Political magazines love to send reporters to infiltrate the other side and hear what they say to each other in private. As a result, stories about the fundraising cruises held by The Nation and National Review have become something of a cliché.
Nonetheless, TNR's piece on the last National Review cruise (held after the election in November) has to be read to be believed.
My favorite quotes are Robert Bork accusing Fox News of unfair coverage of the war in Iraq and Norman Podhoretz claiming that Iraq's WMD are in Syria (among other things):
Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan's one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: "The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You'd think we're the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren't covered. We're doing an excellent job killing them."
...[Norman] Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims, "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that.
..."Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" [William F.] Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."
...For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, [Podhoretz] is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. "I don't much care," he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo" and that Bush is "a hero." He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.
Dinesh D'Souza also ran down Democrats as "the party of [economic] losers" and denigrated immigrants from Central America (and Canada!):
D'Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, "of course" Republican politics is "about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers."
... D'Souza summarizes the prevailing sentiment by unveiling what he modestly calls "D'Souza's law of immigration": An immigrant's quality is "proportional to the distance traveled to get to the United States." In other words: Asians trump Latinos.
There's much more, including vicious anti-Muslim sentiment that apparently pervaded the entire cruise. To paraphrase Brad DeLong, it's worse than I imagined possible, even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than I imagined possible. Indeed, portions of this report and the ongoing Washington Post series on Dick Cheney sound like they were taken from the deranged rantings of a commenter on Daily Kos. The ranks of the shrill will be growing...
Correction 6/26 6:24 AM: As a commenter points out, I mislabeled Norman Podhoretz as his son John -- the mistake is fixed above.
Update 6/27 8:56 AM: Eric Alterman reviews the political cruise genre, which he apparently inaugurated ten years ago, while Daniel Larison at The American Scene found the article's revelations to be mundane from a conservative perspective:
This was supposed to be a story told from deep inside the world of NR, which you might think would offer some interesting revelations, but instead of something different we find Bernard Lewis churning out another piece of bad analysis of Near Eastern politics, Norman Podhoretz thanking God for the prospect of war with Iran and a perpetual gnashing of teeth over the lost war in Vietnam. Also, Dinesh D'Souza said something outlandish--hold the cover!
...That is, those who follow the internal discussion on the right and at National Review will read along through Hari's piece finding various lines of argument that have cropped up time and again at The Corner and almost feel the urge to shrug.
You mean Norman Podhoretz, right?
Posted by: Steve Smith | June 26, 2007 at 02:30 AM
It sounds like something right out of the Onion..
Posted by: George Arndt | June 26, 2007 at 06:18 PM
The problem of why intelligent believe (or appear to believe) unbelievable things is very interesting. I was glad to read that Buckley, at least, is still clear eyed, there are few thinkers remaining reasonable in the conservative world. The ability to lie to ourselves is why we developed rigorous methods of investigation in the sciences.
There was an interesting article published by Ryan Darwish in 2006 in which he says:
"Self-deception allows one to behave self-interestedly while, at the same time, falsely believing that one's moral principles were upheld."…
“As the story goes, if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump out. But if you drop a frog into cold water and gradually heat it up to boiling, it will doze off, remaining in the water until cooked. While further research casts doubt upon the biological accuracy of this account of frog behavior, the metaphor is useful in understanding these research findings.”
RYAN DARWISH (2006) Beyond Compliance and Boiling Frogs. Journal of Financial Planning. February Issue - Article 2. http://www.fpanet.org/journal/articles/2006_Issues/jfp0206-art2.cfm
There is an interesting parallel to this behavior in the research on genocide deniers. This brief summary categorizes the types of deniers, their motivation and tactics. Definitely something to chew on:
Denial by assumed innocence -
Motivation: Maintenance of worldview; Ability to live with hope and trust in society
Tactics: Avoidance; Blocking; Self-deception
Denial by opportunists –
Motivation: Self-interest either personal or collective; Power, careerism, pragmatism, exhibitionism and realpolitik (in this sense: politics imposed by means of physical violence, political extortion or economic suppression)
Tactics: Acquiescence, compliance, acceptance; Conformity, obedience, submission; Failure to confront, resist, challenge
Denials by perpetrators –
Motivations: Hate
Tactics: Outright lies and inventions of fact, false documentation; Language of deception, minimizing or denying portions, revisionism; Rationalizations
ISRAEL W. CHARNY A classification of denials of the Holocaust and other genocides Journal of Genocide Research (2003), 5(1), 11–34
One other parallel examines “Ethical Fading”, but this is already a bit too long.
Kandis
Posted by: Kandis | June 27, 2007 at 06:20 PM