Presswatch / The Plague
Corry, John
The Plague by John Corry T he right-wing peril is on us again, an unholy connivance, the press now warns us, that includes, but is not limited to, crazed preachers, duplicitous politicians, and the...
...Loony left and respectable liberal may easily unite here...
...If the latter want a Christian version of Iran, then the former must want something utterly unspeakable...
...It is more dangerous and diffuse, and it grows as Bill Clinton diminishes...
...and you're taking it in...
...Previous perils were simpler...
...The Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory recently identified Charles Murray, the author of Losing Ground, as a "right-wing sociologist...
...The evidence is so substantial, however, that almost no one dismisses it anymore, except those who are paid to do so...
...Newsweek revealed that, contrary to what she indicated earlier, Hillary Clinton had told Margaret Williams, her chief of staff, to take Vincent Foster's Whitewater files and lock them away in a closet...
...Michael Kramer, a Clinton fan once himself, concluded a column in Time by writing: "What we do know now, however, is that Mrs...
...Clinton "hasn't given up her search for a politics of meaning," and The American Spectator October 1994 49 has made health care a personal crusade...
...Grubbiness has settled in at the White House, and it is no wonder that the crotchety cultural right, not to mention the religious right, far right, and radical right, have been attracting adherents...
...The point of the story was that a great many people and institutions are now interested in virtue, and are doing all they can to promote it...
...The administration is imploding, a condition now generally acknowledged...
...A New York Times editorial—"Whitewater's Wreckage, So Far"—accused even venerable Lloyd Cutler, the president's counsel, of "appalling disingenuousness...
...Moreover, it said, the "fraying of the country's social fabric, which once was considered the crotchety preoccupation of the cultural Right, has become a national (even liberal) obsession...
...Obviously the Clinton administration is a disappointment to its old supporters...
...He's making fools of you, feeding you swill...
...and whatever the gains made by women, they can no longer walk the streets of large cities at night without fear of mugging or other violence...
...Gartner, who has spent much of his career worrying about the right wing, is a wonderful symbol of the divide between so much of the media and the people they insist they are speaking to, but he is not at all unique...
...The great peril of 1994, however, is not like that...
...Putnam's Sons...
...E nter, then, the right-wing peril...
...Rich, of course, was really writing about himself, suggesting that he, too, had wanted to put his country's past behind him and come into a better time...
...Words and ideas mean one thing on the one side of the divide, and something quite different on the other...
...It was hard to know what Newsweek had in mind with the story, and perhaps it did not know itself...
...He was besotted by the Clintons, and like so many others in the media is distressed that he must now renounce them...
...0 bviously this was welcome news, but then Newsweek went ahead and spoiled it...
...For one thing, it is tied to a foundering president, and it is impossible to know where it might strike next...
...Their goal is much larger than that...
...In his column in the Times, Frank Rich plaintively compared Bill Clinton to Tom Hanks's Forrest Gump...
...Subsequently, several publications reported that Wilhelm was being forced out as party chairman...
...Old favorites have been sullied...
...But something went wrong, and Rich's hopes have faded...
...The colum'lists, even Clift, are at least partly correct...
...North's real sin is not that he is a geopolitical charlatan, whatever that is, but that he won the Virginia Republican senatorial primary...
...John Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...Even the circulation of this magazine has climbed...
...The peril this time, though, is different from the ones before...
...When liberal illusions are done in this way, something must take their place...
...When Pat Robertson sought the Republican nomination for president in 1988, for instance, the press could cite his candidacy as proof of a right-wing ascendancy, and measure the menace in primary votes...
...Isn't that what many Clinton voters felt on election night 1992...
...The peril is growing, and it may be that Newsweek was launching a preemptive strike, trying to prove that Democrats were as virtuous as Republicans...
...That was North's style with Central America when he was in the White House...
...Gartner may be one of the emptier vessels in journalism, but besides having been president of NBC News he once was also the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, so attention must be paid to what he says...
...A political figure may be "very liberal" or perhaps a "progressive," but never a left-winger...
...They are geopolitical charlatans who would reassert a lost national greatness by intimidating smaller countries and dominating neighbors...
...Clinton than anyone ever realized...
...Mass death on one hand, Pentecostal ayatollahs on the other, and no place for anyone to hide...
...Moreover, he apparently did it, as Mike von Fremd reported on ABC's "World News Tonight," by enlisting "legions of ultraconservatives and members of the religious right...
...Consider two recent assertions: "I have no doubt that if Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or 011ie North ever got real power, there would be concentration camps and mass death...
...The idea of right wing and left wing comes from European parliaments—conservatives sat on the right, liberals on the left—and in itself is benign, but as used by the media it is loaded...
...Benjamin Chavis was ousted as head of the NAACP when it was learned he had agreed to pay a woman who accused him of sexual harassment up to $322,400 of the NAACP's money...
...Meanwhile, there is Clinton himself, afflicted by what one of his old assistants once dismissed as "bimbo eruptions...
...As social pathologies rise and the popular culture sinks, there is a nostalgia for public civility and decent manners...
...Clinton may be a dud president, and Mrs...
...And: "The leaders of the Christian Right have set out not only to destroy President Clinton...
...Bennett's anthology, The Book of Virtues, is a serious effort toward mending what Newsweek called the fraying of the social fabric, but the Clinton healthcare plan is not, and certainly it has nothing to do with virtue...
...Donald Sweitzer, the political director of the Democratic Party, had told the Washington Times earlier that some of the party's congressional candidates would not "benefit" from associating themselves with the president, and was rebuked by David Wilhelm, the party chairman, for his candor...
...M eanwhile, the right-wing ranks are swelling...
...Therefore, the Clintons are "virtuecrats...
...Ignore the patronizing reference to the crotchety cultural right...
...So keep listening if you want...
...Time magazine said the congressional hearings on Whitewater showed a "culture of deception" at the White House...
...Gump, he wrote, "is neither bitter nor cynical, but a healing figure, eager to put his and his country's past behind him to embrace idealism and hope...
...new inductees come in all the time...
...Moreover, as does William Bennett, the Clintons support "character education in public schools—a trend already exploding across the country...
...Henry Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, is being sued by an old girlfriend who says he welshed on a promise to pay her $4,000 a month after they ended their affair...
...The country's past, apparently, was racist, sexist, and otherwise objectionable, with not much to recommend it...
...It will be an intolerant America if they have their way: something like a Christian version of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran...
...The Ten Commandments are thought to be a good place to start...
...Here is Michael Gartner, the former presidentof NBC News, in his column in USA Today, preaching to people who listen to Rush Limbaugh: He's toying with you, folks, getting you all riled up with a stew of half-truths and non-truths...
...It did not seem to be meant as a compliment, and it is unlikely McGrory would ever identify Laurence Tribe, say, as a left-wing legal scholar, or even Noam Chomsky as a left-wing linguist...
...Clinton is more like Mr...
...It is almost wholly imaginary, but it allows columnists and commentators to explain what went wrong, while they reaffirm their old beliefs, and never admit they were mistaken in the first place...
...Clinton may not tell the truth, but the game is to tell us we are threatened by far worse...
...Gartner does give them permission to keep listening if they really want to, but he seems to be doing it because they are so irredeemable he has no other choice...
...50 The American Spectator October 1994...
...If 011ie doesn't get us, Pat Robertson will...
...Slick Willie, meet Slippery Hillary...
...Prominent among those listed by Newsweek as promoting virtue were Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...As it happens, the first is from the poet Allen Ginsberg in the Progressive magazine, and the second is from the columnist Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, although in temperament there is not much between them...
...But just remember that he's a charlatan...
...Liberal Democrats and other progressives have been having a hard time this year on the moral issues, and it may be that Newsweek was worried...
...In fact, Ronald Reagan has disowned Oliver North, too, although without sug48 The American Spectator October 1994 gesting, as Hoagland does, that North wants to drop paratroopers on Mexico...
...Clinton has spoken at college commencements about the necessity of good behavior, and called for a government-sponsored program of national service...
...Soon afterwards, however, the New York Times reported on page one that Stan Greenberg, Clinton's own pollster, was advising Democratic candidates to run independently of the White House...
...It said Americans all agree now that there are accepted principles of good character and proper behavior, but that society was not teaching them to the young...
...Virtue may lack a precise definition, but certainly there is a broad one, and most people know the rules of virtuous behavior...
...Fineman was only paying his dues to media society...
...The First Couple have turned out to be tacky...
...Few confess to being wrong in the first place, although many now admit to feeling despondent...
...As the White House has foundered, media alarums have grown increasingly goofy...
...The columnists do not understand this, and it is clear some never will...
...Jim Hoagland, the Washington Post columnist, saw a similarity between 011ie and Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky: The separate but similar nationalisms that North and Zhirinovsky express are raw and crude, reeking of claims of manifest destiny and divine inspiration...
...More or less, it is that Limbaugh's listeners are fools, and may even be pigs, slopping up swill because they are not bright enough to do otherwise...
...The Plague by John Corry T he right-wing peril is on us again, an unholy connivance, the press now warns us, that includes, but is not limited to, crazed preachers, duplicitous politicians, and the unscrupulous editors of this magazine...
...The Rev...
...Forrest Gump and Frank Rich aside, the past looks good to the growing number of people who know they are being cheated by the present...
...At his prime-time news conference in August—only the third of his presidency—he answered questions succinctly, but an air of embarrassment hung over the proceedings, and he seemed to be almost irrelevant...
...Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy is in trouble for accepting favors from Tyson Foods, including transportation, lodging, and skybox tickets to the Giants-Cowboys game for the woman the press euphemistically calls his "companion...
...If there is a right-wing peril, we are at its not-so-dark heart here...
...Eleanor Clift, for one, wrote in Newsweek that "the radical right's nostalgia for the way things were" collides with the gains made by women...
...Just before Eleanor Clift fretted about the radical right and women in Newsweek, the magazine ran a cover story by Howard Fineman entitled "The Virtuecrats...
...The right wing is crowded with bigots and other no accounts, while the left wing has no members at all...
...There is no connection at all between Bill Bennett and Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...This atrocious right wing wants a return to the past, and any number of columnists insist the yearning makes up the cutting edge of the peril...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
