As of this issue, I will no longer be writing for the New York Press. When I learned of an impending change in managment about a month ago I decided to quit. I have since learned that there would not have been an opportunity for me to stay anyway. I want to thank everyone who has read this column over the years, and I would also like to thank the exiting staff of the NYP. I have enjoyed writing in New York and will very much miss the experience.

Thanks again, good luck to everyone, and take care–

Matt Taibbi taibbi@nypress.com

The problem with the Karl Rove story is that it’s grounded in the specifics
of a sordid little scandal; it’s a tale far too narrow and mean to serve as an adequate stage for the
drama of Karl Rove’s transgressions.

The very fact that it was not until Rove stumbled over the teeniest of
speed-bumps in the federal criminal code that he even faced the possibility of real public censure
just shows the ragged poverty of American culture when it comes to considering questions of honor,
decency and justice. We have become moral capitalists, not seriously considering anything wrong
that is not also illegal.

The crime that ought to be considered this week is not that Rove may have
whispered something or other to a few reporters. The crime is that hundreds, if not thousands, of
journalists and politicians in this country have over the years cheerily honored this vile, scum-sucking
pig of a human being by calling him names like "genius" and "boy wonder" and "wizard"as though
the business of Rove’s life was somehow cute, quirky and lovably mischievous.

The truly monstrous thing about this Rove story is that it was not until
Rove became a potential criminal defendant that all of those cutesy Will Rogers descriptions of
him vanished from print. Until the Plame story really started to heat up in recent weeks, Rove was
consistently celebrated by reporters as a kind of political Tom Sawyer, brilliantly suckering
the country into painting his white picket fence.

You would be hard-pressed to find a Washington-based journalist who
has not written a Rove profile in the past five years. And virtually every hack to try his
hand at the job took the same rhetorical approachselling Rove first and foremost as a colorful
character full of contradictions, a figure of lore, a man both hated and loved to the extreme.

Reporters conspicuously upheld him as the ultimate political profile
subject, and in their descriptions of him one could almost always detect a degree of gratitude,
as though the reporter were thankful his subject was so interesting, so lively, so accommodatingly
edgy. Profiles of Rove were therefore almost always written with great care, like works of art.
He was every hack’s Mona Lisa.

Almost all of the profiles were the same. They all began with some folksy
tale of the unguarded Rove in the wild, cracking a ribald joke in a campaign plane (taking a jab at
the Brits for loving sports events with "racing pistols," mocking his boss’s campaign "strategery")
teaching the reporter some salty Texas-ism (he produces an actual Turd Blossom) or snorting at
some lame Democrat ploy to seize ground in the polls. They would then move into breathless rhapsodies
over Rove’s Rasputin-esque grip on Beltway power, with observers from both sides of the aisle dragged
out to provide awestruck quotes about the astonishing brightness of the Rove phoenix.

This would be followed by a greatest hits list of Rove’s ingenious tricks
and ploys, followed by the Ebert-Roper review of same by a matched set of Democrat and Republican
analyststhe former of which would add that Rove was "controversial." Then each article
would end with a frankly comic screed about Rove’s rising status as a folk hero and/or sex symbol
("He is my political idol!" 19-year-old Michelle Morrow bouncily tells Newsweek). A full
79 percent of all Rove profiles included mention of the Karl Rove boxer shorts (with Rove’s face
printed within a heart) that can be found for sale on the internet; an only slightly smaller percentage
would mention the "Karl Rove Classic Thong" that was marketed late last year.

Oh, what fun they all had. But then, sadly, the game was halted when rain
broke out. The instant Rove drifted into the prosecutorial crosshairs, and in particular when
his emails to Matt Cooper went public, the media canned the Tom Sawyer actas though Rove
had suddenly become unclean.

And what was he before? That’s the outrage. The Washington press corps,
which has proven repeatedly over the last five years that there is no gross lie or cheap stunt too
stupid for them to fall for, never really clued in to the way Rove, the so-called master media manipulator,
was managing his own image.

Just as Rove has always understood that Billy Bob in Louisiana cares
more about queers on the altar than he does about Enron, Rove also understood that reporters need
a villain, a Svengali. His "genius" here (which, like all of his supposed ingenious ploys, was not
ingenious at all, but merely the plainly obvious step never anticipated by the crowd of idiots watching
him) was to give them their villain not in small doses, but in large ones.

A persistent feature of the Rove profile is the reporter’s close proximity
to Rove in a casual, intimate setting (i.e., Elisabeth Bumiller astride the "bombastic, deceptively
cherub-faced" Rove on the campaign plane as he "playfully withholds news of recent polls from the
president"). Rove made sure to invite every reporter in Washington for a one-day private tour of
his world of dirty jokes, harried cell-phone calls and ad-hoc strategizing. And every hack that
took the tour came away with stars in his eyes, primed to make Rove into the larger-than-life villain
role he had been fitted for.

The result of all this was to obscure the basic fact about Rove, which
is that he’s not a genius at all. He is a pig, and the only thing that distinguishes him is the degree
of his brazenness and cruelty. It doesn’t take a genius to send out fliers calling your opponent
the "fag candidate." It doesn’t take a genius to insinuate that your opponent’s wife is a drug addict.
There’s nothing cunning or clever about saying your opponent came home from a war too fucked in the
head to govern (particularly when your own candidate was too much of a coward to fight in the same
war), or about whispering that that same candidate may have an illegitimate black child. And there’s
nothing clever about calling the followers of the opposition party traitorous and un-American,
and claiming that they all want to coddle and appease the murderers of our brothers, sisters, sons
and daughters.

Karl Rove is a character of a type that reappears from time to time throughout
historyan unscrupulous power-chaser of the highest order, who rises to the top by demonizing
and defaming innocent people. He’s an elementary-school bully who proves his chops by throwing
rocks at the retarded kid. And he reached a position of public honor thanks to a loophole in our national
character that embraces any entrepreneur who dares to do whatever it takes to succeed. Rove is in
trouble now, but he would never have had free reign of Washington to begin with if we hadn’t so willingly
given him his romantic image.

Anything for money. Anything for power. How cute is he now?

I think we take our survey freedoms for granted. Nothing else can explain
the appallingly low quality of our polling. Polling in this country has degenerated almost entirely
into a tool for describing consumer behavior, where the goal of almost every well-funded survey
is to make a numerical determination about the strength of X product vs. Y product
in the general marketplace.

The brand names might be Taco Bell and Jack in the Box, they might be Democrats
and Republicans; the methodology is, to a degree at once damning and hilarious, exactly the same.
Take a look at the press releases for two of the top two polls conducted by Zogby last week:

1. Coke Is It: Americans Choose Coca Cola over Pepsi by 47% to 28%;
‘Real Thing’ Leads Every Demographic; ‘Choice of a New Generation’ Unpopular With Younger ConsumersNew
Zogby Consumer Profile Finding

2. No Bounce: Bush Job Approval Unchanged by War Speech; Question
on Impeachment Shows Polarization of Nation; Americans Tired of Divisiveness in CongressWant
Bi-Partisan SolutionsNew Zogby Poll

The degree to which polling methodology reflects the bias of the interested
(and usually commissioning) parties is seldom noted when the polls are cited by reporters. For
instance, pre-election polls are almost always presented in their, final, less embarrassing,
airbrushed forme.g., 51 percent for Bush, 49 percent for Kerrywhen the actual
numbers are more like 26-24 percent, if you include nonvoters.

Respondents, when quizzed, about, say, their favorite fast food restaurant,
are never asked the obvious cross-reference questions. Thus you never see press releases that
read like this: “74 percent of Americans who cannot climb two flights of stairs without gasping
for breath said that McDonald’s was their favorite fast-food destination, while a surprising
47 percent of respondents who ‘expect to be dead within weeks’ said that the Wendy’s Big Classic
was their ‘favorite sandwich.’”

Our prominent polling agencies almost never take it upon themselves
to actually pose a new question. Instead, they almost always content themselves with recording
the answers to a question that in some very public way has already been askedusually in the
form of a choice presented by the media. Do you prefer Friends to Seinfeld? Is Michael
Jackson guilty or innocent? Are you for or against the invasion of Iraq?

Regarding that last question, numerous polls conducted last week both
before and after George Bush’s bizarre Iraq address made headlines across the country. The biggest
was a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll, widely rereported under headlines like, “Support for
Iraq War Plummets.” Its key result was a number indicating that 53 percent of Americans now thought
the war was a “mistake.”

That single, solitary, unexpressive number53 percentreveals
the utter poverty of the polling system. It’s a number that ought to infuriate people on both sides
of the issue. Remember, before the war began, opinion surveys regularly showed support levels
for the invasion running at between 70 and 80 percent.

Here is how Steven Kull, a pollster for American Public on International
Issues, summed up the nature of Iraq support before the war. In an interview with the San Francisco
Chronicle on April 1, 2003, Kull said he believed that 40 percent of Americans were firmly behind
the war, 20 percent firmly opposed it, and the remaining 40 percent supported it “either out of deference
to the president or a sense of patriotism.” He characterized the stance of the latter group as “pretty
soft.”

Well, no shit. Just as Kull predicted, the 40 percent firm-support number
has remained an absolute constant since the beginning of the conflict. In the CNN/Gallup poll last
week, that same 40 percent said they remained firmly in support of U.S. forces remaining in Iraq.

Clearly, it’s that “pretty soft” other 40 percent that’s slipping.
Those are the people I have a problem with, and it is with regard to those people that our polling system
failed us two years ago and continues to fail today.

It seems fairly obvious that, in the course of the last few years, roughly
25-30 percent of the country has been influenced by the steady issue of news about increased violence
and instability in Iraq. Apparently, a large percentage of Americans who supported the war two
years ago have since become freaked out by the fact that, surprise, surprise, people are dying.

Which invites the question: If these people can’t handle a few bad headlines,
what exactly was their level of commitment to begin with? Pre-war polls, confined to the standard
Coke-Pepsi either-or formula, didn’t tell us much about that.

Maybe if the polls back then had been conducted differently, we might
have had different results. Imagine a March 2003 poll that posed the following questions:

Would you yank your son out of college and send him to die for this bullshit?

Would you yourself be willing to give your life for this cause?
If yes, grab your shit; there’s a bus outside.

Those should be the only kinds of polls we allow, when it comes to questions
of war. I mean, who the hell are these people who changed their minds once the news started
to turn sour? There are only two explanations: They’re either unbelievable cowards, or they didn’t
think it through. In either case, if there were any justice, they would all be rounded up and dumped
buck naked on the streets of Fallujah.

What’s most infuriating about this Iraq war is the degree to which it
represents the worst excesses of our highly developed consumer reflexes. America in the age of
reality tv is in love with making its choice, casting its vote. It has been encouraged to enjoy a narcissistic
thrill in observing the consequences of its consumer choices, often portrayed in tv shows as catastrophic
or indescribably dramatic.

Disgraced fat nerd has nervous breakdown after being voted off American
Idol. Plain girl rushes to plastic surgeon after being bounced from the The Bachelor.
Aloof weirdo voted into metaphorical death after failing to properly conform on the set of Survivor.

Get that loser off the show, he has no voice; bachelor, choose the blonde,
the brunette’s nose is too big. When we vote, we are extraordinarily impatient and exacting and
judgmental, like movie reviewers; we vote like customers who know the law says they are always right.

In fact, the haughty self-importance of the median poll respondent
has become so axiomatic that it is now often built in to the polling process, where it’s not uncommon
to see surveys built around slavish questions like the following: “If candidate X were to bend over
and kiss your ass, how likely would you be to vote for him?”

But for all the poll respondent’s smug airs, he only talks tough when
he’s in a crowd, and shielded by anonymity, identified only by his number. I’ve seen this myself
as a journalist. Interview someone on the street, and he loves to hold forth and waste your time giving
you his great opinion. But ask for his name for the record, and he runs away like a bitch.

A nation that indulges in anonymous casual cruelties like The Swan should not be consulted in the same manner before a war. In matters of life and death, stand up and
be countedby name, swearing on the blood of your children. What kind of country goes to war
whispering “yes” into a telephone?

I’ve seen some horseshit in my time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like last week’s
Newsweek cover story on Deep Throat, by Evan Thomas.

The Thomas piece is remarkable on a number of levels, not the least
being its frank and undisguised hypocrisy: Evan Thomas was one of the figures involved in the Koran-toilet-unnamed-sources
fuck-up, and so an article written by him that denounces as unpatriotic the “legacy” of America’s
most famous unnamed source is humorous from the outset.

Thomas halfheartedly attempts a revisionist history of Watergate,
arguing that the scandal was just an ordinary power struggle in which Nixon’s part was that of a Capra-esque
outsider president trying, quite reasonably, to assert his independence from an entrenched Democratic
Party bureaucracy that was the Washington legacy of FDR. Thomas makes it sound like all Nixon was
trying to do was break big-government gridlock. This is hilarious stuff, but it pales in comparison
to the meat of the article.

Having titled his piece “The Meaning of Deep Throat,” Thomas actually
delivers his conclusionthe “meaning”in the middle of the article:

Watergate did not just spell the end of the Nixon presidency. It started
a chain reaction of investigations and prosecutions that eventually exposed all manner of secret
wrongdoing by the FBI and the CIA… the effect of these investigations by the press, the courts,
and congressional committees was profound. Battered by failure in Vietnam and the exposure of
the CIA’s “crown jewels” (its most hidden and deniable covert operations), the military and intelligence
community became deeply demoralized in the late 1970s. From the highest levels to the lowliest
commands, the watchword was caution.

As soon as I saw the bit about the intelligence community being “deeply
demoralized,” I thought I knew where Thomas was headed. But I could never have predicted the passage
that came next:

When unarmed Islamic militants poured into the U.S. Embassy in Tehran
in November, 1979, the Marine guards fired a few cans of tear gasbut otherwise held back
and let the “students” seize the embassy. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and national security
advisor Zbignew Brzenzinski wanted to avoid military action. A 444-day hostage crisis ensued…

Thomas is saying exactly what you think he’s saying. Having set up the
idea that in the postDeep Throat era”caution was the watchword” from the “highest
levels to the lowliest commands”Thomas brings us to one of those “lowly commands”the
Marine guard in Tehran. What he is saying is that seven years after Watergate, Marines in Iran used
tear gas instead of bullets because they were afraid of… Deep Throat!

For Thomas, the lesson of Watergate was not that elected officials should
take care not to commit electoral fraud, burglary, perjury, or other low-rent domestic felonies
that might be construed as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the election process. Apparently,
the lesson is not to fire back when fired upon; wave bin Laden through customs. Deep Throat might
be watching! How Thomas moves from Nixon getting caught stonewalling a criminal investigation
to Marines not defending themselves against Iranian students is beyond me, but he does it, and God
bless him.

From the Carter years he moves on to Reagan, whose presidency he describes
as a valiant attempt to countermand the unfortunate legacy of Watergate and Deep Throat. Among
Reagan’s accomplishments:

The Reagan presidency saw a renewed buildup of the military and an
‘unleashing’ of the CIA, as well as stirring rhetoric about renewed American pride.

In the parallel structure of this sentence, the buildup of the military,
the ‘unleashing’ of the CIA and the renewal of American pride all go together. The implication of
this passage, of course, is that American pride had taken a hit not only because of Watergate,
but specifically because of Deep Throat. Remember, the article is entitled, “The
Meaning of Deep Throat,” not “The Meaning of Watergate.” When Thomas talks about the unfortunate
legacy of Watergate, he’s pinning something on Felt, not Nixon.

When I read this the first time, I thought, Thomas is kidding. After all,
what was Watergate? A situation in which five grown (and in some cases, balding) men, acting as agents
of the president of the United States, had been caught kneeling on the floor in a darkened hotel suite
like a bunch of glory-hole closet casestrained ex-CIA professionals who were caught,
not by seasoned detectives, but by hotel rent-a-cops. These clowns were so stupid that they voluntarily
admitted that they were CIA veterans at their own very public, press-attended burglary arraignment.
Dick Nixon made people like this the face of the American government. And Deep Throat was
the one responsible for the loss of American “pride”?

Thomas goes on to blame Deep Throat for Colin Powell’s “overwhelming
force doctrine” and his opposition to the first Gulf War (“overwhelming force” being an idea borne
of postDeep Throat “caution”); for our failure to intervene militarily in the Balkans
in the early 90s; and finally, for the relaxed vigilance in intelligence in the spring and summer
of 2001. Only now, Thomas writes, is George Bush helping to “overturn the legacy” of Watergate.
“The sleeping giant is starting to stir,” he writes.

Still, Thomas warns, the specter of Deep Throat yet hangs heavy on the
frail neck of the War on Terrorism:

At the same time, investigators who have examined the national security
establishment’s performance since 9/11 have seen signs of the same inertia, the fear that a wrong
move could land an unlucky bureaucrat on the hot seat of a congressional investigating committee.

A few observations:

1) If Thomas is so concerned about secret unnamed sources, why doesn’t
he tell us which “investigators” opined, to him, that the national security establishment is weighed
down by fear of being outed by the next Deep Throat and dragged before Congress?

Because they don’t exist, that’s why. I’ll take a secret, unnamed source
over a complete bullshit, pulled-out-of-my-ass, made-up source any day. Even if Thomas is only
crediting “investigators” with seeing “inertia,” and is inferring the “fear” on his own, this
is still a transparently lazy and rhetorically dishonest piece of journalismin an autopsy
of the greatest and most diligently researched scoop of all time.

2) Unless I’m missing something, Thomas’s argument seems to be that
unless the president of the United States is allowed to commit all the domestic electoral crimes
he wants, the country will always be squeamish about using military force and vulnerable to foreign
invaders. Are you laughing yet?

3) If you’re going to blame Deep Throat for the Powell Doctrine, why not
blame Oliver North for the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Donna Rice for the Faith-Based Initiative,
and Led Zeppelin IV for the war in Eritrea?

Watergate was not about the president bending the rules to protect American
citizens, or ignoring normal legal procedures to pursue an aggressive military strategy. (That’s
more George Bush territory, which makes one wonder about Newsweek‘s motives in pursuing
this particular line of rhetoric.) Watergate was about a drunken paranoiac flouting the law to
rig an election and secure his own personal political survivalnot ours.

Beginning with the Terri Schiavo affair, and continuing most pointedly
with the latest fight against the filibuster, what we have seen lately is something new: the congressional
leaders of the ruling political party (Tom Delay, Bill Frist) signing on with the more extreme representatives
of the evangelical movement to push highly dubious and eccentric political objectives. The presence
of such people as James Dobson and Al Mohler side by side with leading congressional Republicans
has even led some respected political commentators to wonder aloud if a schism is developing within
the Republican party, if the fiscal conservatives who have long been stomped on in the Bush years
are finally going to start wondering what payoff they’re getting for their political support.
Even Andrew Sullivan, that foul whore of right-wing commentary, admitted as much recently in the
New Republic. “Conservatism isn’t over,” he wrote. “But it has rarely been as confused.”

All of this talk has led to false hope among progressives, who think they
see an opening in the Republicans’ apparent strategic error in backing fundamentalist causes.
The decision by Tom Delay to jump in bed with the snake-handlers in the Terri Schiavo casewhen
polls showed that even a majority of evangelicals opposed himseemed to indicate a rare
suspension of electoral judgment by his party. There is a feeling among the pointy-headed secular
set that the evangelicals are a doomed anachronism who will die out with increased exposure to the
open air, and that hitching a political wagon to their causes must result in failure.

This idea was put most explicitly by Tom Junod in Esquire a few months
back, when he wrote: “Whether the issue is Internet porn or stem-cell research, what conservatives
are up against is not Blue-State America, or liberal America, or secular America, or decadent America,
or enlightened America. It’s not even, as some have suggested, the Enlightenment itself. It’s
technology, and it’s time.”

This is a common belief among the overeducated east coast set. It is also
exactly what H.L. Mencken believed 80 years ago, when he filed what he thought was the obituary of
American yahoo-ism from Dayton, Tennessee. He concluded from the Scopes trial: “On the one side
was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable
of. And on the other side was sense. And sense achieved a great victory.”

Little did Mencken know that 80 years after Dayton, the supporters of
William Jennings Bryan’s point of view would still outnumber the supporters of Clarence Darrow’s
opinion by a ratio of about five to one; not just in Tennessee, but in the country at large. Polls on
the issue have been remarkably consistent for decades. A New York Times survey last year showed
that 55 percent of Americans believed that “God created us in our present form,” while only 13 percent
believed that “we evolved from less-advanced life-forms over millions of years, and God did not
directly guide this process.” A similar Gallup poll in 1997 placed those numbers at 44-10; in 1991,
the numbers were 47-9.

Progressives in this country have always maintained a kind of fuzzy
belief that fundamentalists will eventually just disappear, as if by magic, that the phenomenon
of grown men and women believing in devils and witches and angels will inevitably be outgrown, the
way children outgrow Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Marx. When some pastor in rural Alabama takes
the pulpit to denounce SpongeBob Squarepants as the agent of the Evil One, we figure no response
is really necessaryfolks will figure out the joke on their own, somewhere down the line.

Because of this, nothing like an organized resistance to this buffoonery
has ever taken root in America. Though fundamentalists themselves imagine their secular opponents
as a great and unified conspiracy, in truth the only weapons trained on Christians in this country
are the occasional lawsuit by the ACLU (a group which normally opposes not religion itself, as I
would prefer, but some ostensibly unconstitutional intrusion of religion into the public sphere)
and the sarcastic barbs of ineffectual heathen media figures like Maureen Dowd and Jon Stewart.

Our pornographic pop culture, seen by religious conservatives as a
coordinated, premeditated military offensive against Christian values, is as indifferent to
Christianity as it is to environmentalism. It is not a true opponent of fundamentalist Christianity,
because it doesn’t give a shit about fundamentalist Christianityor about anything else
for that matter, except ratings and sales.

What organized political resistance fundamentalists do encounter
comes in the form of groups that oppose their political objectives, not Christianity itself. Even
pro-choice groups like NARAL, which come into direct and often violent contact with Christians,
restrict themselves to agitation for abortion rights, and leave the issue of their opponents’
religion alone. In general, there is almost no public figure, anywhere, who has ever suggested
publicly that fundamentalist Christianity, as a thing-in-itself, should be opposed. The strongest
suggestion most critics will make is to say that it should be contained, and indeed that seems to
be the best-case strategy of progressives: that the God-fearing set can be boxed in, kept from being
a nuisance and from meddling in areas where they don’t belong, just long enough for them to eventually
die out of natural causes.

This is a mistake, and it is the same mistake people have made for centuries:
underestimating the American zeal for superstition, for boobism, for living the intellectual
lives of farm animals. A large statistical majority of Americans would rather live their whole
lives in perpetual fear of the devil than listen to ten minutes of common sense. When you consider
where these people live intellectually, the idea that the Democratic Party can somehow succeed
in Middle America by making small tactical changes, by waving a few more flags, seems absurd. You
either believe in the devil or you don’t; and if you don’t, you’re never going to fool these people.
The Republicans, for all their seeming “confusion,” understand this now better than ever. Their
seemingly open attempts in recent months to radicalize and embolden their evangelical base may
have had a temporary desultory effect with regard to their poll numbers.

But this current crew of Republican strategists has always understood
American thinking better than the Tom Junods of the world. They know that most political trends
are fleeting. Liberalism vanished at the first sign of trouble; pacifism disappeared one generation
after Vietnam; even fiscal conservatism is easily forgotten. The one thing that never disappears
in this country is stupidity, and if you court it, you’ll always have votes down the line. Especially
when it lives on unopposed.

“It’s going to be called The Flattening,” he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing.

It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called The World Is Flat. It didn’t matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.

So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.

It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.

It’s impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical approach. It’s not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called “the most important columnist in America today.” That it’s Friedman’s own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman’s own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he’s in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country’s most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick’s potential, and it’s absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he’s choosing to argue that the world is flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen to argue that the moon was made of cheese.

And that’s basically what he’s doing here. The internet is speeding up business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than ever. Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical gist of The World Is Flat. It’s brilliant.

Only an America-hater could fail to appreciate it.

—-

Thomas Friedman. Photo via Flickr/Charles Haynes

Start with the title.

The book’s genesisis conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally muttersto Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”

To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase – the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.” What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrastingironically, as it were with Columbus’s discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the “flat world” into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

“Let me… share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round,” he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman “had Lufthansa business class.” When he reaches IndiaBangalore to be specifiche immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: “Gigabites of Taste.” Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: “No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas.”

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end – and I’m not joking here – we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman’s book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author’s metaphors.

God strike me dead if I’m joking about this. Judge for yourself. After the initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and gone back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a monstrous mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the “ten great flatteners,” which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that’s a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: “Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual.” These technologies Friedman calls “steroids,” because they are “amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners.”

According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them.

Although these 10 flatteners existed already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive Treea period of time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0, with Globalization 1.0 beginning with Columbusthey did not come together to bring about Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the 10 flatteners had, with the help of the steroids, gone through their “Triple Convergence.” The first convergence is the merging of software and hardware to the degree that makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub (the product featured in Friedman’s favorite television commercial) possible. The second convergence came when new technologies combined with new ways of doing business. The third convergence came when the people of certain low-wage industrial countries – India, Russia, China, among others – walked onto the playing field. Thanks to steroids, incidentally, they occasionally are “not just walking” but “jogging and even sprinting” onto the playing field.

Now let’s say that the steroids speed things up by a factor of two. It could be any number, but let’s be conservative and say two. The whole point of the book is to describe the journey from Globalization 2.0 (Friedman’s first bestselling book) to Globalization 3.0 (his current bestselling book). To get from 2.0 to 3.0, you take 10 flatteners, and you have them converge- let’s say this means squaring them, because that seems to be the idea – three times. By now, the flattening factor is about a thousand. Add a few steroids in there, and we’re dealing with a flattening factor somewhere in the several thousands at any given page of the book. We’re talking about a metaphor that mathematically adds up to a four-digit number. If you’re like me, you’re already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this numerical jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For instance:

And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you a Thomas Friedman metaphor, a set of upside-down antlers with four thousand points: the icing on your uber-steroid-flattener-cake!

Let’s speak Friedmanese for a moment and examine just a few of the notches on these antlers (Friedman, incidentally, measures the flattening of the world in notches, i.e. ”The flattening process had to go another notch”; I’m not sure where the notches go in the flat plane, but there they are.) Flattener #1 is actually two flatteners, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the Windows operating system. In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like “Windows” is introduced; you wince, knowing what’s coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn’t disappoint.

His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever beenbut the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

Joe Biden, in The New Yorker, on what he would say to
John Kerry

“Look, the answer is, we have to do an unbranding. We have to brand
more effectively. It’s marketing.”

Kerry, in the same piece, on the Democrats’ need to sell themselves
as tough

Around the same time Joe Biden was selling
New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg on the idea that the only hope for the Democratic Party
was to abandon all social programming and invade the planet, some interesting polls were taken
in the three countries most involved in the Iraq invasion.

In the United States, a Washington Post/ABC News poll released
on March 16 showed that 53 percent of Americans think the Iraq war was not worth fighting, 57 percent
disagreed with President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, and 70 percent said that the number of
U.S. casualties incurred in the war was unacceptable.

In Australia, one of the U.S.’s last stalwart partners on the war, the
government’s approval rating fell below 50 percent for the first time in ages, with a new poll showing
Labor with a 52-48 advantage. Prime Minister John Howard conceded that the drop was due to public
dissatisfaction with the continued presence of Australian troops in Iraq.

In Britain, meanwhile, a spate of polls was conducted in anticipation
of May 5 elections. Because of the huge majority owned by Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the House of
Commons408 seats to 162 for the Conservative partyBlair is almost certain to be
reelected to a third term. But the Labour advantage is dropping fast, losing about a percentage
point a month in recent months, with Iraq the main cause. In February, the Labour advantage was 38
percent to 32, with the remainder going to the Liberal-Democrat party. This month, it’s 37-34.
Conventional wisdom anticipates that Labour will retain its advantage but lose about two-dozen
seats. Blair’s personal approval rating, meanwhile, has plummeted to around 35 percent, mirroring
a slide enjoyed recently by George Bush, who has been in the mid 40s since the New Year.

Blair is also facing a major scandal over Iraq that is inspiring demonstrations
all over the country. In a documentary aired on the show Panorama this weekend, MI6 chief
Richard Dearlove said that he had briefed Blair well before the war that America’s Iraq intelligence
was “fixed” to meet the administration’s goal of invading Iraq at all costs. Dearlove said that
nine months before the invasion, he attended a meeting in Washington at which he concluded that
war in Iraq was “inevitable”a conclusion he shared with Blair.

“The facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by
U.S. President George Bush’s administration, Dearlove said. The documentary claims that Blair
had signed on to support the war as early as April 2002. Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary
who resigned over Iraq, echoed Dearlove’s comments.

“What was propelling the prime minister was a determination that he
would be the closest ally to George Bush and they would prove to the United States administration
that Britain was their closest ally,” Cook told the program. “His problem is that George Bush’s
motivation was regime change. It was not disarmament. Tony Blair knew perfectly well what he was
doing.”

In the midst of all of this, the Democratic Party is preparing its shiny
new 2008 position on Iraq and terror. Described in Goldberg’s New Yorker article, the political
plan is centered around a new faction that calls itself the “National Security Democrats” (a term
coined by that famous liberal, Richard Holbrooke) and is led by revolting hair-plug survivor Joe
Biden. The position of the “National Security Democrats” is that the party should be “more open
to the idea of military action, and even preemption” and that the Democrats should “try to distance
themselves from the Party’s Post-Vietnam ambivalence about the projection of American power.”
Additionally, the Democrats ought to reconsider their traditional stance as an opposition party
and learn to embrace Republican heroes like Ronald Reagan.

“Everyone knew ‘Reagan is dangerous,’ remember?” Biden says. “He talked
about freedom, and what do we do? We say it’s bad speech, dangerous speech.” Democrats, he says,
“are making the same mistakes again.”

It would be easy to dismiss the Biden revival as a cheap stunt by a discredited
party hack with all the national appeal of the streptococcus virus, except for one thing.
Biden’s “national security” camp includes all four of the expected main contenders for the Democratic
nominationBiden himself, Hillary Clinton, Indiana senator Evan Bayh, and John Edwards.
New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, another outside contender, is also a member of this camp.
We are going to be hearing a lot about “National Security Democrats” in the next three years.

The Democratic party leadership’s persistent and bizarre campaign
of self-condemnation and Republican bootlicking is one of those things that, on its face, makes
very little logical sense. It makes cultural sense; we have come to expect that the cultural
figures we call the Democrats will respond to electoral failure first by sniveling and finger-pointing,
and then by puffing up their chests and telling their dates they know how to handle themselves in
a bar fight. From the Republicans we expect just the opposite; beaten at the polls, they immediately
start cozying up to snake-handlers and gun freaks and denouncing school lunches as socialism.
It is impossible to imagine a Newt Gingrich responding, say, to LBJ’s Great Society by concocting
its own expensive plan to feed the poor black manbut we fully expect that a Democrat who loses
an election will suddenly start to reconsider his opposition to preemtpive invasion and Reaganomics.

We expect these things, so they strike us as logical when we see them happen.
But they make no sense. A merely cynical opposition party would be emboldened by poll numbers showing
majority opposition to the war to court those votes. And a moral one would seize upon news of the sort
coming out of Britain to argue to not only to their own voters (who would unanimously support them
in this aim), but to the country at large, that the invasion of Iraq was based upon a fallacy, illegal
and impeachable.

But the Democratic leaders do neither. Instead, they tell 53 percent
of the country that they are mistaken, and throw their chips in with the other 47 percent, who incidentally
support the other party and are not likely to ever budge. They then go further and try to argue that
fighting the war on terror requires abandoning health care, education and Social Securityan
idea that, let’s face it, makes no fucking sense at all.

Franklin Roosevelt never argued anything like that, and he fought a
global world war against two mighty industrial powers. But now 4000 retards in caves are going to
close down the entire American school system. If that is the Democratic idea of looking “strong,”
one hates to imagine what weakness would look like.

51.After death, saggy, furry tits of dead Pope begin inexorable
process of melting away into nothingness, like coldest of Sno-cones under faintest of suns.

50.Pope survives just long enough to be acquired by Isiah Thomas
for Stephon Marbury, 2005 #1 pick and cash considerations. “We feel like we’ve made ourselves younger
and more competitive,” Thomas says.

49.After beating for the last time, Pope’s heart sits there
like a piece of hamburger.

48.Whole world waiting until the last minute for a sudden improvement
of his condition. Long lines of girls in the Philippines kneeling and praying. Catholics everywhere
with ears pressed to radios, transfixed. Pope gives one last groan, spits, dies.

47.Upon death, Pope’s face frozen in sickening smile, eyes wide open
and teeth exposed, like a baboon.

46.Beetles eating Pope’s dead brains.

45.Pope departs Earth at a time when Hitch is top-grossing movie
in the world.

44.Gurgling sound during embalming process; real fluids in dead Pope’s
body sucked out into jars.

43.POV Dead Pope: Last glimpse of overcast Italian sky as coffin lid
closes for last time.

42.Get used to that quiet sound.

41.Humming old Polish folk song in there. That kills three minutes.

40.Humming it again, this time getting the words right. Another three
minutes.

39.Can’t move. Can’t reach penis.

38.Somebody taking my job. My job!

37.Getting a little stuffy.

36.Naming all the different types of fish. Flounder, halibut, perch,
goldfish, basking shark…no, do the sharks separately…really stuffy in here, gar, swordfish,
manta ray, eels… No, don’t think about eels. Eels are scary. Boy, is it dark in here. Four minutes
gone by.

35.Doctor applies fingers to neck to check expiring Pope’s pulse. Pope’s
ear falls off.

34.In heaven, Pope keeps wrapping cars around telephone poles.

33.Silverfish pops out of dead Pope’s vestment for a moment, immediately
ducks back in.

32.Priest who administers last rites to Pope excitedly calls mother
afterward to tell her how well it went.

31.Dead Pope, still with baboon face, wheeled through corridors of
Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, learns answer to Great Mystery.

30.Michael Jackson too broke to buy Pope’s bones.

29.New Pope inevitably ambitious cleric burning with earthly vigor
and secret desire to undo dead Pope’s legacy.

28.Bears everywhere shitting in woods.

27.We’ll never get to hear his hilarious post-tracheotomy rendition
of “Come on Eileen.”

26.Pope recovers and survives until 2009; New York Press columnist
Matt Taibbi beheaded by passing garbage truck, March 2, 2005.

25.LexisNexis search on phrase “the inner workings of the Vatican are
shrouded in mystery” temporarily crashes system; Eric Alterman unable to search for press references
to “What Liberal Media?” for 37 consecutive hours.

24.Pope spends last hours surrounded by cardinals who stand glaring
at him with folded arms, silently reminding him of the political necessity of clinging to life.

23.Doctors examining the body discover that the Pope was not only a woman,
but also Hitler.

22.Mankind scrambles to choose new leader of inflexible, sexually
morbid institutional anachronism; heretofore anonymous bureaucrat will instantly be celebrated
as world’s holiest man as he travels to AIDS-stricken Africa to denounce the use of condoms.

21.Telltale white smoke emitting from Vatican chimneys announces
a) choice of new Pope, and b) the fiery death of the 5000 back issues of Manscape and Hung
Inches that had accumulated in the Vatican lobby.

20.Hall and Oates mulling comeback.

19.To the end, the Pope could only think of the poor and the downtrodden.

18.When he died, he stopped thinking of the poor and the downtrodden,
and his face was frozen in that baboon smile, and he thought of nothing at all.

17.In his last days, the Pope was in tremendous pain.

16.NBC Nightly News intern pulls wrong tape from drawer full
of long-ago archived video obits; world thinks Boris Yeltsin has died, wonders why Brian Williams
is calling him an “inspirational spiritual leader.”

15.Williams, after broadcast: “Who’s Boris Yeltsin?”

14.Matt Lauer to Williams: “He wrote the Contract for America.”

13.Just before death, Pope sits up in his bed, shrieks, his body bursts
into flames; everyone runs from the room.

12.Sequoia, birch, maple, willow, palm, oak, pine, fir, mapleNo,
wait, I said maple already…

11.Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal…

10.You dirty rat. You dirty, double-crossing rat… Proxima estacion:
Tibidabo. Tenga cuidado de las puertas deslizantes… It means woods and blanche
means white, so the two together mean white woods… L’tat c’est moi! Don’t think about eels, don’t think about eels…

9.Bush on the tragic event: “Our thoughts and prayers go out to this great
man and all of his many children.”

8.Bush continued: “He touched all of us in places no one else could reach.”

7. According to ancient tradition, the slamming shut of the Bronze Door
in St. Peter’s Square announces the death of the Pope.

6.Normal Vatican schedule closes that door at 8 p.m. every night and
reopens it in the morning.

5.According to numerous reports, if the Pope dies at night this time,
no one will know what to do. (This is not a joke.)

4.In 1958, reporters paid off Pope Pius XII’s physician to throw open
the hospital room window when the Pope died.

3.When a monsignor threw the window open to get some air, the Pope’s death
was erroneously reported all over the world.

2.This is what happens when weird old men in dresses communicate with
the world with doors and chimneys.

1.Throw a marble at the dead Pope’s head. Bonk!

Kurt Andersen, New York magazine

Man, is it easy to make money in this writing
business in New York City. You youngsters out there who are still waiting to get published, still
trawling for internships jobs, you may not see it yet. But take a good look at Kurt Andersen at New
York if you want to see how it all works out at the end of the rainbow.

Once upon a time, when he was writing for the legendary Spy magazine,
Kurt Andersen was not a mouse, but a man. After four years of working (along with Graydon Carter)
at Time magazine, Andersen left in 1986 to found the famous send-up of Time‘s idiot
news-mag culture. In hindsight, Spy was not the viciously dead-on parody of media careerism
that it seemed to be, but it was funny as hell during a very unfunny time.

It was a publication Jefferson would have been proud ofa high-tech
pain in the ass that savaged everything that entered into its field of view, proving over and over
that we were all better off thinking for ourselves than listening to the pompous mannequin-frauds
American society presented to us as sages and cultural authorities.

For reasons that ought to strike everyone (and especially Andersen
and Graydon Carter) as quite sinister, Spy never made anybody any real money. In a publishing
landscape where dumbness itself (Cargo, Self) sells like hotcakes, this obviously brilliant
magazine with a desperately devoted readership died something like a half-dozen deathsfinally
expiring, I think, in the spindly altruistic arms of the owners of Psychology Today.

Andersen was long gone by then, having joined Carter on a 20-year journey
in which they would both be endlessly hailed as geniuses and innovators by hordes of media sycophants
and offered gobs of money to do either nothing at all (splitting a million bucks to cowrite Spy:
The Funny Years) or to just add countercultural lan to the staid, unthreatening
publications (New York, Vanity Fair) that were placed in their rabbity custody.

Carter’s career path showed that the best way to secure a golden old age
of attending parties and carrying the skirts for celebrities is to behead a few in your youth.

What Andersen proves is that once you’ve put in a few years of writing
very well, with dignity and iconoclastic fervor, you can then mail it in for the rest of your life.
You can melt into the easy life and undead thinking of a timorous upper-class weasel, and you can
dress it up as “realism” because you were somebody once.

Andersen’s Feb. 21 Iraq piece in New York, “When Good News Feels
Bad,” is the most shameful, vicious piece of horseshit I have seen anybody write about this
terrible war. It is sickening not on the level of writing or rhetoric, but on the level of human behavior.

On the surface, Andersen’s piece is a cheeky piece of political self-denunciation,
a mock show-trial confession. He confesses to being one of those many New Yorkers who considers
himself smarter than everybody else and tends to disagree with the Bush administration “politically,
temperamentally, and ontologically most of the time.” But, he says, smart New York people like
himushave to get real and face the ugly reality of our emotional struggle
over Iraq. He then goes on to indict all of us for secretly applauding any bad news that comes from
Iraq, and for choosing to ignore in grumbling fashion the “surprisingly smooth and inarguably
inspiring” spectacle of the Iraqi elections. If we face this reality, he says, we are then forced
to see that “the only way out is to root for Bush’s victory.”

“Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq.” This is horseshit
on its face. Even the original Hobbesian choice was horseshit, especially in the eyes of
the stereotypical New York liberal Andersen is addressing. We no more have to choose between chaos
and authoritarianism than we do between rooting for Bush and rooting for the insurgents. There
is a vast array of other outcomes and developments to root for.

We could root for Bush to admit he fucked up and appeal to the world for
help in stabilizing Iraq. We could root for a similar admission and a similar appeal to the U.N.,
only coupled with an immediate American withdrawal. We could root for America to come out firmly
against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which would change the equation in Iraq. We could
root for such things as the turning over of Iraqi oil contracts to the United Nations and an end to
war profiteeringwhich, again, would change the equation in the war.

And that’s just the beginning. It does not come down to rooting
either for Bush or for the insurgents. Andersen thinks he can make this argument because he thinks
he knows that in our hearts, many of us are rooting for the insurgentsand he is trying to tell
us that renouncing this instinct automatically translates into unqualified support for Bush.
But that is wrong, and totally dishonest.

“Either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless
policy.” Note the use of the qualifying, “risky, very possibly reckless,” hereobscuring
the stark lie of the word “vindication.” To Andersen’s audience, nothing can possibly vindicate
Bush’s Iraq policy. Along with millions of other people, I opposed the war before it began, and we
opposed it not because we thought we might lose or fail in Iraq, but because invading Iraq was wrong.
It was wrong because they were lying about why we were invading; it was wrong because the whole notion
of preemptive invasion is immoral and dangerous; it was wrong for a dozen other plainly irrefutable
reasons that will not change if Iraq is magically transformed into Switzerland by next year.

“I don’t mean to suggest, in the right-wing, proto-fascist rhetorical
fashion, that every good American is obliged to support all American wars.” No. You suggest it in
the pompous, verbose, superior fashion of a feckless left-wing snob.

“But at this moment in this war, that binary choice of who you want to win
is inescapable.” Translation: you’re either with us or against us, either for us, or for
the terrorists. Where have I heard that before?

Oh, that’s right. I’ve heard it everywhere. Just never from
that funny guy who used to run Spy.

Some of the numbers are surprising. According to the survey, 37 percent of
Americans think liberals oppose gun control, or else they are not sure if liberals oppose gun control.
Likewise, 27 percent of respondents thought a right-winger was someone who supported
affirmative action. Furthermore, the survey showed that respondents generally viewed the paired
concepts liberals and left-wingers and conservatives and right-wingers as possessing, respectively, generally similar political beliefs—with one caveat. In
both cases, respondents were roughly 10 percent more clueless about left-wingers and
right-wingers than they were about liberals and conservatives.

"The label left-winger is broadly perceived to be similar to liberal,"
the agency concluded, "except that more people are not sure what it means."

Respondents were asked to define the labels according to what their
positions were on seven "political issues": abortion rights, gun control, cutting taxes, gay
rights, same-sex marriage, affirmative action and moral values. This list of issues is preposterous
in itself as a symbolic reflection of the political landscape, but that’s a discussion for another
time. To me the most instructive category was "moral values." According to the survey, 78 percent
of respondents believe conservatives support moral values, while only 40 percent said the same
about left-wingers. In fact, 29 percent said they believed left-wingers actually opposed moral values.

I’m glad the Harris people never called me for this survey, because I
would have had to answer "not sure" to every question. Even after working as a political reporter
for many years, I still have absolutely no idea what the American versions of left and right meanwhat they mean in an ideological sense, that is. It’s hard not to be confused when we
call a saber-rattling free trader like John Kerry far left, while a man who keeps a portrait
of Lenin on his wall, like Grover Norquist, is considered the very definition of a right-winger.

When I see someone called a leftist or left-leaning in
print, I’m never sure whether they’re talking about an actual communist, or just some timorous
capitalist yuppie whom David Brooks spotted drinking a latte, or standing in line to see Cinema
Paradiso. Politically, it’s just not a very concise definition.

But of course we all know exactly what left means, when we’re
talking about social labels. In common parlance, left is clearly code for "feckless, pseudo-intellectual
wiener," while right is code for "winner" and "the people who are actually running things
while you assholes are reading James Joyce." Left also emphatically stands for "wrong
side of history," while right is explicitly understood to mean the only remaining legitimate
vision for future social organization. All ambitious politicians run screaming from the word
left, understanding it to be a fatal electoral contagion, whereas being labeled rightwing even adds a winner’s aura to an openly drooling political psychopath, like Kentucky Senator Jim
Bunning.

Historically, the term left originated with the French
Jacobins (they sat on the left in the Assemblies of the French Revolution) and the Stalinists who
gave a 20th century gift of Jacobinism to about 20 million victims. That’s what the term leftist meant for about 200 years: a bloodthirsty fiend who seized your property and chopped off your head.
You’ll never hear the editorial board of The Nation admitting that they’re in any way the
inheritors of this excellent legacy, but this implication is always lurking somewhere in the back
of every right-wing caricature of the modern left.

For one thing, the left in these quarters is always described as a tiny
minority of over-educated elites, desperate to seize power and impose some blockheaded, sweepingly
sinister grad-school theory on decent folk. Beyond that, conservative writers always manage
to have guillotines, terror-bombers, death-camps and other relics of the glorious leftist past
ready to stick in some nearby paragraph whenever the modern left is described.

Here’s this trick on display in a Miami Herald piece from last
fall called "Left-leaning intellectuals, voters and their values." It takes writer Carlos Montaner
about three sentences here to turn Noam Chomsky into a Shining Path terrorist:

The American academic left, sweet and law-abiding, usually grazes
in the fields of the Democratic Party. Although it can be as radical as Noam Chomsky, its lucubrations
end up in some fiery article disseminated through the Internet or buried in an obscure publication
read by barely a few hundred members of the same sect. Thankfully, blood is never spilled.

In Latin America or Europe, the situation is different. The
criminals in Peru’s Shining Path emerged from the philosophy department of a provincial university.
They began by reading Hegel and Marx and went on to slit the throats of peasants they called ”collaborators.”

Clearly, only the constant vigilance of the right prevents all those
kids with pointy beards working in coffee shops from organizing massacres. Thankfully, blood
is never spilled!

Which gets back to the Harris poll. If people are confused about what
left-wing means, there might be a reason for that. If you can call both Leon Trotsky and Eric
Alterman left-wing and be technically right in both cases, then clearly the word is doing
injustice to one of them. They have nothing in common; Trotsky had a much better sense of humor.

There was an hilarious example last week of how loosely left-wing can be interpreted by our media. While covering Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Europe, FOX News White
House correspondent James Rosen described France’s Institute for Political Sciences as "left-wing."
Here’s the exact quote, from a Feb. 8 broadcast on Special Report With Brit Hume:

ROSEN: Speaking to one of France’s leading left-wing political
science academies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged old Europe to put aside the old differences
over Iraq…

The institute in question is so left-wing that it claims L. Paul Bremer
III as one of its graduates. Other graduates include Jacques Chirac, Francois Mitterand, Georges
Pompidou, and Boutros-Boutros Ghali. What Rosen was obviously trying to say was that Rice was speaking
to a bunch of recalcitrant Europeans. Left-wing is becoming a synonym for not American.

Obviously there’s no way to really stop a group of people bent on demonizing
dissenters by the tireless use of some all-encompassing, Satanic label. When even Nancy Pelosi
can be described as a "left-wing torch-thrower" (a small California paper used that term last week),
it’s pretty clear the word is more meant as an insult, to describe a fuzzy-headed refusal to accept
patriotic orthodoxy, than it is to refer to a concrete set of political beliefs.

But at some point it says something about you if you allow these labels
to stick. Either the left is not being very clear about the winning politics that it stands for, or
else the word accurately describes a secret willingness to be constantly abused by bigots, a market
niche full of bashful subscribers to Total Pussy Weekly. Because nothing else makes the
American left look worse; it can’t even change your mind about its name, much less change the world.