THE ALL-NEWS-IS-BAD-NEWS LEFT The Scrapbook may have given the impression in recent weeks with our Surprisingly Good Guys List that the Left was defecting from its traditional anti-Americanism almost as quickly as brighter-than-average Pashtun soldiers are deserting the Taliban. Not so; the world hasn’t changed that radically. Just about every working day, for instance, we get an e-mail from a group called the Institute for Public Accuracy, aptly described by Christopher Hitchens as part of the soft-on-fascism Left. The institute theorizes that the Left is out of favor in America not because its ideas are noxious, but because they haven’t been professionally packaged. Hence the e-mails, which offer to journalists and radio and TV bookers a theme of the day along with an assortment of Noam Chomsky epigones ready to propound it in interviews. Picture Stalin with a top-notch Washington PR firm sending out faxes during the Moscow trials (“The Trotskyite saboteurs are like rabid dogs,” said Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky earlier today; he will be available after 4 P.M. Moscow time to discuss with reporters his 16-0 record in obtaining convictions; call his assistant Ludmilla for video handouts) and you get the flavor. For an even better flavor of the IPA message, here are some of their press release headlines, starting in early October, when the first bombs falling on the Taliban gave these folks a case of heartburn from which they haven’t yet recovered. The parenthetical remarks are ours: FIRST CASUALTIES OF WAR (refers to Afghan refugees, not World Trade Center tenants). AS BOMBING PROCEEDS: NOW WHAT? (Answers: mass starvation in Afghanistan; American breach of international law.) CIVIL LIBERTIES AT HOME: “ENDURING FREEDOM”? (The question answers itself: The Bush administration is the enemy of freedom.) FIRST AMENDMENT IN JEOPARDY? (Ja wohl! Why not dispense with the question marks, already?) BOMBING HALT NOW OR MASS STARVATION BY THANKSGIVING? (There’s that pesky question mark again. Mass starvation, obviously.) WTO AND WAR: ‘INVISIBLE HAND AND INVISIBLE FIST’? (Perhaps you weren’t aware that the “invisible fist” is the U.S. military and the war in Afghanistan is a capitalist plot.) AFGHAN WOMEN WARN AGAINST THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE (Lasting peace will come to Afghanistan only if all parties but the Communists are excluded from the post-Taliban negotiations.) INTERVIEWS AVAILABLE: REAL PEACE OR PAX AMERICANA? (One guess. Someone at IPA needs to repeat Left Wing Propaganda 101. The words Pax Americana should always be surrounded by sneer quotes.) Perhaps rumors of a new post-9/11 politics have been greatly exaggerated.[img nocaption float=”right” width=”252″ height=”194″ render=”<%photoRenderType%>”]991[/img]SPECIAL FORCES ON HORSESGREAT RUMSFELD MOMENT From a meeting with the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times, November 16, 2001. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had just been asked if the bin Laden organization could mount a successful guerrilla campaign. Rumsfeld: The amount of real estate they’ve got to play around in now has dropped substantially in the last weeks. That’s not to say a person can’t dress up and shove off. They can. The borders are porous, I’m sure there’s a couple of helicopters floating around some place. Burros, donkeys, horses. They’ve got trucks and–I’ve just got to show you these. These [see photo on opposite page] are American Special Forces on horseback. The ones in the light colored camouflage are American Special Forces. Question: The cavalry rides again. Are they our horses? Did we send the horses? Rumsfeld: No, we sent saddles, bridles, and horse food but did not drop horses from the air. We decided against it. Not that I’m that politically correct, but–I love horses. We end up [with] a lot of broken ankles just when people drop. SEPARATION OF MOSQUE AND STATE? Of all the opportunists who have plied their trades since the events of September 11, from sellers of New York Fire Department turn-out gear to manufacturers of Stars’n’Stripes bikini briefs, few have proven as distasteful as Americans United for Separation of Church and State. One would think as the nation turns to God during this time of crisis, that the AU would take a break from its specialty of sneering at every “God bless you” after a sneeze. But no, executive director Barry Lynn has been a busy beaver. In the last two months here is just a partial list of things his organization has come out against: teachers joining students for prayer outside schools, a U.S. House resolution permitting schools to display the words “God Bless America” as an expression of support for the nation, a National Day of Prayer, and government officials “asserting that prayer and religious worship are somehow the natural, logical, or expected reaction to recent events.” It would seem, then, that Americans United should have been in their denunciatory glory last week, when President Bush hosted ambassadors from 53 Muslim nations for some serious church/state commingling. The guests (which oddly for an anti-terrorist gathering included the Syrian ambassador and the PLO’s man in Washington), dropped by the White House to celebrate their traditional Iftar meal, which breaks the sunrise-to-sunset fast during their holy month of Ramadan. After saying their prayers in the East Reception Room, the envoys supped on biryani rice and pomegranate-glazed rack of lamb, while Bush made enough explicit religious references to send Lynn and Co. into spasms of panic. Not only did the president say that “tonight we are reminded of God’s greatness,” but he proclaimed Islam a “great faith” in which “God first revealed His word in the holy Koran to the prophet Muhammad.” The terrorists, Bush said, “have no home in any faith” (Lynn may want to send them a pledge pitch), and evil, Bush added, “has no holy days.” So what did Americans United have to say about this state-endorsed, sectarian abomination? Not a word. The Scrapbook must have been mistaken about AU. For years, we believed the only thing they cared about was removing God from the public square. Now, it appears, they don’t mind if God stays–so long as he goes by “Allah.” December 3, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 12
