Decision ‘08

BDS: Too Much For Even The Times?

Well, for one Times writer, anyway; Jennifer Senior looks at the latest offerings from Lewis Lapham (he of the extremely unpopular lefty yawner Harper’s) and Sidney “Dirty Tricks” Blumenthal (proud father to Max “I’m famous for nothing” Blumenthal, of whom Christopher Hitchens once said, “one hopes not to have to speculate about how far the Blumenthal apple managed to roll from the tree,” and noted sycophantic Clinton groupie). To say Senior is not impressed is an understatement:

Since the president’s re-election, loathers of George W. Bush have had no shortage of cudgels with which to club him: a distressingly belated response to Hurricane Katrina; an experiment in warrantless wiretapping; a modest parade of indictments; a nation-building project so distant from its original intent that our troops are now caught in a proto-civil war. One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.

I remind you that this is from the New York Times, not the Weekly Standard. Senior on Lapham:

Lapham compares the Bush administration to a “criminal syndicate” and Condoleezza Rice to a “capo.” He likens the United States to “a well-ordered police state” and the policies of its Air Force to those of Torquemada and Osama bin Laden. He calls Bush “a liar,” “a televangelist,” “a wastrel” and (ultimately) “a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous.”

Well. At least his point of view is unambiguous. But unless you agree with it 100 percent — and are content to see almost no original reporting or analysis in support of these claims — you may feel less inclined to throttle Lapham’s targets than to throttle Lapham himself. For this book is all about Lewis Lapham: the breathtaking lyricism of his voice, the breadth of his remarkable erudition. He goes across the street and around the corner to confirm the worst stereotypes about liberals — that they’re condescending, twee, surpassingly smug. “What I find surprising is the lack of objection,” he writes of the misguided American public. “The opinion polls show four of every five respondents saying that they gladly would give up as many of their civil rights and liberties as might be needed to pay the ransom for their illusory safety.” Wouldn’t Lapham be a more interesting columnist if he took this finding seriously? And analyzed it, perhaps, giving it its due? (Though later he generously allows that not every Idahoan and Nebraskan “is as dumb as Donald Rumsfeld,” based on his “reading of the national character in the library of American history and biography and a fairly extensive acquaintance with the novels of Melville, Twain, Howells, James, Wharton, Dreiser, Faulkner, Cather, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O’Hara and Roth.” Idahoans and Nebraskans, rejoice.)

People who are serious about politics don’t just preen. They report, explain, explore contradictions, struggle with ideas, maybe even propose suggestions. If they do none of these things, they’re simply heckling, and if the best Lapham can do is come up with 50 inventive new ways to call Bush an imbecilic oligarch, that’s all he’s doing: heckling.

That’s admirably on target. On little Sidney, the hack:

There was a time when Blumenthal was an unpredictable writer and thinker (during his years at The New Republic, for instance), but by 1997, when he left The New Yorker to go work for the Clinton White House, his transformation to predictable partisan was more or less complete. During the Ken Starr years, Blumenthal was publicly accused by the journalist Christopher Hitchens of waging a covert campaign to portray Monica Lewinsky as a stalker; today, he seems to appreciate the value of special prosecutors a good deal more. His book is dedicated to Joseph C. Wilson IV, the American diplomat who publicly challenged Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to get yellowcake uranium from Niger, and whose wife’s identity as a spy was thought to have been leaked by the White House in retaliation. (It now looks as if the State Department was the original source of the leak, though people in the White House certainly had no trouble passing the information along.)

…[I]t’s hard to deny that these columns have a certain cumulative power. But their content has also been curated with one aim in mind, and that’s to cast the Bush administration in the grimmest possible light, rather like Philip Roth telling the story of his protagonist in “Everyman” from the point of view of his illnesses. Blumenthal also has a taste for tiresome epithets — he calls Paul Wolfowitz “the neoconservative Robespierre” and compares Bush (yawn) to a cowboy. And rather than letting damning facts speak for themselves, Blumenthal insists on pushing his arguments to the breaking point. He claims Bush had “plenty of information” to act on before Sept. 11, but fails to produce anything more specific than the findings of the 9/11 Commission. He suggests the tragedy of New Orleans might have been prevented if funds for a flood control project hadn’t been diverted to the Iraq war (as if dozens of other factors hadn’t conspired against the poor city). He even suggests that Rudolph Giuliani became a figure of national reassurance after the Sept. 11 attacks “in large part because President Bush was not to be seen for days.” (Does he really think Giuliani would have been less impressive if Bush had responded with alacrity? Was Blumenthal anywhere near New York that morning?)

It’s hard to trust a narrator who only and always assumes the worst.

Indeed it is…and kudos to the Times for having the guts to take on a couple of liberal lapdog icons…

5 Responses to “BDS: Too Much For Even The Times?”

1 peter Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
The excerpts are from the Sunday book review section, which seems autonomous from the news and editorial sections and uses a broad spectrum of reviewers (including, I think, your friend Chrisopher Hitchens).

However, the rest of the paper is by no means afraid to take on liberal icons — you may recall that the Times broke the Whitewater story and pursued it with an obsession which would make Richard Scaife proud –
2 peter Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
For that matter, the recent piece on the Clintons’ marriage — which was one of the silliest pieces of journalism I’ve ever seen — shows that they are still more than willing to stir the pot –
3 Mark Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
Did the Times break Whitewater? I seem to recall that being the Wall Street Journal…
4 Aaron Says:
September 26th, 2006 at 12:15 am
Peter’s right, it was the Times .
5 Mark Says:
September 26th, 2006 at 9:28 am
I stand corrected…