Back Into the Muck

Nation pay rates, you may have heard from brother Trillin, are not those of Condé Nast. Every once in a while I don't mind this, because the job just kind of does itself. Take this week: I couldn't decide which of the many McCarthyite wing-nuts currently accusing ex-lovers and comrades of being liars, gay-bashers, anti-Semites and spouse-abusers merited an entire column. None of them did. But hey, I got a column out of just trying to figure it out.

(1) Weekly Standard writer David Frum took a job as a supposedly anonymous White House speechwriter. But his wife, novelist Danielle Crittenden (yes, she's the one who tells women to use their husband's name professionally but doesn't bother with that silliness herself), could not bear to see hubby's genius go unrecognized and sent out a mass e-mail claiming his authorship for Bush's nonsensical "axis of evil" formulation. Tim Noah, Slate's Cindy Adams, owns this baby. He published the offending e-mail. ("It's not often a phrase one writes gains national notice...so I hope you'll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere!!") He quoted her stepdaddy's Canadian newspaper telling the same tale. And he cited other possible authors. Later Frum, thinking twice, decided Bush had thunk it up all by his lonesome. (When you think about it, it's just foolish enough...) Anyway, speechwriters are not supposed to take credit for anything, even dumb ideas, and now Davy's unemployed. Bob Novak blames wifey's e-mail. Davy says Bobby's a liar and he was quitting anyway. Now, "Nofacts" is a well-known McCarthyite fabulist, but Mr. Crittenden does not improve his own credibility much by claiming that W. has "proven himself to be one of the great presidents of American history." So who's really writing fiction here? You be the judge.

(2) Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund has landed on Page Six in a bizarre tale that is almost too weird to write down. It seems that a woman with whom Fund had an affair twenty years ago named Melinda Pillsbury Foster sent her daughter, Morgan, to look up Fund when she came to town. One thing led to another and the results appear to have been a live-in relationship and an abortion. This is strange enough for a Wall Street Journal editorial writer who, although very much a gentleman in person, penned some of the most vicious and irresponsible material about Clinton and the Democrats outside the columns of this magazine. (Fund is also a ghostwriter for Rush Limbaugh and, irony of ironies, is widely believed to be the source of Matt Drudge's libelous claim that Sidney Blumenthal is a wife-beater.) Anyway, things did not exactly work out. Mother and daughter decided to take their revenge by uploading onto the web a taped telephone call in which John attempts to reconcile his support for Morgan's abortion with his "family values" politics. They then informed the media that John and Morgan had decided to wed after all. This turned out to be false, but the next thing you know, Fund is gone from the Journal's editorial page, arrested in Manhattan for battery of Melinda and under a restraining order. (Join me for a moment in imagining what the Wall Street Journal/Washington Times/New York Post/Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/American Spectator scandal machine would do with this crazy story if it were about, say, Frank Rich.) In the meantime, I am inclined to accept Fund's denials absent contrary evidence. Politically the man may be a menace, but his accusers have already proven themselves to be--to coin a phrase--"a little bit nutty." You pays your money and you picks your liar.

(3) Ever wonder what it must have felt like to be a right-winger and lay your hands on Whittaker Chambers's Witness for the first time? Run, don't walk to your corner bookstore. David Brock's Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative is a liberal's Stairway to Heaven. Absolutely everything we thought about these bozos in the vast right-wing conspiracy turns out to be true and then some. Meet Anti-Semite Ann Coulter, Homophobe Johnny Podhoretz, Lovesick Matt Drudge, etc. Like Chambers, Brock is a confessed liar, an ex-ideologue and a formerly closeted homosexual who conspired with people and publications specializing in McCarthyite slander of innocent liberals, minorities and gays. For Chambers fans, anyway, that should do it.

(4) Washington Post writer Michael Kelly says of his column: "It's not that important to me.... It's a busman's holiday." Here I am pretty confident Kelly is telling the truth. Complaining of a negative reference to the State of the Union in a New York Times Op-Ed by Mark Lilla, Kelly, who edits both National Journal and The Atlantic Monthly, recently joked that the author was "a professor of something called social thought (presumably, there are professors of antisocial thought too, but no one knows who they are since they won't answer the phone)." LOL. Apparently nobody at the Post takes Kelly's column seriously either. Had Kelly spent a few minutes on research, he might have discovered that the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought has been the home of such nobodies as Friedrich Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Harold Rosenberg, Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom. Today the novelist J.M. Coetzee, the poet Mark Strand and George Bush's favorite bioethicist, Leon Kass, all hang their homburgs there alongside that of Lilla, who is also the ex-editor of the neoconservative Public Interest. Since none of the above are pacifists--or as Kelly would put it, "evil...objectively pro-terrorist.... Liars. Frauds. Hypocrites"--perhaps one might even rate a contribution to the once-great Atlantic.

(5) Speaking of verbal diarrhea, Scaife-funded David Horowitz has just published another of his entertainingly insane pamphlets; this one joining fellow McCarthyite Andrew Sullivan in blaming the "Fifth Column" left for September 11. Last time I mentioned Horowitz, he responded, "Eric Alterman apparently thinks lying is a form of mooning." I don't know what that means, but it does confirm my long-held belief that one Panther-loving Commie-turned-reactionary-racebaiter sure does spend a lot of time with his head up his ass.

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