I couldn’t bring myself to read the book, but here’s the inimitable Christopher Hitchens on the latest piece of mendacious preening from David Brock:
He finds it difficult to refer to himself – when he isn’t crippled by self-loathing – without using the words “icon” and “poster boy.” There are actually very few revelations in the book, unless you are surprised to learn that a cabal of right-wingers tried to frame the Clintons for killing Vince Foster. (Brock now prefers the even more far-out view that Foster was murdered by the Wall Street Journal.) Referring to the anti-Semitism of a famous conservative, he cites what might be a joke in poor taste and says it was “one of her gentler remarks.” What, couldn’t he have cited a more damning one? … Still, I wanted to take an extra shower after trudging through this dismally written, pick-nose, spiteful and furtive little book. It glitters with malice and the more cowardly kind of “disclosure”; it’s a dank, filthy tissue turned inside out. And it is all written allegedly as a defense of the Clintons’ right to privacy! As someone who despised Clinton from the very first, I remember resenting the damage done by hysterical and fabricated right-wing attacks, which bought him time and sympathy. Anyone really interested in this period should grab the paperback version of Michael Isikoff’s Uncovering Clinton, a verifiable story told by a serious journalist, who began by disbelieving the rumors and discovered by honest exertion that many of them, and some that had not even been suspected, were true.
Enjoy.
PARTISAN PUNDITS: Fascinating study by a new blog (well, new to me) about which pundits and columnists are the most reflexively partisan. They measure this by tagging the names of politicians or parties or similar phrases and measuring how often a pundit mentions them, and whether positively or negatively. Guess who’s the most ferociously partisan columnist, the one most likely to scream and yell for one side, or rail against the other, rather than engage in actual argument or reason? Yes, it’s Paul “Enron” Krugman! He’s followed by three Republican-supporters, Peggy Noonan, Michael Kelly and Bob Bartley. The Wall Street Journal is the most partisan, but the New York Times isn’t far behind. It is the main repository of loathing for president Bush around. Like we didn’t know. It gets even more interesting when you see how this partisanship is expressed – either by plugging your side (positive) or slamming the other (negative). The most positive is Peggy Noonan (gush, gush as she does); the most negative is Frank Rich. The most positive for Republicans is Peggy Noonan, and the most positive for Democrats is – bizarrely – Tunku Varadarajan. The biggest single partisan anti-Republicans are – drum roll – in reverse order: Bill Keller, Sebastian Mallaby,Michael Kinsley, Frank Rich, and … Paul Krugman.
HOW MUCH WARMER? “Yes, humanity certainly has some impact on global warming, but what magnitude that impact will be is extremely questionable. Again, Lomborg’s suggestion that our best solution is to make the developing world more capable of adapting to climate change is diametrically opposed to the anti-humanist, anti-technology, anti-capitalism solutions of the environmental movement.” Today, the global warming debate in the Book Club.
THE EURO-LEFT’S NEW LOW: This column by the Independent’s columnist, Mark Steel, is so vile in its near-celebration of the murder of Pim Fortuyn that it is almost beneath criticism. Notice he won’t cite a single one of Fortuyn’s policy positions, his stark differences with Le Pen and Haider, his social liberalism. For Steel, smelly leftist orthodoxy trumps examination of the truth or even basic decency. The subtitle says it all: “It’s true that Le Pen didn’t like Fortuyn, but then Mussolini didn’t like Hitler.” The implication, of course, is that Fortuyn was even more extreme than Le Pen. Where are you when we need you, Eric Blair?
NUMBER-CRUNCHING LIBERAL BIAS: I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg’s piece in the American Prospect in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by numbers, because it so flew in the face of what I knew that I figured something had to be wrong. (And I was too lazy to do all the enormously laborious number-crunching to refute it. So sue me.) I figured someone would correct it at some point. And so they have. Check out this blog, Zonitics from Arizona and scroll down to May 7. Let me say again for the umpteenth time: I have no problem with good old bias. If Howell Raines wants to run a newspaper tilted left, that’s fine by me. But there needs to be honesty about this or you lose credibility. By the way, a reader sends in the following tally from the Times in the last month: use of “far-left” – 16 times; “far right” – 38 times; use of “left-wing” – 26; “right-wing” – 63.
The Dish 