, let us assure him that the Kerry campaign did not call us for advice before banishing him from its councils.
We thought about sticking around for Barbara Lee's speech, but decided we'd had enough and repaired to the hotel bar for a midafternoon martini.
Editor Dies in Comic Fashion
BOSTON--David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation and a Fox News contributor, died here this week.
Oddly enough, he's still alive. When we say he "died," we mean he tried his hand at stand-up comedy and proved himself (to coin a phrase) a miserable failure. If we were Washington editor of The Nation, we'd probably quit, but our advice to Corn is to keep his day job. Corn was one of a dozen or so amateur and professional comedians who performed at a Tuesday night show sponsored by The Hotline, National Journal's daily political newsletter. The quality was decidedly mixed, but Corn's performance stood out for its sheer awfulness.
His main joke played off a recent encounter between Vice President Cheney and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, in which Cheney used an obscene expression, which we'll abbreviate "GFY." Corn's joke was that Cheney had supposedly said GFY to various sympathetic groups of people (9/11 survivors and the like).
The joke wasn't over yet. Corn then proposed that the Bush-Cheney campaign use the expression as a campaign slogan: "Bush-Cheney: GFY." And he said the Kedwards campaign could use the same slogan, the idea being that Bush and Cheney are saying GFY to everyone else, while Kedwards are saying it to Bush and Cheney.
We apologize if such hilarity has caused you to spew coffee on your computer.
Master of ceremonies Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler opened the festivities by declaring, "This will not be the latest episode in which Democrats try to lose an election by consorting with foul-mouthed comedians." What he meant was that this was not an official Democratic Party event.
If it had been, there was plenty that would have embarrassed the party, such as this line from one Barry Crimmins, referring to President Bush: "That guy is lucky to get through a speech without using a drool cup." Crimmins got huge applause when he referred to the administration as "these fascist, nightmare assholes running our country." This was basically a more vulgar version of Howard Dean's rant about "burning books," so what exactly is the joke?
Still, Crimmins did have a sense of comic timing, and a riff he did on Edwards and Cheney as Bambi vs. Godzilla was mildly amusing. There were other high points too: Comedian Will Durst and impressionist Jim Morris both gave polished performances with many laughs. And among the amateurs, Time magazine's Matt Cooper and California's Rep. Brad Sherman stood out, in part because they were willing to make fun of Democrats as well as Republicans.
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Cooper said of Al Gore, "There's only one person in America who hates Bush and Clinton equally. . . . His daddy stole my presidency and that hillbilly's promiscuity took away my birthright!" (Actually, this sounded funnier than it reads.) And Sherman got a big laugh simply by reading, with feeling, one of John Kerry's recent lines: "We've got better vision, better ideas, real plans. We've got a better sense of what's happening to America--and we've got better hair." If you don't get the joke, look at the picture nearby.
On the other hand, Rep. Linda Sanchez of California was dreadful--as vulgar as Roseanne née Arnold née Barr, and even unfunnier. Much of her shtick was about her elder sister, Rep. Loretta Sanchez--perhaps funny at a family reunion, but incomprehensible to an ordinary audience, or even a Democratic one. Sanchez even made a rude remark about the fellow California Democrat who'd preceded her on the stage. Noting that for the first time the convention had more female delegates than male ones, she said, "Even with that improved ratio, Brad Sherman still hasn't gotten laid." Even with a friendly audience, Linda Sanchez hasn't gotten laughs.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was a frequent target, and our favorite joke of the night was a dark, bipartisan barb from Will Durst, who described the California governor's marriage to Maria Shriver as "phase one in a genetic experiment to breed a bulletproof Kennedy."
Blogville on the Charles
Late last night, we made our way to Charlestown, a part of Boston so obscure that our taxi driver got lost. After he stopped twice to ask directions, we finally found our destination, a Greek restaurant that was the site of the big blogger party. We had no idea this would be such a hot ticket. Granted, it wasn't the Creative Coalition's star-studded bash (we didn't even bother trying to get into that one), but still, we were initially turned back at the door--a clerical error apparently had kept us off the list--and we had to plead our case.
Our encounter with the Gatekeepers of Blogdom had a comic aspect to it. The guy who seemed to be in charge told us that as a member of the press, we would have to talk to the "press officer," a middle-aged man in a checkered jacket. He in turn denied being the press officer and told us he'd have to get the press officer on the phone. Finally he did arrange for our admission. Bloggers, of course, tout their medium for its freedom from the bureaucratic constraints of large institutions. Well, one thing's for sure: Bloggers do not do well at running a bureaucracy.
We saw more people we knew here than we have anywhere else in Boston, save for Wall Street Journal editorial board meetings: Robert George of the New York Post, columnist Joel Mowbray, bloggers Mickey Kaus and Josh Marshall. Joel teased Josh about the Sandy Berger scandal: "Even you aren't defending Berger." We thought about taunting Josh about Joe Wilson, whose flame-out has taken its toll on Josh's credibility, but as a compassionate conservative we decided against putting a damper on his evening.
We struck up a conversation with a pretty, young blonde named Valerie (no relation to Joe Wilson) who runs something called Clothing of the American Mind. She explains that she's been traveling across the country in a trailer home selling anti-Bush T-shirts--she wears one that reads "axis of evil doers"--to raise money for MoveOn.org. We get to talking politics and are interrupted when we make an observation about the possibility of a Hillary Clinton candidacy in 2008 if John Kerry loses this year.
"Kerry's gonna win," a stocky man informs us. He tells us he's a former Dean supporter. If the election were held today, he is sure, Kerry would receive some 330 electoral votes.
We point out that the election isn't going to be held today, and he concedes the premise but not the conclusion. He is convinced not only that Kerry's victory is a foregone conclusion, but that in 2012, "after two terms of Kerry," the Dems will see a three-way contest between Mrs. Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama, who as we speak has not even been elected to the Senate yet. Our interlocutor is pretty sure Obama will win, and he likes Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, as a running mate. Rendell will be 68 in 2012.
This isn't the first evidence we've seen of Democratic overconfidence, but it's the first time we've encountered anyone who's certain Kerry will be re-elected, much less someone willing to handicap the 2012 race. Part of the reason for this overconfidence surely is that the Angry Left lives in a bubble that is impervious to the appealing qualities of George W. Bush. The carefully staged nature of the convention suggests that the Democratic establishment knows better--which of course is lucky for Kerry. Still, one wonders how the overconfident Angry Lefties will handle it if Bush does win.
The conversation turns back to the convention, and we finally have to walk away when Valerie offers her opinion on John Edwards's speech: "It gives you hope that people running for office really care about America and American values." It's the sort of thing only someone very young and innocent can say and mean--and hearing it makes us feel old.
Later, a "celebrity," Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, gets up and says a few words, among them: "I want to give a shout-out to my daughter." What in the devil is a "shout-out"? Our incomprehension makes us feel young again, as we realize that the 56-year-old senator must be using slang from the 1920s or '30s that didn't reach remote North Dakota until Conrad's youth.
We thought about getting into the spirit of things and shouting out, "Groovy, Daddy-O." But it had been a long day. The time had come to bid our fellow bloggers a fond 23 skidoo. |
