Bush didn’t believe the intelligence. Clinton said he wasn’t sure if Monica Lewinsky performed oral sex on him.
Keith’s Ed McMahon, the ever-obliging Howard Fineman of Newsweek, said that the leaked intelligence showed that Bush “has zero credibility.”19 The next night, Keith’s even creepier sidekick, androgynous Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe, also agreed, saying American credibility “has suffered another serious blow.”20
Olbermann’s most macho guest, Rachel Maddow, demanded to know—with delightful originality—“what the president knew and when he knew it.”21 Again, this was on account of Bush’s having disparaged the good name of a sawed-off, Jew-hating nut-burger, despite the existence of a cheery report on Iran produced by our useless intelligence agencies.
Poor Ahmadinejad!
Keith, who knows everything that’s on the Daily Kos and nothing else, called those who doubted the NIE report “liars” and repeatedly demanded an investigation into when Bush knew about it. He was even happier than Ahmadinejad, who proclaimed the NIE report “a declaration of the Iranian people’s victory against the great powers.”22
A lot of Republicans were suspicious of the intelligence, from John Bolton to Dick Cheney. The report’s release was precisely timed to embarrass Bush inasmuch as it followed a series of bellicose remarks from the administration about Iran. Moreover, anyone who knows about these things knows that the United States has the worst intelligence-gathering operations in the world. The Czechs, the French, the Italians—even the Iraqis (who were trained by the Soviets)—have better intelligence. Burkina Faso has better intelligence—and their director of intelligence is a witch doctor. The marketing division of Wal-Mart has more reliable intel than the U.S. government does.
After Watergate, the off-the-charts left-wing Congress gleefully set about dismantling this nation’s intelligence operations on the theory that Watergate never would have happened if only there had been no CIA. This is a little like dismantling your car because you accidentally hit the mailbox. (Democrats are apparently opposed to intelligence of any sort.)
Ron Dellums, a typical Democrat of the time, who—amazingly—was a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, famously declared in 1975, “We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail.”
And so they did.
So now our spies are prohibited from spying. The only job of a CIA officer these days is to read foreign newspapers and leak classified information to the New York Times. It’s like a secret society of newspaper readers. The reason no one at the CIA saw 9/11 coming was that there wasn’t anything about it in the Islamabad Post. (On the plus side, at least we haven’t had another break-in at the Watergate!)
CIA agents can’t spy because that might require them to break laws in foreign countries. They are perfectly willing to break U.S. laws to leak national security secrets to the media, but not in order to acquire valuable intelligence on other countries. CIA officers spend their days finding reasons to do nothing and then, a month later, say, “Yeah, we heard that request a few weeks ago. Let me tell you why we can’t do it.” It was constantly being leaked that Dick Cheney was demanding that the CIA do something insane. You want us to infiltrate al Qaeda? We can’t do that!
But whenever anyone mentioned this about the Iranian nukes leak, Keith accused the “neocons” of choosing “to slander the intelligence community.”23
Even the New York Times, of all places, ran a column by two outside experts on Iran’s nuclear programs that ridiculed the NIE’s conclusion. Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and Valerie Lincy of Iranwatch.org cited Iran’s operation of three thousand gas centrifuges at its plant at Natanz, as well as a heavy-water reactor being built at Arak, neither of which had any peaceful energy purpose. (If only there were something plentiful in Iran that could be used for energy!)
Weirdly, our intelligence agencies missed those nuclear operations.24 They were too busy reading an article in the Tehran Tattler, “Iran Now Loves Israel.”
Even if you weren’t aware that the United States has the worst intelligence in the world, and even if you didn’t notice that the leak was timed perfectly to embarrass Bush, wouldn’t any normal person be suspicious of a report concluding Ahmadinejad was behaving like a prince?
Not liberals. Our intelligence agencies concluded Iran had suspended its nuclear program in 2003, so Bush owed Ahmadinejad an apology. Any military response was scuttled. Indeed, then-Senator Joe Biden threatened Bush with impeachment if he bombed Iran.
Then, on February 11, 2010—about a year after Bush left the White House—Ahmadinejad announced that Iran was “a nuclear state.” So it would appear that Iran’s nuclear program hadn’t been completely abandoned in 2003. Can we get an apology from liberals? How about after Ahmadinejad drops his first bomb?
Once again, the Left had made triumphal accusations that turned out to be completely wrong—and then we never heard about it again.
In the fall of 2009, the naked body of census worker Bill Sparkman was found hanging from a tree in southwestern Kentucky. Liberals wasted no time in leaping to the conclusion that right-wing extremists had murdered him in a burst of anti-government hate.
A census worker? Lots of Americans—including the liberal ACLU—objected to the detailed personal questions included in the long form of the modern census that go far beyond the “actual enumeration” called for in the Constitution. So did lots of non-Americans worried about their illegal status being revealed to immigration authorities. Presumably, those people didn’t answer the personal questions on their census forms. Other than that, a census worker isn’t a particularly reviled figure. He’s not an IRS agent, who can threaten you with penalties and jail time, an EPA inspector with the power to declare your swamp a federally protected wetland, or an Agriculture inspector, who can arrest you, seize your tractor, and fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars for running over rats. A census worker just asks you to fill out a form but has no power to impose punishment.
Even the New York Times wasn’t buying the idea of a right-wing militia type murdering a census worker, running only a short, terse AP item about the death. Stranger still, Frank Rich sat this conspiracy theory out.
But the liberal idiocracy was ablaze with fantasies of a violent right-wing uprising sweeping America. After categorically announcing that the census worker’s death was “not suicide”—that’s “the one thing we know for certain”—the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan blamed “Southern populist terrorism” for his death, “whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”25
Newsweek’s story on the census worker’s death suggestively quoted a warning in the Census Bureau’s manual telling employees not to engage people who say “they hate you and all government employees.” The story ominously added, “Perhaps Bill Sparkman wasn’t given the time to follow that sage advice.”26
New York magazine ran an article about the dead census worker, asking, “Has Nancy Pelosi’s Fear of Political Violence Been Realized?” Somehow blaming Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN)—whom it called “wide-eyed” and “hysterical”—the magazine said a right-wing vigilante “wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering the sheer volume of vitriol directed at the federal government and the Obama administration these days by conservative media personalities, websites, and even members of Congress.”27 Poor besieged liberals! Americans were committing hate crimes against them by asking Congress to cut spending! (Liberals are still trying to figure out how to blame John Hinckley’s shooting of Reagan on conservative rhetoric.)
On CNN’s AC360, Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, said, “At this point, this was such a symbolic and personal anger, that I’m led to lean towards someone who has severe anti-government feelings, perhaps someone who’s seeking revenge.”28
But for truly crazy zealotry, we turn to MSNBC. Asked by Ed Schultz on The Ed Show whether political rhetoric was driving people to commit crimes, MSNBC analyst and former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt said, “Absolutely. As I say, Ed, there are the fringe of the fringe. There are people sitting there saying, you know, you’re going to have to pry the gun out of my cold, dead fingers.… They listen to talk radio. They read blogs that are only on one side or the other. They watch programs that only have one side.… And for many of us, that just says, well, there, I believe it. For others, that says, by God, I’m not going to take it. I’m going to do something about it. And that fringe of the fringe, one more time, will pick up a gun.”29
But the one person most hysterically committed to the idea that a right-winger had murdered Bill Sparkman was MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Rachel’s main move is constant eye-rolling at the crazy things conservatives believe—which generally turn out to be true. But then she will transition in an instant to deadly serious earnestness about the possibility of, for example, anti-government right-wingers causing Sparkman’s death.
The week the census worker’s death first broke, night after night, Maddow devoted large portions of her show to fearmongering over this “troubling story.” Letting her feminine side come out, she started to seem more like her MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann.
Beginning her show with this “very serious breaking news,” Rachel reported that the FBI was investigating and that the census chief had called it “an apparent crime.” The only reason the FBI would be involved, she said, is that “it is a federal crime to attack a federal worker on the job or because of their job.”
And so it went, with Rachel breathlessly reporting this “breaking national news” every night, quoting anonymous sources calling it a homicide and digging up rare video footage of Sparkman to show his human side.”30
One of Sparkman’s friends, retired state trooper Gilbert Acciardo, had been quoted in the Lexington Herald-Leader saying he had warned Sparkman to be careful working in that part of the state. Thinking she had found a fellow conspiracy theorist, Rachel invited him on the show. But despite Rachel’s portentous, leading questions, Acciardo repeatedly shot down her Deliverance fantasies.
Maddow: What—what in particular made you worry about him going to that part of the state?
Acciardo: Well … the road system over there is a little bit—they have smaller roads over there, and I was just afraid for his safety on driving the roads.…
Maddow: Did he ever express any concern to you about his work with the Census Bureau—any problems he’d ever had on the job?
Acciardo: No—just the opposite. He really enjoyed his census work, and he said people were really good to him.
Maddow: Are folks in this area familiar with the Census and its purpose? … Is there any fear that you’re aware of that the Census might be seen as sort of a government intrusion?
Acciardo: No. I’m not aware.…
The next night, Rachel led with “brand-new details which do not all dampen the worry that Bill Sparkman’s death was what we first worried it appeared to be—violence against a federal employee, because he was a federal employee.”
The “new disturbing details” were that Sparkman’s census ID had been taped to his body. Rachel reminded viewers over and over again that “of course, with the confirmation from the coroner today that the word ‘Fed’ was written across Mr. Sparkman’s chest and then this new information about the ID being taped to his otherwise naked body at the time, this is what’s leading us to worry that he was killed in fact because he was a federal employee.” Again, she reminded viewers, there’s “a strong suspicion of government generally among people who live in that area.”31
Rachel Maddow owned the Bill-Sparkman-was-murdered-by-right-wingers story.
With law enforcement authorities still refusing to say whether they even believed a crime had been committed, Rachel complained that it was taking them too long to rule out suicide or accident. “We’re starting to get to a point,” she said, “where it’s hard to imagine that this could be anything other than a homicide.”32
When investigators announced a month later that Sparkman had committed suicide as an insurance scam, Rachel’s guest host Howard Dean made the brief announcement, sparing Rachel the humiliation.33 From that moment on, the story of the census worker was buried in a lead casket and dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as Maddow returned to regaling her viewers with hilarious stories about conspiracy-theorist right-wingers.
Even after having been taken in by the dummied Bush National Guard documents, the collapse of the Mississippi River bridge, the laughably false intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear program, and the alleged right-wing murder of the census worker, Rachel didn’t pause before issuing the breathless claim, in the middle of Wisconsin’s budget crisis in February 2011: “I’m here to report that there is nothing wrong in the state of Wisconsin.”
Contrary to what everyone else was reporting, Rachel assured her viewers that “Wisconsin is fine. Wisconsin is great, actually. Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year.”
She continued the breaking news: “I am not kidding. I’m quoting their own version of the Congressional Budget Office, the state’s own nonpartisan ‘assess the state’s finances’ agency. That agency said the month that the new Republican governor of Wisconsin was sworn in, last month, that the state was on track to have a $120 million budget surplus this year.”34
Unfortunately, Rachel hadn’t bothered to read the entire memo. In that same January 31, 2011, memo, Robert Lang of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau went on to describe an additional $258 million in unpaid state expenses, including a $174 million shortfall in Medicaid services and $58.7 million owed the state of Minnesota in a tax reciprocity deal. Those were just two of the debits that had to be set against the $120 million “surplus.”
The result was—as Lang concluded—Wisconsin was facing a $137 million shortfall, which, oddly, was very close to the $137 million shortfall Republican governor Scott Walker had claimed.35
Rachel had confused “0” with “$137 million.” Next up on The Rachel Maddow Show—a story you haven’t heard anywhere else: How Big Foot stole government workers’ pensions!
A promotion for Rachel’s program shows her sitting on the floor surrounded by index cards, with a Magic Marker in her mouth, as she says in a voice-over that news is about “what’s true in the world.” The promotion ends with Rachel at her anchor desk, opening her show with: “Good evening. We begin today with a story that no one is talking about.”
Given her record, there’s probably a reason no one is talking about it.
MSNBC’s celebrated African-American guest, Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell (now, Harris-Perry), has made a career as an eye-roller about Americans who, in times of economic insecurity, fear “the Other”—immigrants, Muslims, and black presidents. This is the sum total of left-wing social science from the 1960s to the present. And it’s manifestly untrue: Some of the most comfortable, cosseted people in America will apparently believe anything.
Unemployed mine workers in West Virginia, clinging to their guns and religion, for example, have shown more skepticism about Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth than Melissa Harris-Lacewell showed toward innocent Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of gang-raping a stripper in March 2006.
By May 20, 2006, the liberal legal reporter at the National Journal, Stuart Taylor, had written that the available evidence about the case left him 85 percent sure that the rape charge was a lie.36 Among the evidence that was then publicly known was the fact that not one speck of the DNA taken from the stripper’s body, clothes, or fingernails belonged to any of the lacrosse players, who had allegedly raped her anally, orally, and vaginally in a small bathroom.
It was also known that one of the three defendants, Reade Seligman, had an airtight alibi for virtually every minute of the only time period when a rape could ha
ve occurred—midnight to 12:31 a.m. on March 13. Phone records proved that Seligman was on his cell phone from 12:05 to 12:14 and that his last call was to a cabdriver. The cabdriver, who happens to be black, said he picked Seligman up at 12:19, drove him to an ATM, where a receipt showed that Seligman used his card at 12:24 a.m., then took Seligman to a fast-food restaurant, and finally drove Seligman back to his dorm, where his key card was swiped at 12:46 a.m.
It was also known that the accuser had a criminal record and had repeatedly changed her story about the alleged rape.37
More than a month after all this information had been released to the public, Harris-Lacewell wrote about what she called the “Duke Rape Case” on her blog and accused Duke athletes of “pervasive misogyny” and “brewing hostility.”
Everything about this story resonates with my experience.… The pervasive misogyny that clung to the men’s athletics programs and the thinly veiled racism of the university culture were palpable. I distinctly remember a crushing sense of vulnerability and dread when I interacted with some white males on campus. Although many were the model of respectable, genial behavior on the surface, I often sensed a brewing hostility beneath the surface. When I first heard the allegations in this case I wept because it felt like someone had finally revealed that unspoken anxiety I so often felt.38
Apparently, she perceives Duke athletes as “the Other.”
Contradicting Harris-Lacewell’s broad generalizations about white men at Duke were actual facts adduced by a Duke faculty committee two months earlier. Led by liberal law professor James Coleman, who, again, happens to be black, the committee had reviewed the conduct of the entire Duke lacrosse team for the previous five years. The committee found a few alcohol infractions, but concluded that none of the misconduct by the lacrosse players—again, going back five years—had “involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist slurs.” The committee also reported that “current as well as former African-American members of the team have been extremely positive about the support the team provided them.”39