KARMA
It
remains to be seen whether the revelation that she called
Paul Fray, her husband's former campaign manager, a "Jew bastard,"
will result in the meltdown of her campaign and the effective
end of her political career. The President took time off from
the tense Middle East peace negotiations to ring
up the New York Daily News
from Camp David: "All I'm telling you is, this is crap."
Coming from a longtime crap connoisseur – indeed, the
champion shit-shoveler of all time – you can practically
bank on the President's expert opinion. Clinton is right,
for once: the charge of anti-Semitism directed at Hillary
Rodham is a lot of crap – but so what? After all,
it wasn't all that long ago that Hil was hurling some of the
same slimeballs at Pat Buchanan: in a
pious peroration to the Independence Party of New York,
Hillary declared that she would not accept their endorsement
if it meant being on the same ticket with Buchanan. And why
not? "If this party allows itself to become defined by the
anti-Semitism, extremism, prejudice and intolerance of a few
shrill voices of both the right and the left, you will be
doing yourselves and our state a great disservice." I can
only gawk in awed admiration at Hillary's ability to cram
so many smear words into such a short sentence: and just look
at the high ratio of epithets to boilerplate – nearly
50 percent!
IT
DIDN'T START WITH HILLARY
Hillary
didn't feel obliged to offer specific evidence of her charges
against Buchanan, and not only because none exists. The New
York media is not exactly friendly to Buchanan: the Post,
in its role as the daily edition of the Weekly Standard,
has been recycling the same swill about Buchanan for nearly
a decade – and on the strength of much less substantive
evidence than is now offered against Hillary. For daring to
point out that Israel does, indeed, have an "amen corner"
in the US – a fact of political reality recognized by
virtually everyone, and brought into even sharper focus in
the New York Senate race – Buchanan continues to be excoriated
as a matter of course by both Mrs. Clinton and many of her
journalistic antagonists. But of course the smear campaign
against Pat didn't originate with Hillary: she was merely
trying to cash in on it with her sanctimonious lecturing of
the Independence Party. It originated with the same crowd
that is now dancing around a large pile of kindling, with
Hillary tied to the same stake. . . .
THE
MURDOCH CONNECTION
As
Joe
Conason points out in Salon: "From the beginning,
the current controversy has been a Rupert Murdoch operation.
The allegation that Hillary Clinton used ethnic invective
against a campaign worker appears in a book published by HarperCollins,
one of the many enterprises in the right-wing press lord's
News Corp. conglomerate." While acknowledging that Matt Drudge
had the exclusive story first, Conason goes on to note that
it "was almost instantly picked up and headlined on Page 1
by the Post. In that awful moment, the Murdoch technique
crystallized perfectly for the first time in this campaign."
This technique has been used on other targets. Murdoch also
owns the Weekly Standard, the neoconservative fountainhead,
which led the way in the campaign to drive Buchanan and his
supporters out of the Republican party. Long before the Post
took out after Hillary over this, Andrea Peyser, the most
venomous viper in that neocon snakepit, utilized what Conason
correctly characterizes as "the ethnic inflammation that Murdoch
long ago adopted as a circulation booster and ideological
weapon" to incite
Jewish passions against Buchanan, pegging him as "an urbane
Khalid Muhammed." Peyser cited the fulminations of the Anti-Defamation
League's Abe Foxman as a kind of declaration of holy war,
indeed a religious war, against Buchanan, the alleged "anti-Semite,"
ripping quotes out of context and simply repeating the lie
over and over again, as if it were a self-evident fact. With
these new charges, the Murdoch technique is fully operational
again, and the same propagandistic motifs predominate: repetition,
innuendo, invective. But the revelations about Hillary's hissy-fit
have really had a cathartic effect on Peyser, who, in a moment
of sheer brazenness, now admits
the dirty little secret of the professional anti-anti-Semites:
"Did
Hillary Clinton really call a cowed campaign worker a "f – -ing Jew bastard"? It may not really matter. Clinton and
her newly obedient husband are whining that the story of a
slur Hillary is alleged to have screamed in disgust some 26
years ago was planted by a fuzzy conspiracy of disgruntled
ex-staffers, unfriendly media and political rivals. . . .
But this time, use of the trademark Clinton tactic points
to a deeper problem. It may not matter to some Jews whether
Hillary hurled the offensive phrase. Hillary's Jewish problem
centers on the fact that the remark rings believable."
TRUTH
AND LIES
It
may not matter if the charges are true? Graduates of
the New York Post school of journalism are no doubt
familiar with this axiom, while others may still be getting
used to it. It's also a regional thing: this stunning indifference
to the truth is nothing new in the top ranks of New York City
journalists. What is shocking is that they now feel brave
enough to come out and say what they really think,
and how show they really operate, without mincing any words.
Who cares, after all, if Hillary Clinton is a mean,
nasty, Jew-baiting bitch, who could fly into an anti-Semitic
rage as easily as Louis Farrakhan? Not Andrea Peyser. Her
stunning admission is followed by a laundry list of Peyser's
real beefs with the First Lady: she endorsed the idea of a
Palestinian state (along with the current Israeli government),
she was once connected to a foundation that gave money to
some project having some vague connection to the PLO, she
just sat there while Mrs.
Arafat made an ass out of herself, blah, blah, blah.
What Peyser seems to be saying is this: I don't care if you
like me, or if you really are an anti-Semite, or if
your private behavior is morally damaging and reprehensible.
Just as long as you toe the party line.
LIE
DETECTOR
But
the comparisons between the case of Hillary Clinton and the
outrageously false accusations leveled at Buchanan can be
overdrawn. For Buchanan's accusers never contended that Pat
had ever expressed any personal animosity toward individual
Jews: all concurred that he is a charming guy utterly bereft
of personal prejudice. They argued, instead, that his ideas
and policies were somehow objectively anti-Semitic,
albeit purely by implication. In Hillary's case, however,
the issue is whether or not she burst into an obscene anti-Semitic
invective directed at her husband's 1974 campaign manager,
calling him unprintable names invariably preceded by the same
sneering derogatory prefix: Jew. The three alleged
witnesses to this momentous event have all had their reputations
completely ruined, even at this early stage, and I'll
just duck while the combatants duke it out. The latest is
that, as Drudge headlined it: "ACCUSER
SAYS HE'D TAKE LIE DETECTOR TEST, TRUTH SERUM – no
doubt simultaneously. Conason and Richard
Cohen make the trenchant point that, as Conason puts it,
"the Jew-bastard is a Baptist." "Her accuser, Paul Fray, the
man whom she allegedly vilified as a 'fucking Jew bastard'
during an election-night blowup in 1974, is in fact a Southern
Baptist who has variously claimed that his father, grandfather,
great-grandfather and grandmother were Jews," Conason informs
us. "To use a Jewish slur on a Baptist is both inexplicable
and a sheer waste of anti-Semitic invective," quips Cohen,
who dismisses the whole incident on the grounds that a) "we
will never know," and b) even if we do know, we ought to write
it off to the First Lady's well-known "hot temper."
REDUCED
TO THIS
On
the face of it, the accusation that Hillary Clinton is an
anti-Semite seems self-evidently absurd: here, after all,
is a candidate who is seriously
considering whether or not to call for a presidential pardon
for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole highly-sensitive
state secrets on behalf the Israelis and is to this day unrepentant.
But anti-Semitism isn't what it used to be. It used to mean
a personal distaste for all Jews, not one particular
Jew, and the advocacy of legal sanctions against Jews, as
in the case of the ideology that animated the National Socialist
German Workers Party. Today it can mean anything, from
a phrase lifted out of a 26-year-old conversation to any hint
that Israel may not deserve every penny of $3 billion-plus
in US "foreign aid." It is an epithet thrown casually around,
in this era of politically correct tyranny and all-pervasive
thought control, and is now a wielded as a deadly ideological
weapon to devastating effect: after all, it has practically
reduced Hillary Clinton to tears.
DISTINGUISHED
COMPANY
Having
been inducted into the ranks of those unfairly smeared with
the broad brush of "anti-Semitism," Hillary joins some pretty
distinguished company, including T.S.
Eliot, H.L.
Mencken, Gore
Vidal, Charles
Lindbergh, and William
Shakespeare. Certainly she is out of her league.
IT
HAPPENED TO ME
While
not even aspiring to keep such company, my regular readers
will recall that even
I have been accused of harboring "hate-thoughts" of a
similar character by one Jonah Goldberg, pipsqueak-in-chief
of National Review Online – a baseless and vile
charge that originated in a
dispute over the wisdom of invading Africa! While trying
to engage the National Review crowd in some
kind of dialogue about what kind of a foreign policy we need,
I was accused by Goldberg of harboring disdain for "rootless
cosmopolitans" – a code word for Jews. As I wrote at
the time, in
answer to Goldberg's hallucinations, "We know that all
sorts of standards, both moral and journalistic, have been
lowered in the Clinton Era. But does this have to apply to
the conservative movement, and specifically the conservative
press as well? Sadly, the answer is yes." Naturally, Goldberg
believes
the accusations, but declares, like Peyser, that it doesn't
really matter one way or the other – I don't think it
matters if she did say it" – as long as the voters get
the general impression of Hillary's all-around evil, that's
fine by him. The election of Hillary Clinton to the US Senate
would be a disaster, and it is good that conservatives are
mobilized to defeat her. To engage in this kind of smear campaign
is not only morally wrong, but politically counterproductive.
Leave it to the neocon crowd to lash out with such ferocity
that they make Hillary a sympathetic figure and generate enough
of a backlash to put her in the Senate – and on the road
to the White House. Good job, guys.
THE
PRICE OF APPEASEMENT
The
President took a break from the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations
to intercede on his wife's behalf, and this is really the
crux of the matter: in an effort to appease voters who take
the New York Post seriously, what price will Clinton
be willing to pay for his wife's Senate seat – not to
mention a legacy? Billions in more "aid" to both the Israelis
and the Palestinians? Almost certainly. Freedom for Jonathan
Pollard? Maybe. US "peacekeepers" keeping the nonexistent
peace between the Israelis and the newly-emerging Palestinian
entity? Don't rule it out.
BROOM
HILLARY
In
her speech to the New York Independence Party, remember that
Hil also took a swipe at party leader Lenora Fulani as an
example of anti-Semitism and extremism on the left, a charge
Fulani denounced as "slanderous." Now that Lenora has recanted,
however, and denounced her former ally Buchanan for "sabotag[ing]
the core principle of our alliance" perhaps these girls can
sit down, have a heart-to-heart, and forge a working alliance,
commiserating about how they were both unfairly accused of
Jew-baiting. For what better symbol of politics, Hillary-style,
than the touchy-feely warmed-over Marxism of Fred Newman and
Lenora Fulani, who speak in bromides like "democracy" and
go to great lengths to hide their real agenda? In one
of her less incoherent columns for WorldNetDaily –
why oh why do they keep her on? – Fulani explains
that Buchanan "sabotaged the core principle" of their "left-right
alliance" without actually identifying what this "core principle"
amounted to. But by her own admission, a motivating factor
behind the break was Buchanan's refusal to back her candidacy
for National Chair of the Reform Party, as she reveals at
the end of her
typically off-the-wall pretentiously self-referential letter
of resignation from the Buchanan campaign. This
is the "core principle" of Fulani-ism – high office and
prestige for Lenora Fulani – and when Buchanan "sabotaged"
it, the alliance was over. But the "core principle" of Fulani-ism
may yet be served. It's not too late for the Independence
Party of New York to withdraw its candidate, and give its
coveted third spot on the ballot to the most left-wing Senate
candidate in the field this year. Fulani has recently endorsed
John Hagelin, the disciple of the Guru Maharishi who
believes in "yogic flying," for the Reform Party presidential
nomination: just think, if she also endorses the First Lady,
maybe they can all get together and Hillary can teach them
how it's really done – on a broomstick.
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