Right and Wrong

Casual readers of America's daily newspapers can be forgiven for wondering whether anybody at all opposes the War on Terrorism or the Bush Administration's handling thereof. While polls are repeatedly cited that show strong domestic public support, editorial pages, from prestigious dailies like the Washington Post to the low-budget, chain-operated McPapers that plague most smaller U.S. cities, are dominated by a striking number of opinion-makers whose strident advocacy often make Donald Rumsfeld sound tame -- and which are almost never paired with corresponding views from their polar opposites.

It is, however, hard to imagine what the polar opposite of someone like Charles Krauthammer or Michael Kelly, both featured each week on the Seattle Times op-ed page, might be: Bin Laden? A pacifist so committed that, faced with an imminent threat, she or he would argue that the U.S. should do nothing at all? In U.S. politics, such an extreme -- with the possible exception of Ward Churchill, a prominent radical Native American who calls the September 11 attacks a justified and welcome antidote to U.S. atrocities -- doesn't exist. But that doesn't stop Kelly, Krauthammer, and their colleagues from getting published -- side by side, every week, in hundreds of newspapers.

It also doesn't stop them from flailing away repeatedly at the few Bush critics who've managed to crack the far-right stranglehold on media commentary. In fact, you can usually read the criticsms in far more places than the original views they criticize. Kelly has been particular vicious in his views when he misrepresents, and then demolishes the misrepresentations, of what he mistakenly labels "pacifists." Krauthammer, in his syndicated column run March 25 in the Seattle Timea, trotted out a list, plagued with factual inaccuracies and breathtaking assertions, of what he feels to be the "left's" failed attempts to criticize an unassailable war.

Krauthammer starts with Susan Sontag, who, accurding to Chuck, wrote an "...immediate judgment, published in the New Yorker, that America had it coming." (She wrote no such thing, in that essay or at any time since, and has repeatedly and vehemently denied it.) He moves on to flay critics of the U.S. interruption of food aid to Afghanistan: "Had we listened to them, tens of thousands of Afghans would have died. As it was, the bombing defeated the Taliban -- the source of the famine -- and thus saved the Afghans from starvation."

It's hard to know how to unravel such a pithy series of lies with equal pithiness, but for starters: the Taliban were not a major factor in the famine; drought, 22 years of war, and extreme poverty were. And not tens but hundreds of thousands of Afghans probably have died, before and after the beginning of U.S. bombing and the Taliban's unseating. Moreover, the criticism at the time, which is Krauthammer's subject, came in the context of a very real risk of the death of millions -- an outcome the U.S. was, and is, fully prepared to accept if it decides mass famine (or genocide) "serves U.S. interests."

Krauthammer sinks to even greater depths dismissing critics of Bush's assaults on civil liberties, in explaining that nobody cared about such criticisms: "Americans have not much appetite for giving al-Qaida the run of a massive judicial apparatus designed for those who live by the American constitution."

Yeah, that damned American constitution. It gets in the way of so much. Next thing you know, Republican apologists like Krauthammer -- who has been in the mainstream of Republican thought for two decades -- will be claiming that Americans don't, and shouldn't, get all worked up about the need for things like free and fair elections, designed for those who live by the American constitution.

Never mind. Given Dubya's path to the Oval Office, that might already be moot, too.

And by the way, when did we judge the appropriateness of constitutional protections by poll numbers or perceived public sentiment? African-Americans, for one, are probably glad that's no longer common practice.

There's more, naturally, including a predictably complete misrepresentation of tcomments by congressional Democrats Tom Daschle and Robert Byrd. But one column, apparently exempt (by virtue of being labelled "opinion") from fact- checking, isn't the problem: dozens of them, week after week, from a stable of syndicated far right pundits, is the problem. It moves the grotesque notions that Bush has done far too little to shred the constitution and make the third world a radioactive wasteland into the political mainstream, rather than the province of Birchite fringes where they belong. And there is no counter-balance. As groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) have repeatedly demonstrated, daily newspaper op-ed stables are heavily conservative; the general range is from centrists like David Broder -- "centrist" im the sense of fawning profiles of whomever's in power, regardless of party -- to attack dogs like Krauthammer or conservative evangelical Christians like Pat Robertson or James Dobson. For balance, Molly Ivins, bless her, is about the only widely distributed writer whose opinions are consistently scornful of conservative, corporate state dogma. A handful of others get some distribution, but rarely outside the country's bicoastal liberal zones.

What is most remarkable about the far right crew -- aside from their selective morals -- is how many of them are willing to put other folks' lives on the line, but not their own. The New Hampshire Gazette has compiled an amusing yet depressing list [http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html] of several dozen "chickenhawks" -- politicians (including both Dubya and Dick Cheney) and pundits who somehow found a way to avoid military service when their country called. Among the chattering classes, perhaps the most amusing is Rush Limbaugh (who avoided Vietnam due to "anal cysts") but you'll recognize lots of other architects and apologists for massacre, too.

But all that can be, and is, forgotten. History is also a selective thing in these climes. Krauthammer, for example, derides Daschle, who asked why almost no Al-Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed; but the columnist has been notably silent on the one world-class terrorist who has died in the last six months, Angola's Jonas Savimbi. Perhaps that's because when Savimbi, in the service of America's Cold War machinations, was leading campaigns that mutilated, tortured, and massacred countless Angolan civilians in the '80s, Krauthammer, taking his cue from the Reagan Administration, repeatedly praised him and his works.

Of course, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, and in the funhouse that is U.S. foreign policy, George Orwell's Ministry of Love would feel right at home. ("We're bombing them because we love them.") But until such opinionmakers in the popular media are repeatedly challenged for their distortions, misrepresentations, and often vile ethics -- both through direct challenges by those of us who do have access to such forums and by creation of alternative popular media institutions, like WorkingForChange.com -- it will be no surprise that vast numbers of Americans will support policies that kill people in far away places, restrict freedoms at home, and make the friends of the architects of those policies even wealthier than they already are.

When all people see, read, or hear is minor variations on the same viewpoints, they're going to believe one or another variation on that viewpoint. Ask Mr. Orwell.