The Paranoid Left
Best of the Web Today - February 23, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Back in September, when the story first broke of CBS's fabricated Texas Air National Guard memos, Terry McAuliffe, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, theorized that White House adviser Karl Rove might have produced the memos.
That theory seems to be catching on among left-wing Democrats. Blogger Charles Johnson reports that Rep. Maurice Hinchey of upstate New York put it forward at a weekend community forum in Ithaca. Here's a partial transcript:
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Hinchey: They've had a very very direct, aggressive attack on the, on the media, and the way it's handled. Probably the most flagrant example of that is the way they set up Dan Rather. Now, I mean, I have my own beliefs about how that happened: It originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House. They set that up with those false papers.
Why did they do it? They knew that Bush was a draft dodger. They knew that he had run away from his responsibilities in the Air National Guard in Texas, gone out of the state intentionally for a long period of time. They knew that he had no defense for that period in his life. And so what they did was, expecting that that was going to come up, they accentuated it; they produced papers that made it look even worse. And they--and they distributed those out to elements of the media. And it was only--what, like was it CBS? Or whatever, whatever which one Rather works for.
They--the people there--they finally bought into it, and they, and they aired it. And when they did, they had 'em. They didn't care who did it! All they had to do is to get some element of the media to advance that issue. Based upon the false papers that they produced.
Audience member: Do you have any evidence for that?
Hinchey: Yes I do Once they did that--
Audience: [murmuring]
Hinchey: --once they did that, then it undermined everything else about Bush's draft dodging. Once they were able to say, "This is false! These papers are not accurate, they're, they're, they're false, they've been falsified." That had the effect of taking the whole issue away.
Audience member: So you have evidence that the papers came from the Bush administration?
Hinchey: No. I--that's my belief.
Audience member: OK.
Hinchey: And I said that. In the very beginning. I said, "It's my belief that those papers, and that setup, originated with Karl Rove and the White House."
Audience member: Don't you think it's irresponsible to make charges like that?
Hinchey: No I don't. I think it's very important to make charges like that. I think it's very important to combat this kind of activity in every way that you can. And I'm willing--and most people are not--to step forward in situations like this and take risks.
Audience: [clapping and cheering]
Hinchey: I consider that to be part of my job, and I'm gonna continue to do it.
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In his classic 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," historian Richard Hofstadter described this mentality:
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As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. . . .
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman--sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.
Hofstadter wrote at a time of liberal ascendancy, and as he noted, "in recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers," especially Sen. Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society. But as he noted, "the paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life."
These days it is recurring on the left--a point that first became clear seven years ago last month, when, as CNN reported then, First Lady Hillary Clinton denied that her husband had had an affair with Monica Lewisnky and "blamed the sex allegations on a 'a vast right-wing conspiracy.' " Its ironic that today Mrs. Clinton seems quite sane compared with many in her party. |
