Capitol Ideas / The Tony Awards
Bethell, Tom
The Tony Awards by Tom Bethell A little noted benefit of liberalism is the privilege of accusation. Without evidence, liberals can impugn the motives of adversaries and dish out accusations of...
...In 1985 he thought that funding the contras in Nicaragua was "a policy of fighting devils," and "can bring only more hate...
...But one can't help wondering whether Kassel Lewis might not have been similarly dismayed by some of his son's recent columns...
...We know he had his political shortcomings, but that...
...Shortly before the election Lewis wrote one of his most foam-specked columns...
...In particular, he has shown a growing tendency to accuse his political adversaries of hate...
...You would think he might feel obliged to produce evidence for so grave a charge...
...Give us an example, Tony, just one...
...After Nixon resigned, Lewis gave thanks...
...Then came Troopergate, published by "a right-wing magazine devoted to cackling attacks on Democrats and liberals...
...20 The American Spectator March 1994...
...The talk show hosts are out there, spewing ignorance and hate...
...Well, Reagan had said "the Sandinistas are infinitely worse" than Somoza...
...In fact, they have made "the Presidency a symbol of hate . ." George Bush...
...Inevitably, they would try to stamp out such a brave new society...
...Nixon had been "that rarity in high office: genuine evil...
...The following week he again denounced the "general tone of hate" at Houston, but without supporting quotes...
...Two weeks later Lewis was still incensed...
...That has been Lewis's enduring worldview and strategy...
...Not for the first time, Lewis recalled the dreaded one: Joe McCarthy...
...Again, notice that in (successfully) seeking the removal of judges who were soft on crime, the right was playing offense for once...
...Distressed by George Bush's mild response to his primary challenger in 1992, Lewis suggested the presidential speech he would give, to deal with "the Buchanan phenomenon...
...Nixon Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...What we have instead is a politics of hate, exemplified by speakers the Bush people chose to feature at the Republican Convention...
...Earlier he had attacked "Pork Rind George, Knee Fighter," and now he added: "More than any incumbent President in memory he has been a candidate without shame...
...And the man who had accused Nixon, Reagan, and Bush of hate found questions about Clinton's character to be "tired...
...It was written by two reporters from Murray's Washington stable...
...But this would come to pass only if American right-wingers could be discouraged from their wicked designs...
...By 1986 Lewis thought that Reagan was"obsessed" with Nicaragua, and "in his frustration he spews out rage and hate, fear and falsehood...
...Bush in the last days of the campaign have shown us a man in a frenzy," and have "degraded the most important office in the country...
...But, McCarthy-style, he usually doesn't...
...Clinton a "feminazi...
...Because he's on the left, no one calls him on it...
...Lewis's column, "Abroad at Home," has come out twice a week on the op-ed page of the New York Times since that page was created in the fall of 1970...
...In an article in these pages last October, David Brock raised the possibility that Napolitano had improperly coached a witness to testify more credibly at the Clarence Thomas hearings...
...Perhaps more than anyone in the press, the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis is free and easy with such accusations...
...If the politics of hatred is going to take power in America," Lewis said, it will come not from rabble rousers "but with professions of Christian redemption...
...It's another inconspicuous sign of our times...
...He added: "The foul words and falsehoods that have spewed from Mr...
...Any supporting evidence this time...
...The evidence this time...
...Lewis hissed his familiar refrain: "Only someone driven by hate would make the president's most intimate life the test...
...Its self-importance passes belief...
...David Duke running for office in 1991 made an easy target ("It Can Happen Here...
...It bewildered Lewis's father that someone could be so shameless...
...Tony Tony...
...For once he took note of his own omission...
...Lewis has avoided the mistake of apologizing for the Soviets, but he seems to have been driven by the millennial expectation that somewhere in the world—in Cambodia, perhaps, or Nicaragua, or southern Africa—a New Society would emerge, vaguely collectivist and filled with hope and social justice...
...Hate...
...He had already been a columnist for the paper for about a year, so he has been in the column business for a quarter of a century now...
...He just assumes the worst and goes venomously on the attack...
...He thought the kinder, gentler Bush had been sincere...
...The author of this story, David Brock, "has made himself the chief manure-spreader for the extreme right," Lewis wrote...
...So why were they being raised at all...
...That column was entitled "By Hate Possessed...
...The explanation may once again be frustrated utopianism...
...Today, liberals are free to accuse opponents of acting in bad faith, or with malign motivation, without benefit of interviews or confessions...
...For "political" reasons, he explained, some of the "most strident messages from the convention were toned down...
...Well, if you'll recall, Bush had recently referred to Bill Clinton and Al Gore as "those two bozos...
...His column had a familiar headline: "Merchants of Hate...
...Any evidence this time...
...Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
...In his column on the Simi Valley acquittals of the Rodney King defendants ("A Lost Country"), Lewis's admiration for due process disappeared from view...
...Perhaps the New World Order offered him Real New Hope...
...Napolitano, David Brock has abandoned the pretense that he is an impartial investigative reporter," Lewis wrote...
...Lewis quoted, but ungraciously rejected, Duke's "regret over the intolerant things I've said...
...Racism is what happened," he divined...
...Without evidence, liberals can impugn the motives of adversaries and dish out accusations of greed and evil whenever they want...
...In the past, he has seen Americans abroad as impediments to a.bright new socialism...
...CI ALAN MURRAY WINS AWARD Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, won a special Press Corps Award the other day for his widely reprinted criticism of Troopergate: "It's two troopers who are trying to get a book deal...
...attorney for Arizona, and earlier a lawyer for Anita Hill...
...That's all Lewis needed to justify his vituperation...
...It is a savage world for presidents these days, as those of us who criticize them ought to recognize," Lewiswrote...
...20), the Wall Street Journal published on its front page a thinly disguised editorial headlined "As Cynicism Becomes An Industry, Distrust of Washington Grows...
...Some feel that journalists' real complaint is that Middle America is not cynical enough about marriage vows and might take the troopers' allegations seriously...
...That goal is threatened tdday by a political attack that seeks to divide Americans by race and class and origin, 18 The American Spectator March 1994 that asks us to hate people of different colors and different ideas...
...had "no discernible commitment to any moral principle," he added...
...What is special about him is his utter detachment from the norms of morality...
...He even went so far as to call Gore "ozone man...
...A week later, Lewis was still seething over Pat Robertson...
...The press is ravenous, ready to see scandal in a speck of dust...
...On the same day (Dec...
...Lewis detected "sleaze," "slime," "meanness," and "intolerance," fomented of course by the "hard right...
...Well, you see, anti-Communism was a "crusade" for Reagan, and he had said at one point that the Sandinistas were "deeply involved in drug trafficking...
...Clinton," he wrote...
...Probably nastiest of all were the references to Mrs...
...And this: the Sandinista government "is a Communist dictatorship...
...Lewis backed this up by saying that Robertson had once written that feminists want women to "kill their children" and to "practice witchcraft...
...It had been "scary" enough when Dan Quayle denounced the "cultural elite...
...But what was actually said...
...Kassel Lewis was so dismayed that he phoned the man, who nonchalantly admitted: "So I lied...
...Lewis has told the story of how his father, a businessman, came home one day stunned because someone at work had casually made a promise and not kept it...
...In the fall of 1986, Lewis spent an evening with California Chief Justice Rose Bird, whom voters were seeking to remove, along with two other justices...
...R ecently, he has taken to writing furious columns calling for intervention in Bosnia, perhaps a surprise to those who recall his past antagonism to foreign intervention by the U.S...
...Lewis offered an old Pat Robertson quote deriding feminism, but nothing actually spoken from the podium...
...Nothing has been too shameful for George Bush...
...In attacking Ms...
...That is where we are in this country: fear begetting fear, hate hate, revenge revenge...
...So they would have to be anathematized—specifically with accusations of hate...
...Richard Harwood was banned from the award ceremony for saying in his New Year's Day column in the Washington Post that the New York Times's reluctance to publish Troopergate stories "was a logical outgrowth of the standards of marital fidelity that have been observed by Timesmen and Timeswomen since the paper's purchase by Adolph Ochs a century ago...
...Al Gore, author of Earth in the Balance: Ozone...
...In making so cynical a remark and accusing the nation of cynicism on the same day, Murray had made a breakthrough and deserved a prize, it was felt...
...With President Clinton in the White House, there came the $200 haircut on the LAX runway, and subsequent press criticism...
...It was about Janet Napolitano, nominated by Clinton to be U.S...
...H is first column about the 1992 GOP national convention was headlined "Merchants of Hate...
...A week later he thought that President Reagan's anti-Sandinista rhetoric "rings with hate...
...He is a hatchet man of the far-out right...
...For example...
...You hold it in your hands...
...The Hudson Institute's Elliott Abrams responds: "They certainly were involved...
...Then, a little while later, he called him just plain "ozone...
...The following May, when foreign-service veteran Melissa Wells was named ambassador to Mozambique, Jesse Helms put the nomination on hold: "The right," Lewis noted, had "found a focus for its hate...
...Literature sold in the hall outside the arena had called Mrs...
...Lies, hate, vulgarity...
...It's all too reminiscent of the McCarthy era, a time (you may recall) when Joe McCarthy felt free to accuse people of guilt by association with Communism, without supporting evidence...
...He will be 67 in March...
...But Pat Robertson was a "professional hater," a "hatemonger...
...Ergo, they were guilty of hate...
...4 4 f/ you wonder how low the politics and hate and revenge can get in Washington," Lewis wrote in November, "listen to this story...
...But Bird was "the main target of hate...
...TB...
...No conservative would dare make such scurrilous accusations without evidence, even if he felt so inclined...
...The award was made by his bureau-chief predecessor, Albert R. Hunt, in a brief ceremony in the John Peter Zenger Room of the Washington Press Club...
...As far as I have been able to determine, Lewis first used the hate weapon in May 1974, against (you guessed it) Richard M. Nixon, whose Oval Office tapes, Lewis thought, revealed "only fear, hatred, contempt for others...
...It went like this: "Ladies and gentlemen, four years ago I promised to work for a kinder, gentler nation...
...The only question is how deep...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 3
