Huffington's Post
New York Times, June 29, 2008 Book ReviewsRight Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness), by Arianna Huffington. 388 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Arianna Huffington, the dynamo editor-entrepreneur behind the Huffington Post Web site, has now written her 12th and 13th books if you count her new title, "Right Is Wrong," as a twofer, a calculation I completely encourage.
One of the two books contained in "Right Is Wrong" pillories the policies and views of the Bush administration and other conservative operators. Those who oppose the war in Iraq, support universal health care, believe the Republicans are waging a "war on science," belong to the American Civil Liberties Union and snarl at the scent of neoconservatives will delight in Huffington's liberal-to-progressive take, even if many of these pages strike them as more hymnal than dissertation.
When writing in this polemical mode, Huffington produces a better-researched version of one of those pseudobooks that ghostwriters create for presidential candidates who hope a book-length outline of their political agendas will attract voters. Although not currently running for anything, Huffington understands and enjoys the campaign trail, as her many political talk show appearances make evident. She Svengalied her Republican husband's political career, which ended with a failed bid for the United States Senate in 1994. After repudiating her Republican roots, Huffington ran unsuccessfully as an independent in the 2003 recall race for governor of California, and she has made a cottage industry of counseling Democrats to move left.
The second book in Huffington's package breaks original--if rocky--ground as she travels the path set down by her road-grader of a subtitle: "How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (and What You Need to Know to End the Madness)." In an enraged yet conversational tone, Huffington argues that a lunatic fringe seized Ronald Reagan's party around the beginning of the new millennium and from this power base has commandeered the nation. She blames, among others, the "enabling" traditional news media and the Democratic Party, which she believes has "tread far too lightly."
Finding the press culpable for President Bush's successes is a strange tack for Huffington to take, seeing as the source notes for many of her strongest factual observations cite mainstream publications. Likewise, accusing the Democratic Party of pussyfooting after it has retaken both houses of Congress and now knocks on the White House door with a liberal candidate doesn't scan.
What gives? Huffington appears to be stuck in 2004, the year her last political book, "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America," was published. Reprising many of that book's themes about the right's dominance and the left's incompetence, her new book seems oblivious of the right's decline. For example, the people she calls the leading conservative malefactors in "Right Is Wrong" have all stumbled in recent years: Rush Limbaugh exhorted his listeners to stop John McCain in the primaries, but failed. Bill O'Reilly's average audience is still less than half that of the last-place network news anchor, Katie Couric. Ann Coulter was exiled in late 2001 by the hard-core righties at National Review Online for her outre comments. The omnipotent Karl Rove has fallen so low he's now working in journalism. And George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have so overdrawn their political accounts that no sane Republican candidate will ask them for campaign help this fall.
The best evidence of the conservative decline is that McCain, the bane of all hard-right Republicans, has clinched the party's nomination for president. But rather than regarding his victory as a defeat for the "lunatics," Huffington interprets it as one of their successes. McCain has been "hijacked" by the right-wingers! He's become their puppet, she suggests, mouthing their brutish line on torture, religion and immigration.
"McCain is the Trojan horse the right desperately needed to put a faux maverick, faux independent, faux straight-talker imprint on the same ruinous policies that have taken us down this dark road," she writes, presenting him as some sort of Manchurian candidate. Does she really think the right wing is this cunning, or is she advancing this theory because she's become too invested in the right's power to play it straight? I assume the latter.
Huffington, whom I've edited and who quotes me neutrally in her book, deserves credit for cataloging the ways in which Bush has peddled fear to silence critics and build political support. At the same time, dock her a few points for pretending that only Republican administrations are capable of spreading panic.
In November 1997, President Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, visited CNN's and ABC's Sunday talk shows to warn of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons capabilities. Demanding that Saddam Hussein comply with United Nations inspectors, Cohen hoisted a five-pound bag of sugar as a prop on the ABC program "This Week" and said that an equal amount of anthrax spread over a city the size of Washington would destroy at least half the population. In miniature, it was as dramatic a presentation as anything Bush's minions presented in the run-up to the Iraq war. Cohen reminded viewers that after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, "2,100 gallons of anthrax" and "almost four tons of VX" nerve agent were found in Iraq, even though Hussein had claimed to have almost none. Cokie Roberts, then a co-host of "This Week," said to Cohen, "Would you put that bag down, please?"
Huffington shares with Bush (and Cohen) this tendency to oversell the merchandise. Take her strident charge, spotlighted in the book's subtitle, that the right has "shredded" the Constitution. You can abhor, as Huffington does and as I do, the way Bush has pushed his Article II war-making powers to the extreme. But I have only one response to her claims that the alleged "quashing of dissent," the prison at Guantánamo, the abuse of "signing statements" or the National Security Agency wiretaps amount to the destruction of the Constitution: Would you put that bag down, please?
It just so happens that the right is wrong. But so is Huffington.