Book banning by the Left?

MMFA sends letter to Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble asking these top booksellers to review policies on selling Unfit for Command

In light of an August 19 report in The Washington Post (titled "Records Counter a Critic of Kerry") proving that a key allegation in the new book Unfit for Command by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi is fraudulent, I'm writing to express my concern that by continuing to sell Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry as a work of nonfiction, prominent book retailers are complicit in a literary hoax.

The Post reported on August 19 that "[n]ewly obtained military records of one of Sen. John F. Kerry's most vocal critics, who has accused the Democratic presidential candidate of lying about his wartime record to win medals, contradict his own version of events." This is but the latest in a long line of evidence that Unfit for Command is a fraud, with no basis in reality and no attempt to convey the truth. Slate.com editor Jacob Weisberg has described the book as a "scurrilous book accusing Kerry of being a war criminal and faking his injuries in Vietnam"; it's important to keep in mind that official military records (as well as the statements of all but one of Kerry's crewmates) flatly contradict the lies in Unfit for Command.

With the revelations of August 19, it's clear that Unfit for Command is the Hitler Diaries of the current political season -- a complete fraud. As you know, and as Salon.com reported on August 19, "[T]here is a long-standing tradition by reputable publishers of withdrawing titles that prove to be hoaxes or frauds." I would hope that in the case of Unfit for Command, Regnery, the book's publisher, would do the right thing and withdraw it from publication. However, given Regnery's history as an irresponsible publisher, I have no expectation, nor should you, that it will act responsibly with respect to this deeply flawed book.

I therefore ask you to consider what is the responsibility of a bookseller when a prominent work of nonfiction is found to be based on false information. As the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit organization that seeks to rid the U.S. media (including book publishing) of conservative misinformation, I ask you to consider taking some action on Unfit for Command -- if not simply pulling it from the shelf -- to alert your customers that this book is a paid political hatchet job, full of false allegations and lies. One way you could do so is to prominently place on your Unfit for Command product page a link to -- and excerpt from -- one of the many refutations of Unfit for Command and the organization behind it.

In addition to the August 19 Washington Post report, I'd also like to draw your attention to my organization's website, www.mediamatters.org, where we have documented, since Unfit for Command's publication, several false and grossly contradictory statements made by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Of particular interest may be the bigoted and hate-filled prior writings of Unfit co-author Jerome Corsi, for which he has publicly apologized. Other resources you may wish to consider making available to your customers include FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, which has debunked Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the August 18 Slate.com piece titled "Unfriendly Fire: Liar vs. coward in the Vietnam ad war," by William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg.

All the President's Critics
By JACOB WEISBERG

Published: August 29, 2004

A YEAR ago, it was still possible to debate whether the phenomenon of Bush hating had taken on the virulent dimensions of Clinton loathing in the 1990's. On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, there's no longer any argument. By any measure, Bush bashing is bigger.

On talk radio, a Howard Stern radicalized by FCC prudery and Clear Channel censorship has eclipsed Rush Limbaugh. On cable television, the Bush-mocking ''Daily Show'' gets better ratings than the right-wing ranters on Fox. And on the tables at Barnes & Noble, Al Franken, Molly Ivins and Michael Moore find more prominent display than the struggling firm of O'Reilly, Hannity & Coulter. Some other recent book titles: ''The Lies of George W. Bush.'' ''Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You.'' ''The Bush-Hater's Handbook.'' ''The I Hate George W. Bush Reader'' has done well enough to spawn an ''I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice . . . Reader.'' Before long, we'll be hating Bush's subcabinet.

What may or may not be the terminal stage of Bush-phobia has also motivated artists and entertainers who are not, by inclination, partisans. Bruce Springsteen and a group of rockers who have avoided taking sides in previous elections will tour next month in support of the Democrats -- not out of any affection for John Kerry, but because of their horror at the prospect of a Bush second term. In the past, Hollywood has seldom risked box office take by producing message movies. But this election cycle's releases include not just the Bush-ripping crockumentary ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' but a Halliburton-themed remake of ''The Manchurian Candidate'' and the forthcoming John Sayles film ''Silver City,'' the plot of which revolves around a grammar-garbling Western pol put up for office by nefarious corporate honchos. The novelist Nicholson Baker has just published a Bush assassination fantasy.

In the category of not naturally polemical writers pulled into the fray by the Bush presidency, one can also place Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who is often reticent with her political opinions; the slashing literary and cultural critic James Wolcott; and Graydon Carter, the editor of a glam magazine with a nonideological focus (until lately) on wealth, class and celebrity. These are ordinarily calm customers, but the Bush administration has somehow blown their cool.

Why have these writers come to so hate President Bush? Perhaps the first thing to say is that, in fact, they don't hate him. The right's Clinton hating was largely personality-driven. Conservatives objected to the previous administration's policies, to be sure, but what brought their blood to a low simmer was the sight of a man they deemed immoral, dishonest and manipulative (much in the way the left reacted to Nixon and Lyndon Johnson). Clinton's success as president only made his enemies madder.

Bush's opponents, by comparison, despise the substance of his presidency. They may light on such irritants as the President's smirk, his sense of entitlement, his laziness, his verbal incoherence or his righteous dunderheadness. But these are largely stand-ins for their opposition to the Bush administration's catastrophically unplanned occupation of Iraq, its self-defeating alienation of allies, its favoritism toward the rich and the energy industry, its hostility to the environment and civil liberties, and the qualified legitimacy of the 2000 election. Bush's critics get lathered up denouncing his misdeeds, his plutocratic backers and his lame appointees. But they often admit that they, well, kinda like the guy personally.

''Bushworld'' is a case in point. In a collection of columns written mostly over the past four years, Maureen Dowd sometimes seems torn between feelings of affection for the Bush clan and the view that they are woefully inadequate to the task of governing. A sometimes coy commentator, Dowd lets her views trickle out in caustic observations and witticisms. ''All presidents are in a bubble,'' she writes in a sharp introduction, ''but the boy king was so insulated he was in a thermos.'' In her Kennebunkport burlesque of ''Dynasty,'' the ''dauphin'' is protected from reality by his ''regents,'' foremost among them Vice President Dick Cheney, typically referred to as Bush's ''baby sitter'' or ''chaperone.''

Dowd views politics through the twin lenses of pop culture and pop psychology, and it is the latter she most often emphasizes in relation to the Bush family. She sees the 2000 election as the culmination of an Oedipal drama or, as she describes it, ''the most astonishing and dangerous subordination of American history to particular psyches I've seen.'' George W., long the family black sheep, is driven both by the need to win his father's respect and the desire to symbolically slay him. To Dowd, invading Iraq had less to do with W.M.D. than the ''chance for W. to complete his transformation from the screwup son to the son who fixed his father's screwups.'' She calls the war, which she viewed skeptically from the outset, ''a Freudian tango that was rocking the world.''

As with any assemblage of in-the-moment journalism, some of Dowd's columns hold up better than others. Among her best are an account of a visit to the lingerie section of a department store in Riyadh, which led to a frightening encounter with the Saudi vice cops, and a column entitled ''Pappy and Poppy'' in which she compares the Kennedy and Bush clans. ''The Bushes were trying to de-Anglicize and lose the silver spoon while the Kennedys were trying to Anglicize and seize it,'' she writes. Less collectible is some of Dowd's sketch comedy (Cheney and Rummy sipping Scotch in the hot tub), which can degenerate to an Art Buchwald level. But in the main, her daily wit stands the test of hard covers.

Dowd's consistent view of the gulf war II as a misbegotten adventure driven by a confluence of conservative ideology and patricidal urges is looking more and more prescient. Yet in the end, she can't muster the kind of animosity toward Bush that she leveled at the Clintons, husband and wife. The Clintons, it seems, had the intelligence to be held culpable for their actions. Dowd depicts the ''boy emperor,'' by contrast, as the victim of a family psychodynamic he is incapable even of recognizing, and as the yielding vehicle for mean-spirited aides pursuing private agendas. Several years before Jonathan Demme's remake, she had cast W. in the role of the Manchurian Candidate (with Lynne Cheney in the Angela Lansbury role). The vice president, of course, supervised the brainwashing.

James Wolcott's ''Attack Poodles'' finds a less direct avenue to attack the administration. His book is not about Bush per se, but rather about pundits who serve as the president's defenders and apologists. Wolcott sees these para-journalistic blowhards, primarily those who appear on MSNBC, the Fox News Channel and CNN, as having played a crucial role in support of the invasion of Iraq. He holds the commentariat, if anything, more responsible than the Bushies themselves for misleading the public about Saddam Hussein's W.M.D., Iraq's role in the 9/11 attacks and the threat it posed to the United States. Wolcott describes the period leading up to the war as nothing short of a ''propaganda coup.''

Only someone who had spent far too much time watching ''The O'Reilly Factor'' with a notepad in hand could advance this argument with a straight face. There was, as I remember it, a fairly vigorous debate about the wisdom of invading Iraq in the months leading up to the war, even if one did not find the most sophisticated expressions of it on cable news. Almost all of this argument was premised, however, on the erroneous assumption that Saddam retained an active W.M.D. program, a belief not questioned at the time by Wolcott or most others who today accuse Bush of intentional deception. If the administration was able to overcome resistance to the war, it had less to do with the hosannas emanating from the Fox choirloft than with the thinness of Democratic opposition in Congress.

Indeed, it a questionable whether the broadcasters Wolcott chain-saws have a strong persuasive effect on the public, as opposed to simply reinforcing the biases of a relatively small number of like-minded viewers (FNC's top-rated show has an audience of 2 million to 3 million, as compared with 7 million to 12 million for each of the network evening news broadcasts). The audience for political gab skews old, male and conservative; MSNBC and CNN have tried to emulate Fox's right-wing bully boys not because of marching orders from Karl Rove but because of Fox's commercial success. The liberal caricature Phil Donahue was axed after a few months by MSNBC not because it prefers Republicans but because his ratings were too weak to make the show profitable. The problem may be that libs don't look to politics for entertainment the way cons do, preferring their news straight up, without a twist.

That said, ''Attack Poodles'' is irresistible political entertainment from and for the left. It is a true sadistic pleasure to watch Wolcott exact revenge for the hours he has wasted watching the likes of Joe Scarborough, Michael Savage and Chris Matthews. A skilled hit man, Wolcott sharpens his instruments and takes his time in setting up a kill. In his assault on Peggy Noonan, he quotes a passage from her memoir, ''What I Saw at the Revolution,'' in which she waxed romantic about glimpsing one of the President Reagan's brown shoes. It was ''not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little . . . frail,'' Noonan wrote. ''I imagine cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.''

''His other foot,'' Wolcott writes, ''would just have to fend for itself.''

Most of the thugs Wolcott ices had it coming, but after a while, his selection of victims does begin to look lopsided. After demolishing conservative pundit after pundit, he finds his hero and it's CNN business anchor Lou Dobbs. This is because Dobbs has been thumping a left-populist tub about outsourcing and corporate malfeasance (after doing his part to help inflate the stock market bubble in the late 90's). The free pass given the author's allies of the moment -- Michael Moore, Joe Conason, Eric Alterman, Sidney Blumenthal -- calls into question his choice of targets like Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan and my colleague Mickey Kaus, shrewder commentators with whom he simply disagrees.

One wonders, indeed, what Wolcott might say about Graydon Carter's ''What We've Lost'' were Wolcott not employed by Vanity Fair. Carter's book is not the strident polemic one might have expected, given the author's Hollywood milieu. Indeed, his book errs mostly in the opposite direction, that of an underwritten compendium of data. Carter is constantly breaking prose stride in favor of bullet points, and at one point pads out 13 pages with an alphabetical listing of the coalition dead in Iraq. One can almost hear the author wheezing as he staggers across the finish line, with a chapter that recapitulates his previous complaints about the Bush administration Harper's-Index-style.

Carter credits no fewer than 11 researchers, but this team has not saved him from some cringe-making errors. On his first page, he describes the invasion of Iraq as ''a war of choice with a country that was neither an enemy nor a real threat.'' Think what you like about the threat part, but to describe a country firing daily at American planes in the no-flight zone as something other than an enemy is not right. On the second page, Carter describes the American education system before Bush as ''in many ways the envy of the world.'' Perhaps he was thinking of Japan? But what grates here is not so much the sloppiness or the flat prose as the absence of even the slightest complication. Carter describes himself as a fan of Ronald Reagan. Surely from that point of view, not every single thing Bush has ever done in his whole entire life can be utterly deplorable. What about increasing AIDS funding? What about deposing the Taliban and bringing NATO into Afghanistan?

Yet even Carter, who depicts Bush's presidency in the gravest possible terms, seems unable to muster any personal antagonism toward the fellow. In a recent interview, he said he thought he would like Bush if he knew him. Why, after he has ''curtailed our freedoms, mortgaged our economy, savaged our environment and damaged our standing in the world,'' as the jacket of Carter's book has it, does this president remain so hard for the people who condemn him in such terms to hate?

The best explanation, I think, is that Bush's critics esteem him too little to despise. Most of the current wave of animosity posits a marionette in the White House rather than a malefactor. Like Warren Harding or William McKinley, Bush is seen by his enemies on the left not as a prime mover, but as the useful idiot of the reactionary right. Most of them share the view of Garry Trudeau, who portrays Bush in ''Doonesbury'' as an asterisk in a Roman helmet. Accurate or not -- and I do tend to agree with it -- the view of Bush as a basically limited and shallow person has certain consequences. You can't despise a simpleton for his simplicity. You can't hate a man who isn't there.

Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate and the author of the Bushisms series. He is also co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of ''In an Uncertain World.''

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