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By James Taranto
Friday June 10, 2005
Karen Finley Liberals
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is outraged over a comment Rep. Charles Rangel made the other day, the New York Daily News's Lloyd Grove reports:
The Iraq war "is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. . . . This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed," the 74-year-old Harlem Democrat insisted during a Monday radio appearance on the WWRL-AM morning show with Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter. "The whole world knew and they were quiet about it because it wasn't their ox being gored."
When interviewer Malzberg challenged Rangel's analogy, the congressman replied: "I am saying that people's silence when they know things terrible are happening is the same thing as the Holocaust." . . .
Foxman retorted: "It is so outrageous that I think he owes an apology not only to the families of the victims of the Shoah, but he also owes an apology to the soldiers who are fighting for freedom. . . ."
It's good that there are people like Foxman around who are paid to remind us that such comparisons are outrageous. For our part, we can barely muster the energy to roll our eyes. We have simply become desensitized to exorbitant liberal-left rhetoric. Bush = Hitler! Little Eichmanns! Guantanamo is a Gulag! By now what can one offer in response but a weary "whatever"?
This is a problem not only for those who resist the trivialization of evil but also for the liberal left itself. Shock can be a useful rhetorical device, but only if used sparingly--for the listener's capacity for shock quickly diminishes. That's why Republicans see Howard Dean as a laughingstock rather than a threat.
Hearing about the Rangel comment, and looking back on the past few years of left-liberal rhetoric, got us to thinking about one of the first stories we covered in our journalist career: the controversy, during the administration of President Bush's father, over the National Endowment for the Arts. Back then the NEA gave lots of grants to "avant-garde artists" whose idiom was shock and whose politics were left-wing. Perhaps the best known was "performance artist" Karen Finley.
In July 1990 we attended a performance of Finley's one-woman show "We Keep Our Victims Ready," the title of which was an allusion to the Holocaust and meant to draw a parallel between America and Nazi Germany. Mimicking the cadences of a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, Finely delivered a series of tirades consisting of standard-issue left-liberal politics laced with obscene language and gross imagery. The crowd loved it, giving her a standing ovation. We found it tedious.
The whole NEA kerfuffle, though an amusing story for a young journalist to cover, felt like something of a sideshow. But in recent years--especially since George W. Bush became president--Karen Finley-style shock rhetoric has become a dominant mode of expression on the political left, among politicians like Rangel and Dean as well as cultural figures like Michael Moore and Ward Churchill and even once-serious groups like Amnesty International.
Indeed, on "Fox News Sunday" AI's William Schulz expressly said his group employed the "gulag" calumny in order to grab attention:
Chris Wallace: Is it possible, sir, that by excessive rhetoric or by your political links, that you have hurt, not helped, your cause?
Schulz: Chris, I don't think I'd be on this station, on this program today with you if Amnesty hadn't said what it said and President Bush and his colleagues haven't responded as they did. If I had come to you two weeks ago and said, "Chris, I'd like to go on Fox with you just to talk about U.S. detention policies at Guantanamo and elsewhere," I suspect you wouldn't have given me an invitation.
Karen Finley, by the way, is still around, blogging at HuffingtonPost.com. And she sounds exactly like a left-wing Democrat of the early 21st century:
Why did our President persist, to find the man and the weapons of mass destruction? Becasue [sic], George W is the man with the weapons of mass destruction. George W is identifying himself so to speak, he is not speaking about Sadaam Hussein, he is projecting. We can use his system of projection with his compulsive usage of evil doer to apply to his own war crimes. This is George speak. He is speaking about himself.
One peculiar aspect of all this is that the defenders of left-wing shock artists are themselves so easily shocked. When Karen Finley performed unnatural acts with root vegetables onstage, we were told this was an exercise of her constitutional rights. But the same people professed horror when Anita Hill alleged that Clarence Thomas had made ribald remarks in the 1980s. When Ward Churchill called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he was exercising his academic freedom, but when John Bolton called Kim Jong Il a tyrant it was outrageously undiplomatic. Urinating on a crucifix is art (Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ"), but "mishandling" a Koran is a crime against humanity. And so on.
A good counterargument is that Finley, Churchill and Serrano, although they are or were government supplicants, have never held positions of actual responsibility, and those who do hold such positions are rightly held to a higher standard. After all, the things they say actually matter.
That's fair enough--but the embrace of shock rhetoric by prominent Democratic politicians suggests that many in America's minority party no longer sees themselves as responsible political actors.
Dems Defend Dean
"A round of criticism from fellow Democrats and major donors about Howard Dean's four-month tenure as Democratic National Committee chairman has prompted Senate leaders to rise to his defense," the Boston Globe reported yesterday:
Originally scheduled as a private meeting between Dean and the leadership team of Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, [Thursday's] session instead will now include a news conference and photo opportunity as a public embrace of Dean, who has rocked the political world over the past week with provocative condemnations of the Republican party.
Today's Washington Times has an after-the-fact report:
The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate yesterday blamed "the right wing" and elements of the press "in service to it" for repeating Howard Dean's remarks about Republicans and inflating them out of proportion.
"I think we all understand what's happening with you all," said Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin. . . . "The right wing has got the agenda moving. Fox [News Channel] and everybody's got the agenda. It's all about Howard Dean. You've bought into it," Mr. Durbin said.
There's something very odd about all this. The chairman of the Democratic Party has become a source of division among his party's elected officials--or, perhaps more precisely, a symbol of the division that already existed between the Angry Left base and the faction of the party that is actually interested in winning elections.
Dean was chosen precisely because of his popularity with the Angry Left, but he doesn't seem to have grasped that his job is to look out for the interests of his party as a whole.
Would Pryor Have Won in '03?
The Senate yesterday confirmed three formerly filibustered judges: Bill Pryor, Richard Griffin and David McKeague. The Griffin and McKeague votes were unanimous; the duo had been held up for nonideological reasons having to do with a Michigan senator's Clinton-era grudge.
But the Pyror vote was interesting. He of course was one of the three "extremists" the filibuster compromisers agreed to let through to the Senate floor, and his vote was pretty close: 53-45 (two senators missed the vote). Three Republicans (Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee and Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe) voted against his confirmation; two Democrats (Nebraska's Ben Nelson and Colorado's Ken Salazar) voted in favor.
What if the Democrats had allowed Pryor's nomination to come up for a vote back in 2003 rather than filibustering him? Back then there were only 51 Republicans; with three dissenters there would have been only 48 GOP votes in his favor, two short of the 50 (plus the vice president) needed to confirm. Without two Democratic votes, Pryor would have been rejected.
Salazar wasn't in the Senate yet, but Zell Miller still was, and he was a reliable vote for the president's judicial nominees. That means that if the Democrats had prevailed upon Ben Nelson to cast a party-line vote, or had persuaded one more Republican to jump ship, they would have been able to block Pryor's nomination. It is possible that by filibustering him, they ended up assuring his confirmation.
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