Bush's New Political Adviser; Kerrey Outfoxes Kerry; The Funny Papers; Harvard Frauds

The Times: Bush's New Political Adviser; Move Over, Karl Rove

Last Sunday The New York Times took a break from its strange mission to remove New Jersey's Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli from office?I swear it was the 10 Italian suits Torricelli accepted from David Chang that goaded the infuriated Times gentlemen into a full-bore investigation?to issue its carved-in-stone opinion about President Bush's first 100 days in office. As expected, the verdict was mostly thumbs down, although speckled with mock-support and advice for the man whose campaign promises and first White House initiatives have been misrepresented in the paper even more vehemently than by official opponents like Tom Daschle or the hapless Dick Gephardt.

The April 29 editorial reads: "...George W. Bush has had a placid 100 days. Yet as we measure them today, the most striking feature on the domestic front is the emergence of a deep-rooted, unnuanced and sometimes almost truculent conservatism from a man once regarded even by many Republicans as a moderate."

Obviously, this statement is disingenuous, but taken at face value, the reader must ask: What was it about Bush's agenda last fall that the overstaffed Times didn't understand?

Bush's platform, in comparison to Al Gore's (and John McCain's), was extraordinarily straightforward. He proposed a large across-the-board tax cut; was against gun control and campaign finance reform; was unambiguously pro-life; was in favor of the partial privatization of Social Security; advocated tort reform and a significant change in U.S.-China diplomacy; and was an unapologetic booster of free trade and immigration. He was the most conservative GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan, even if his rhetoric was purposely toned down to differentiate it from that of the demonized Newt Gingrich. A commitment to education might be considered liberal?since Democratic legislators, most of whom send their children to private schools, are in constant hock to the teachers' unions?but even as Bush and Gore competed to see who could visit the most fourth-grade classes, the Republican favored vouchers and strict accountability. It's very unlikely that his preferred education legislation will win approval in the 50-50 Senate, but that's what he campaigned for.

The Economist cut through the devious drivel that the Times and other elite U.S. media outlets have spoon-fed their readers and viewers with its own, mostly favorable, editorial of April 28. It read: "America's political commentators have had some stunning surprises to cope with since the turn of the year. First came the shock of Bill Clinton's misconduct during his final days in office. So bizarrely out of character. Still reeling over that, they next began to suspect that George Bush may be, get ready for this, a conservative. That's right, a conservative. Now, as he approaches the end of his first hundred days, Mr. Bush's shocking conservatism is becoming hard to deny... Obviously, a 'compassionate conservative' cannot be an actual conservative: compassion is good, whereas, it is widely recognized, conservatism is bad. Mr. Bush said he was a good man, and now he turns out to be a conservative. Not only that, but one who wants to keep his promises. America just isn't used to this."

After denigrating Bush for his "clumsy and amateurish" public statements, his "bankers' hours and long weekends," the Times editorialist attempts to portray Reagan as a bleeding heart compared to the current president, suggesting there's "something almost Oedipal" in Bush's allegiance to those who voted for him. That Bush learned from his father's political mistakes hasn't seemed to cross the writer's mind. The editorial continues: "Mr. Reagan concentrated so fiercely on cutting government spending and taxes that he was willing to set aside the harsh agenda of the socially conservative members of his so-called base. His aides worked hard to minimize his image as uncaring and disengaged from the problems of working Americans."

In addition, the author notes that Reagan's first Supreme Court appointment was Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate, while Bush?even though the opportunity hasn't yet presented itself?is certain to nominate someone who will decimate Roe v. Wade. This is standard Times demagoguery. With a divided Senate, it's clear the Bush administration, when a vacancy occurs, will tap a person they believe can survive the vicious smear tactics that'll be waged by the same Democrats who outrageously defamed John Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork (a failed Reagan nominee).

It's odd that the Times, which has devoted so much space to distorting Bush's tax cut plan as a sop to the rich, would praise Reagan for doing the same, while omitting that a defining moment in the early years of Reagan's administration was his bold intervention in the air traffic controller's strike, hardly an action the Times would consider as "caring" to "working Americans" who belong to unions.

Hypocrisy imbues Times editorials, but that knowledge doesn't make them easier to digest. The paper proclaims, "Although we would be happy to be proved wrong, our conclusion from the record of the first hundred days is that on domestic policy, Mr. Bush will go to the right every chance he gets." The first part of that sentence is a lie. The wealthy men and women who run The New York Times, in their revolting condescension to 99 percent of the American population, don't want to be "proved wrong" by Bush. They'd prefer him to fail on every single proposed initiative; suffer a Clintonesque congressional disaster in the 2002 elections; and have a Democrat, preferably one who doesn't wear flashy suits, reclaim the White House in 2004.

But the word "honesty" doesn't appear in the Times stylebook.

On the op-ed page Sunday, Maureen Dowd offers her own assessment of Bush's first months in office. (For those keeping score, the obligatory pop culture reference in this column is the 1937 film Damsel in Distress.) Dowd cites one question in an April 22 ABC/Washington Post poll that shows 51 percent of Americans believe Bush doesn't "understand the problems of people like you."

She omits the Gallup Poll finding that Bush currently has an overall approval rating of 62 percent, compared to Bill Clinton's 55 percent and former President Bush's 57 percent at the same time in their administrations. The Zogby Poll shows Bush at 63 percent. That same ABC/Washington Post poll has Bush also at a 63 percent approval rating, as well as at 55 percent favorability in his handling of the economy, a strong number considering the current economic climate. And in the same poll Bush gets a 62 percent mark for international affairs, despite all the liberal nattering about the President pissing off every major foreign leader.

But Dowd doesn't let that latter poll result get in the way of her presenting Bush as a moron. (Talk about being behind the curve: I think Maureen's been lunching too often with Tina Brown.) She writes: "Last week, the president threw the planet into a turmoil when he went on 'Good Morning America' and said he was willing to 'do whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself' against a Chinese attack, including sending American forces. Obviously, Mr. Bush did not set out to change nearly 30 years of American policy on a morning chat show. But, sensitive about W.'s reputation as a featherweight, his aides did not want to have to admit he made a boo-boo and is a yo-yo who can't be trusted to carry on a brief discussion about his own policies with hard-hitting Charlie Gibson."

So who's working bankers' hours, Maureen? Of course Bush "set out to change nearly 30 years of American policy" on the question of China and Taiwan. If you weren't so busy worrying about a possible SAG strike in Hollywood, perhaps you'd have followed the story throughout the day and found that out. But no, you were wondering what to wear for the opening of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

An antidote to Dowd's I'm-officially-burnt-out rant was found in Sunday's Washington Post, where George Will, not a fan of Clinton's predecessor, writes with cautious admiration for the younger Bush's embryonic presidency. Among the more memorable lines: "In domestic policy, Bush's presidency is pervasively pro-choice, other than about abortion. Democrats are pro-choice about killing unborn babies but not about much else?not about school choice for children who survive the abortion culture, or about giving individuals the choice of privately investing a portion of Social Security taxes, or about increasing individuals' choices by increasing disposable income through tax cuts, or about guns or smoking or...you get the idea."

Will concludes: "He has underestimated the problems of governance posed for a Republican by the media's increasing partisanship and decreasing intelligence?witness the gullible and hysterical coverage of environmental matters. However, his remarkable carapace of confidence serves his executive temperament. To govern, said Churchill, is to choose. Bush makes choices, and moves on, a moving target."

Kerrey Outfoxes Kerry

Now that Bob Kerrey has, with hardly a trace of subtlety, unofficially announced his candidacy for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, he's instantly the frontrunner. Sen. John Kerry?also a Vietnam vet?who's spent more time in television studios criticizing President Bush than even Sens. Joe Lieberman, John Edwards or Joe Biden, must be one depressed dude.

I'll leave the moralizing about Kerrey's admission that he killed civilians 32 years ago in Thanh Phong to other journalists; besides, everyone in the business aside from Esquire's David Granger has already offered their opinion. Frankly, even though Kerrey was forced to do damage control last week because of Gregory L. Vistica's April 29 New York Times Magazine story, I wish he'd kept his public confession to a terse three or four sentences. But his Clinton-like blab blab blab, which the media focused on with a Columbine intensity, was the tip-off that, despite protestations to the contrary, he's back in the political sweepstakes.

Kerrey's advantages over his slew of challengers are enormous. Despite a few critics, notably John Leo in U.S. News & World Report, Mickey Kaus (kausfiles.com), Christopher Caldwell in his current New York Press column and Korean War veteran James Brady in the April 27 New York Post?not to mention the Times, which has always despised Kerrey?the former Nebraska senator has been deluged with support from a dizzying array of media outlets. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, pundit Joe Klein (who first anointed Bill Clinton in 1992 as the frontrunner in that Democratic primary battle) and Times columnist William Safire have all, for their own reasons, exonerated Kerrey from criminal behavior.

It doesn't hurt that Kerrey now lives in New York, with its huge donor base, and isn't burdened by congressional duties. More significantly, what's the political downside for the tortured Kerrey? It's not as if he'd lose the Democratic base of blacks, unions, trial lawyers or loudmouth show business personalities because of his past. He's the new John McCain, who used his own experience in Vietnam (as well as his soul-cleansing involvement with Charlie Keating) to sucker the media almost to the point where McCain could defeat Bush last year in the primaries.

In addition, Kerrey is a less predictable pol than the liberal Kerry, and would have an easier time picking off soft Bush supporters, especially in the crucial swing states.

The Bush 2004 reelection team had better prepare for Kerrey, even as he insists he's not a candidate. Pete Hamill, writing in the April 30 Daily News, offers a hint of what's to come three years from now: "For Bob Kerrey, it was a short war. He left a leg in Vietnam, along with his youth and innocence, and when he came home, he insisted on living a decent life. He went on to an honorable career in politics and did not add a single sentence to the history of American lousiness. Now he's in New York, the one American city that understands memory and forgetting. He's an educator now, and has much to teach us all, about pain and remorse and how the unexamined life is not worth living. Today is the anniversary of the end of the war that never ends for Bob Kerrey. No matter what happened that night in Thanh Phong, we should cherish him."

The Straight Talk Express has a new driver.

The Funny Papers

There's reason to believe that The Nation, although not in my lifetime, was once taken seriously. Any political magazine that's survived since 1865 has been through its intellectual peaks and valleys. The current incarnation, over which presides the wealthy Katrina vanden Heuvel, (a self-proclaimed resident of Harlem, no less; at least since that neighborhood's boundaries now extend down to W. 106th St.), is The New York Times as written by a squad of Power Rangers.

The weekly's May 14 editorial, "The Worst 100 Days," crosses the line of hyperbole and becomes pure fiction. And so the reader is told that while Bush campaigned by "claiming to want more or less the same things Al Gore wanted," he's now "a hard-edged, rather maladroit right-winger" whose "style of governing...most resembles the notorious theft in the Florida recount operation."

The Nation noisily asserts that "Bush the Younger" is led by the nose by a Cabinet "populated by elder statesmen and hacks" from the Nixon/Ford and Reagan/Bush administrations, people who are stuck in a "time warp." How startling to encounter ageism in a "progressive" magazine, not to mention the convenient omission that Bush's administration is more diverse than any in history, although the women and minorities currently in power were chosen on the basis of merit, rather than to fulfill a Clintonian quota. It's not likely that Rod Paige, Karen Hughes, Condoleezza Rice or Mel Martinez reads The Nation, or would pay attention if they did, but the insult still stands.

It's this magazine that's stuck in a time warp. For example, the editors believe that the ragtag group of protesters in Quebec City is the wave of the future, rather than a loose coalition of adolescent thrillseekers, thugs sponsored by labor unions and old hippies who believe that a whiff of tear gas might revive their memories of more meaningful demonstrations in the 1960s. The Nation's staff doesn't seem to like the United States very much, judging by its latest editorial. "Bush foreign policy?the China incident aside?looks like a smashmouth approach to global relations. We're the big guys. We get to say what goes. Kyoto and global warming?forget about it. Russia and China?in your face. South Korea's hopeful reach for detente with the North is brushed aside."

Perhaps the wealthy backers of The Nation might consider moving its operations to Beijing, where a more simpatico government would allow it to flourish and wouldn't be in its face.

"The Worst 100 Days" concludes with a paragraph that resembles the first draft of a misguided if well-intentioned college student's submission to the campus paper. "The Bush II years, in sum, promise nasty ideological warfare on virtually every front that matters?a struggle at least as serious as the Reagan era's and maybe more, given the decayed state of representative democracy. The awkward new President's boldness is encouraged, we observe, by the lame responses of the Democratic opposition. If Democrats don't make the full-throated fight now, when may we expect them to do so? If Democrats remain so timid, popular agitation must build fires under them, too. The political imperative is not exactly news but requires repeating: Do not wait for Washington to resolve these great issues. March on it. Bang on it."

Bang on what? A gong? A bong? A thong? Even Dr. Seuss, no doubt a devotee of The Nation many years ago, would have difficulty figuring out what exactly vanden Heuvel, a dilettante every bit as naive and irritating as Barbra Streisand, is trying to say.

Solidarity (at Least Until I Graduate)

Top honors for the most repulsive online essay in the past week go to Matthew Daniels, a Harvard senior who posted a self-aggrandizing dispatch for The New Republic on April 24 about a campus sit-in in support of the university's nonacademic employees. Daniels, a member of Harvard's Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), claims the ostensible reason for his group's action is "to secure, once and for all, a living wage for Harvard's workers. Many of the employees who serve food, clean bathrooms, and stand guard at the world's richest university work 80 or more hours a week but struggle to support their families."

Daniels' me-me-me article describes the comfort he and his compatriots have received from celebrities (Matt Damon! Ben Affleck! Teddy Kennedy!), and the media campaign they've orchestrated from within occupied Mass. Hall, but never does he mention the name of one of the people whose wages the PSLM is cutting classes to raise. I find the fleeting alliance between pampered students and laborers dodgy at best, but for the sake of accuracy it'd be interesting to read actual anecdotes, or comments, from the janitors and cooks instead of about the sacrifices the PSLM is making to save the world.

But no. Daniels writes about the yoga sessions that "relieve [the] stiff backs" of the students; about the realization that "travel Scrabble" wasn't enough to counter the boredom of their sit-in; about the food sent in from sympathizers; and about the joy of passing around a copy of Sisterhood Is Powerful and singing along with golden oldies like "If I Had a Hammer."

It gets worse. Daniels, who in 10 years will probably be a trial lawyer or commodities trader, writes: "Survival assured, a more pressing long-term concern now is classwork. Academic responsibilities weigh heavier on some than others, but we are, after all, students. I'll have to reschedule my seminar presentation from this Wednesday to, well, who knows. The breadth of faculty support has helped alleviate the burden. My thesis advisor showed up to picket and to say, undoubtedly for the first time, he was proud of me."

I'm certain the alleged 80-hour-a-week workers are proud as well. But how would the reader know? Because it doesn't occur to Daniels to put a human face on any of these allegedly aggrieved people?the working class is an abstract concept to brats like him?we have no idea if the security guards, etc., are legitimately mistreated or, more likely, just happy to have a job.

April 30

Send comments to [MUG1988@aol.com](mailto:mug1988@aol.com) or fax to 244-9864. Please include your full name, town and state for publication.