Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (10 page)

The Republican Party itself refused to acknowledge that it was happening. While the countermedia—the Drudge Report and Lucianne Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh—were leading the charge against the campaign, the Republicans, except for those few people who went about their business pursuing the articles of impeachment, ran for the hills. The institutionalized conservative movement and specifically Newt Gingrich were conspicuously silent. They knew they were in no position to be going after Clinton for impeachment, even though it was on legal grounds, because they had allowed the left to turn the media narrative into one of sexual inquisition. They didn’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. The people pushing for impeachment were like today’s Tea Partiers, men and women who were pushing their representatives, telling them over and over again, “No, you guys have to have
courage, and if you’re going to be in the battle, you have to know you’re going to take bullets, too.”

It was watching the Republican Party run from their responsibility to their constituents in order to save themselves that caused me to cultivate a more limited respect for them. I looked at the one guy who stood up, knowing he’d be isolated, Rep. Jim Rogan (R-CA), and they decimated him even as Republicans fled around him. Rogan was the American dream—a guy who had spent time on welfare, who raised himself up and eventually ended up in Congress—and they destroyed him unmercifully. The Clintonistas, as they are commonly referred to for their revolutionary media battle tactics, put a hit out on Rogan, using outsized resources to target him in his next election. The payback is not just payback—again, it is a warning to anyone else that politics to these people is a blood sport and if you cross them, you will pay dearly. This was when I recognized that the next Republican president was going to be isolated for attack. The message was that the Complex still controlled the big guns, and if you punched them, they’d punch back twice as hard. George W. Bush’s fate was preordained.

To the nation, the media’s Clinton-created response to the Lewinsky scandal was a turning point. They had been the Edward R. Murrow wannabes, the guys who idolized Woodward and Bernstein. Now they were open partisan hacks digging up as much dirt as possible, whenever possible.

That became even more clear to me two years later, when, absent the “ugly times require ugly measures” excuse,
Salon.com
ran a piece by Dan Savage, the radical gay-left columnist from the Pacific Northwest. Savage infiltrated then–presidential candidate Gary Bauer’s Iowa campaign at the caucus level and, under the
guise of being a conservative Christian, got a job for one month to help out.

Savage described how, sick in bed watching television, he’d devised his plan. Watching Bauer on MSNBC, he saw Bauer state, “Our society will be destroyed if we say it’s okay for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman.” It isn’t exactly news to those of us who have lived outside San Francisco that religious conservatives feel this way.

But it was news to Savage:

In my Sudafed-induced delirium I decided that if it’s terrorism Bauer wants, then it’s terrorism Bauer is going to get—and I’m just the man to terrorize him. Naked, feverish and higher than a kite on codeine aspirin, I called the Bauer campaign and volunteered. My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary. I would go to Bauer’s campaign office and cough on everything—phones and pens, staplers and staffers. I even hatched a plan to infect the candidate himself…. My plan was a little malicious—even a little mean-spirited—but those same words describe the tactics used by Bauer and the rest of the religious right against gays and lesbians.

He spent the rest of the piece describing with glee how he applied his bodily fluids to the entire office—he licked “the front door, office doors, even a bathroom door… the staplers, phones and computer keyboards… the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack.” Then he chewed on a pen and handed it to Bauer.
²⁸

This is not journalism. It’s not even the third-grade ramblings of a snot-nosed booger eater. It’s the vicious actions of a perverse,
degraded, and disgusting human being. And Salon ran it without question. Why? “It was savage (no pun intended), powerful writing, Swiftian in its desperate, satiric outrage at anti-gay discrimination.”
²⁹
In other words, the ends justify the means.

This was
Salon.com
. It wasn’t like this was an alt weekly with ads for hand jobs. For many people, this was a respected publication. That these people allowed for such a story to be published, sending the message that it was open season on Christian conservatives, without so much as a
Columbia Journalism Review
symposium labeling such behavior outrageous and asking how best to shame Salon for so completely abandoning journalistic standards… it was a new low. If a conservative writer had done the same thing to a Democratic candidate, that writer would not only be shunned—he’d need a criminal defense attorney.

I believe strongly that this was the moment in which the politics of personal destruction—especially in the age of New Media, where the Old Media were on their way out—took over the business. The
New York Times
and
Time
and
Newsweek
were all finally figuring out that they were clinging to each other in desperation as they plummeted off the financial cliff. Their downfall was the result of their failed business model combined with their failed ideology. But their foot soldiers were now firmly embedded in the New Media, where the left’s partisan hackery could operate on a whole new front. Drudge had taught them the power of the Internet. Now, with all its collusion and single-minded advocacy intact, the Complex was firmly established on this new frontier.

It was all about to reach the breaking point with the election of George W. Bush.

I had watched Bill Clinton get his hand stuck in the cookie jar (or in a humidor, to be more precise), and I had watched the forces of the New Media hold him accountable in a way the Old Media would not. I had also studied the perfection of the politics of personal destruction under the Clintons. In particular, I witnessed a shameless president turning the national tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing into a political opportunity to attack a personal enemy. Before the real culprit, Timothy McVeigh, was even arraigned, Clinton had blamed talk radio (read: Rush Limbaugh) for fomenting the climate that led to this isolated incident. It was disgusting. And it was effective.

By 2000, I knew these people inside and out. I knew how they operated all too well.

Early in that election cycle, I spoke with John Fund of the
Wall Street Journal
, sensing that the Clintons had crafted the plan to control the Democratic National Committee by putting lackeys like Terry McAuliffe in charge. Sensing also that they were
looking for revenge after the New Media had maligned and nearly destroyed the Clinton presidency, I predicted that their strategy would be to isolate somebody for destruction as a cautionary tale to conservatives. Clearly targeted were those on the right who had been emboldened by the emergence of talk radio and the Internet as communications tools for the masses. The message sent to the New Media conservatives would be clear: you punched us, and we will punch you back twice as hard.

“George W. Bush,” I said to John, “is making a huge mistake with his ‘uniter not a divider’ line.” Using his lieutenant governor—Bob Bullock, a Democrat—as a campaign prop in order to demonstrate his goodwill was a mistake. Establishing the standard that he was the good guy who could work with the other side? A mistake.

“It’s a mistake because they’re going to use that ‘uniter not a divider’ line as a means to mock him and pillory him, undercut his affability and his frat boy good nature, his charming-nickname-for-everybody-in-the-room style,” I told John. “They’re not going to grant him his legitimacy; they’re not going to grant him his humanity. They’re going to take his personable friendliness—his biggest skill set—and turn it against him. They’re going to try to destroy George W. Bush. We are about to witness one of the greatest assaults on an individual in the history of the country.”

It started right from the beginning. Even before Bush stepped into office, the left used Florida as its first launching pad. The Gore people picked their targets: Bush, Dick Cheney, Katherine Harris. Mark Fabiani, a Gore adviser, told the
New York Times
candidly: “We needed an enemy.”
¹
It was raw hysteria plus total media conformity. It didn’t matter that Bush won Florida by every possible count, and it didn’t matter that even the
New York Times
and
USA Today
and every other major publication ran stories tabulating the “uncounted” votes and recognizing Bush’s victory (on
page 16B, by and large). What mattered were the front-page stories emphasizing that Gore had won, Bush had stolen the election, and the Supreme Court was in the pocket of the big corporations that wanted their man in the White House.

Bumper stickers appeared reading “Not My President” and “Selected, Not Elected” and “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Gore.” The academics all rallied around the cause. Princeton University professor Fred Greenstein labeled Bush a cowboy moron who had no basis for governing as a conservative: “Bush is very good at claiming victory. He has a ‘Marlboro Man’ approach to communication. His idea of having a mandate is to say ‘I have a mandate.’ ”
²

After the Supreme Court rightly ruled that arbitrary ballot counting was unconstitutional, the
New York Times
put the opening stamp of disapproval on the Bush presidency before it had even begun, holding Bush’s feet to the fire on bipartisanship and claiming that Bush would have to abandon his political principles in order to attain legitimacy: “To make deals with the Democratic leadership in Washington, the President-elect is going to have to bridge some ideological gaps. But this seems to us a time to take Mr. Bush at his harmonious word…. A Presidency that starts out under a cloud of doubt can transform itself into a success at the vital center of politics, where most Americans would want it to be.”
³

As the new president entered the White House without the usual bipartisan grace notes from the losing side, the exiting Clintonistas vandalized many of the offices they were vacating and, in an act of pure spite, removed the W from computer keyboards. Bush, the uniter, refused to pursue the matter. Eventually, of course, Bush would learn too late that magnanimity was not a winning strategy against this crowd.

The first eight months of the Bush presidency were spent by the New Media fighting to rebuff liberals of all ilks: pundits, writers,
commentators, all arguing that Bush had stolen the election and that this wasn’t a real presidency and that he was just plain stupid. While the Clintons properly fought to lay the predicate that their daughter, Chelsea, was off-limits—John McCain was rightfully chastised for an uncalled-for and cruel joke at Chelsea’s expense—the same press immediately targeted the Bush daughters for ridicule. The press pursued Jenna in particular and framed her as a wild party child, and even Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston took to
Rolling Stone
magazine to make Jenna the butt of an unfunny joke.

The same Larry Flynt who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attempting to tear down Republicans to save Clinton called Bush “the dumbest President we have ever had.” Martin Sheen, who many in West Los Angeles thought was the real president because of his role on
The West Wing
, called Bush a “moron.” Michael Moore predictably stated, “Once you settle for a Ronald Reagan, then it’s easy to settle for a George Bush, then it’s real easy to settle for Bush II. You know, this should be evolution, instead it’s de-evolution. What’s next?” Flynt, Sheen, and Moore never graduated college (Flynt didn’t even graduate high school).
⁴
Bush graduated from Harvard Business School.

Maureen Dowd, whose writing can be buoyant and insightful, picked up the “Bush is stupid” mantra in her column immediately after Bush’s election. Commenting on President Bush’s visit to Yankee Stadium in May 2001, Dowd wrote, “Some days, it’s fun to be the boy toy of the military-industrial complex…. Doesn’t W. realize that EVERYBODY in the world HATES us?… Gerhard Schroder thinks that he and W. had no communication when they met, and that W. had trouble remembering his name. Tony Blair has to call Bill Clinton to find a sympathetic ear.” She accused Bush of “trying to turn Alaska into a giant oil rig and give more riches to the
rich.” She accused him of “rewarding his contributors with the Pentagon.”
⁵
There’s that bipartisan feeling Bush was talking about!

They were well on their way to destroying Bush.

Then 9/11 happened.

September 11 obviously changed everything. It stopped the left from bleeding the country dry with its cynical partisanship veiled as “objective” and “neutral” coverage and commentary. The liberal model of separating Americans into different categories as a means toward empowering group leaders to tell their followers what to think, what to believe, and how to fight everyone else was over. They couldn’t pit Americans against each other anymore, and that scared the hell out of them, because that was how they’d gotten themselves elected for decades. September 11 took the pendulum and swung it away from polarization and toward unity; it brought America back to its natural state of
E Pluribus Unum
for a very short time, a time in which even Democrats were awkwardly forced to hold hands with Republicans and sing “God Bless America.”

Nothing was clearer to me at that time than the artificiality of the feeling, the fact that Democrats were caught in an unpredicted, unpredictable moment in which their tactics for gaining and holding power and manipulating situations were frozen solid. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to handle things, because it had been a lifetime since the honest Democratic Party was taken over by the far-left operatives.