Public Nuisances: The Worst Books of the Year/Make Love, Not War
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
ILMEMEMBEThriai by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Worst Books of the Year Every year the J. Gordon Coogler Committee refrains from awarding its Worst Book of the Year Award until the Pulitzer...
...What Dershowitz is actually doing is misappropriating the incendiary term McCarthyism and applying it to one of President Clinton's opponents, Independent Counsel Ken Starr, for polemical effect...
...At one point he says abuse No, wait, they should...
...Throughout the book he is guilty of 25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator The Seventeenth Amendment, adopted in 1913, decreeing that senators should be chosen by popular vote, changed the picture radically...
...All the world knows that we have bungled into the present hostilities with no clear strategy, or as the phrase has it, "end game...
...His goal, Dershowitz tells us, is to defend "our delAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...As he rallied the nation against a SerDoubtless over at the White House bian blitzkrieg from his desk at the Oval Our Wartime President is getting some- Office, Mr...
...How can the Clinton administration, with all its progressive idealists from the 1960's, get out of the fix it has gotten the country into...
...His wife comes from a prominent CNN...
...Clinton and the progressive Democrats urging us all to stand tall against Serbian Lebensraum are generally the same anti-war activists who criticized our effort in Vietnam...
...The Coogler Laureate for fiction is Erik Tarloff for Face-Time...
...Again, the professor commits a logical fallacy...
...Sex by association or a sex under every bed...
...Why Hitler...
...istration compares that enemy to Hitler Was that a gas mask on his desk...
...Possibly he will dent Counsel...
...Some rose to the level of decent mediocrity...
...Doubtless Mr...
...He has copped his Coogler mainly because of the book's plot, wherein a White House staffer has an affair with the president...
...Let us "Make Love, Not War...
...book of the year...
...Well, what is Clinton doing to Serbia and Kosovo now...
...Milosevic better buckle as Ho Chi Minh did not or Richard Milhous Clinton better find himself a Kissinger...
...His Sexual McCarthyism easily won the 1999 J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year in non-fiction...
...Was Hitchens's jest President and his aides insist on this fan-callous...
...As late as the mid-War era, by the same people who in their 1990's she was a professor of Marxist the-youth trivialized the Cold War and snick- ory and chief ideologist of a hard-line ered at its honorable claims...
...Dershowitz put in his usual performance, longwinded, contradictory, superficial, and reliant on several variations of what logicians diagnose as logical fallacies...
...Actually, their criticisms of that effort are infinitely more applicable to this military effort...
...This is what is called a false analogy...
...Watching the pitiable column of refugees straggling out of today's war zone, and noting our shelling around Kosovar and Serbian cities, I thought of another parallel from the Vietnam War...
...Perhaps Mr...
...The prof's presumption is that there is such a thing as sexual McCarthyism...
...Here is war waged in the post-Cold Communist family...
...The fact is that I never had appeared on television with him before...
...Not sur- Marxist party in Serbia...
...Nonetheless, our work was relatively easy, for Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz had a bestseller...
...Another line from the 1960's suggests itself...
...Do you remember how Bill Clinton and the other anti-war demonstrators used to jeer at the statement supposedly made by an American military officer explaining that "we had to destroy the village to save it...
...umn-elements operating out of goulash Rather than comparing Milosevic to kitchens in Brooklyn...
...True, Mr...
...Of the two, Professor Dershowitz's book is worse...
...he does not appear to have many other authorities...
...But there is an even more colossal irony at work...
...The Pulitzer nominations were not bad...
...The Worst Books of the Year Every year the J. Gordon Coogler Committee refrains from awarding its Worst Book of the Year Award until the Pulitzer Advisory Board has conferred its accolades...
...Clinton surely had on his what anxious about the obduracies of mind FDR, the last American Wartime war...
...is his reality, FDR...
...Usually this strategy works...
...Stupidity is always more amusing than dullness...
...Tarloff is not a bad writer...
...I level of an impeachable offense...
...In what passes through his dank Yes, it is a colossal irony that the only brain for philosophy and economics, he draft dodger ever to be president would The American Spectator • May 1999 15...
...In fact, the Adolf Hitler...
...Sexual McCarthyism" is a nonsense term...
...War, it's good for one's ratings...
...The show's producer responded that it was Professor Dershowitz who was reluctant to appear with me...
...Yet Our Wartime shores of absurdity...
...How does history manage such drama...
...Actually, in this rambling repetitious book, Dershowitz never bothers to define sexual McCarthyism other than to say that a "compelling analogy" can be drawn between Starr's investigation of Clinton's sex life and the 1950's investigation of "private sexual behavior" by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and J. Edgar Hoover...
...For instance, Sexual McCarthyism repeatedly lapses into "glittering generalities," the ad hominem fallacy (the term "Republican" in his usage is a hate term), argument from assertion (his), argument from authority (again, his...
...Frederic Nelson "Some Thoughts on Impeachment" MAY 1974 9 6 14 May T999 • The American Spectator other blunders...
...Ma e Love, Not War Andt h has so, as British journalist NATO h d Communist t f Communist naNlAisrt Peter probably still is.s.H is mother was an orfthoi fi become the military wing of ily...
...My only sallies against him were in print...
...Even on television I prefer at least fleeting moments of lucidity from interlocutors...
...And why secret police and military much as Mis- not a crackdown on Serbian fifth collosevic is using his, Castro...
...Starr's accusations would not rise to the Now he is also a Coogler Laureate...
...Why should our board of literary experts pore over the claptrap when the Pulitzer Prize nominations may have whittled the field down to the year's five most imbecilic books...
...In a brilliant essay in the Washington Post, the former secretary of defense and director of central intelligence, James Schlesinger, shows how this Administration of 1960's idealists bungled into the Balkans...
...Today a senator, instead of being the sublime elder statesman envisaged by the Founding Fathers—beyond the reach of popular clamor and free to judge controversial issues on their merits—is as likely to be a demagogue as his junior in the House...
...It tells you only memorable lines he uttered were something about the political pranks memorable solely for their incoherence...
...Judges have forgotten that it is for the worst should not pick an independent counsel...
...Later he is against it...
...Milosevic rose prisingly, their present military excursion through the Communist ranks to his pre-is rich with ironies extending out to the far sent dictatorial power...
...C True McCarthyism is OIIClish defined as a personal attack on elements deemed subversive through indiscriminate charges that are usually unsubstantiated...
...be playing the role of Wartime President...
...Again, we see evidence of the dizzy professor...
...Or that expected him to call for war rationing other aggressive brute down in the and a blackout of our cities to protect Caribee who in our lifetime has used his them from the Serbian blitz...
...Clinton did not against a tough thug like Slobodan Milo- utter any sonorities comparable to "a sevic, whom Mr...
...No, no, professor, that is a little joke...
...I half rather than, say, Stalin or Lenin...
...One cannot cleverly talk one's way President acceptable to progressive through a war, not when it is being waged Democrats...
...But the charges made against Clinton have been fulsomely substantiated, starting with Clinton's own admission: "I did have an improper relationship with Communism...
...According to Dershowitz, every time we had appeared together in the past I made cruel sallies against him...
...On page after page of power and perjury "would be impeach- the dizzy professor is at work...
...ClinHitler, it would be historically more ton's FBI could coordinate with the Chi-appropriate to compare him to one of nese spies now operating in our country these despotic Communists...
...being played in American culture that, to Yet he was obviously living out his latest diabolize an enemy, the Clinton admin- fantasy: Bill Clinton, Wartime Leader...
...Nineteen ninety-eight was different...
...Clinton actually admitted to an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky...
...At one would not be surprised if he lists his point he favors some form of Indepen- Coogler on his resume...
...nist...
...Later he says they are not: "Even if As is well known, Professor Der-every word of the Starr Report...were true, showitz is an energetic self-promoter...
...Even the book's title commits a logical fallacy, in this case "illicit presumption...
...Somehow we agreed to the show...
...he informed the world that we shall not introduce ground troops...
...In fact, CNN sent out a press tasy, Milosevic is Hitler...
...How callous is that...
...After all, to protect our nuclear facilities from Milosevic has actually been a Commu- Balkan espionage...
...Neither McCarthy nor Cohn showed much interest in "private sexual behavior," and Hoover was not a McCarthyite...
...Clinton compares to date that will live in infamy...
...icate system of checks and balances" that has, he argues, been grievously endangered by the Clinton impeachment proceedings...
...It is a line Our Wartime President will doubtless cotton to enthusiastically...
...able...
...Several Pulitzer finalists have copped a Coogler, thus freeing our committee members to spend even more time playing golf and otherwise pursuing the intellectual refreshments of the age...
...Dershowitz's Sexual McCarthyism is much more interesting...
...Did we reserve for ourselves only limited options for a successful conclusion of our engagement in Vietnam...
...Surely the novelist can be more imaginative, and that Tarloff s wife was a staffer in the Clinton White House casts still more doubt on his imagination...
...Did we practice an idiotic strategy called "graduated escalation" against the North Vietnamese...
...What would that be...
...What he has actually achieved is the re-creation of one of the staples of American comedy, the dizzy professor...
...I personally experienced it a few weeks back when I expressed my reluctance to appear with him on a TV talk show...
...release boasting that "CNN/US's cover- Clinton, as he passes his Marine guards age of air strikes against Yugoslavia pro- at the White House, sees himself as pelled the network to its highest-rated Churchill, or in the delusory world that week of the year...
...His attempt to defend the presidency in this dreadful book is more of the same, though the book employs a wider range of logical fallacies...
...Professor Dershowitz's distracted persona turns up everywhere nowadays: on the op-ed page, on talk radio, on TV...
...That is precisely what Clinton is doing now, and he even uttered the caveat that will come back to haunt him...
...Did we bungle into Vietnam...
Vol. 32 • May 1999 • No. 5
