Revolutions swept Europe in 1848, and when order returned a year later, many of the leaders of the revolutionaries were condemned to die. The ruler of Austria at the time was a regent, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg. His advisers approached him and urged mercy for the rebel generals.
“Mercy by all means,” Schwarzenberg replied, “mercy is a very good thing. But first let us have a little hanging.”
No reasonable person proposes the hanging of – or any violence whatsoever against – those who chose the hour of America’s tragedy to snarl at her greatness, her military, or her president. But in the place of a little hanging, let us insist on a great deal of clarity. In the aftermath of the tidal wave of terror and murder that struck the U.S. on September 11, there is a giant undertow of common sense and clarity. It has sucked a number of posers out to sea. I do not think we should ignore or forget their moral cowardice or their petty vanity. Others directly control the employment fate of the scores of offending parties. The commentariat can do nothing except mark clearly the distasteful remarks rendered by many and their disingenuous defenses that followed the public outcry against them.
Peter Jennings sniffed his way through the day of the attack, remarking that some presidents are better than others at rallying the country. He is said to be hurt that millions of viewers thought him objectionable. He was.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, on the day after the attack, thought it was necessary to attack the president’s movements on September 11, sneering that “even the president did not know where to go.” That the president had just ordered the shoot-down of his fellow citizens, or the enormity of the fact that timed attacks on the nation’s landmarks had occurred did not cause her to hesitate then or apologize since. She used her column on the last day of September to continue her counter-attack on her critics. Citing her immigrant father and his military and police service, Ms. Dowd wrote that “I don’t need instructions from Ari Fleisher, the White House press secretary, on the conduct of a good American.” Perhaps not instructions, just practice. Ms. Dowd used the balance of her column to attack the Bush team as “image profiteers” dishing out “hyperventilated spin,” and to claim that “[w]e should dread a climate where the jobs of columnists and comedians are endangered by dissent.”
I get it. We should be thanking her for her attacks on the president and her lame defenses of those attacks. Our way of life depends on Maureen Dowd’s column. Why hadn’t I seen it before?
Bill Maher, already well known for comparing the retarded to dogs and the faithful to fools, is in the same ditch with Dowd. He struck his blow for freedom on the first broadcast after the attack: “We have been the cowards,” proclaimed Maher, “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson assured that the right did not go unrepresented in the parade of offensive remarks – though Falwell alone, among the names listed here, has had the grace to abjectly apologize. Andy Rooney, well into his dotage, tried to argue that President Bush did not know that Afghanistan was landlocked when the president made frequent reference to countries “harboring” terrorists. He has clung to his argument, aware, perhaps that the truth that he thought it funny to mock the president’s intelligence at a moment of national peril was more dangerous than being thought merely stupid and stubborn.
There are other candidates for the pundits’ hall of shame, but now we have the inevitable attempt to rally around the offenders, claiming that the First Amendment is at stake. Dowd did not invent this tactic. The Los Angeles Times television “critic” Howard Rosenberg, who waited until Friday after the attack to conclude that the president “has seemed almost like a little boy at times – a kid with freckles wishing he were somewhere else,” found no one to defend him so he defended himself this past week. Sure enough, he grabbed for the First Amendment, demonstrating either ignorance of the Amendment’s concern with government censorship and not public revulsion or the abject desperation of a horse’s ass finally found out. He is now, and will forever remain, the Ted Baxter of his trade.
Rosenberg tried to save face by admitting his timing “stunk,” but declaring boldly he has no regrets. Then in a stunning display of clich? for a television “critic,” he argued that his detractors – they were legion and the Times is begging the subscribers via letters not to blame Howard on the whole paper – were “America right or wrong types.” “If this myopic dictum is followed, the U.S. media might as well pack away their megaphones and allow their 1st Amendment liberties to atrophy. If it had been followed by journalists reporting about Vietnam, My Lai and other excesses from that debacle would still be interred along with the bones of victims.”
And there you have it. Maher and Jennings, Dowd and Rosenberg – all the fools caught in the undertow are laying claim to hero status. It hasn’t worked and it won’t. Maher seems doomed though Disney’s boss Michael Eisner has yet to OK his cancellation despite sponsor revulsion and audience disgust. Eisner runs Jennings as well, and that aging icon will never get bumped but a great deal of audience has fled. Rosenberg would never get the boot from Times management, though the Chicago suits at the Tribune Company have to wonder about the paper’s declining circulation and its steady march into irrelevance. Rooney wouldn’t be there another week if Don Hewitt was alive. Falwell and Robertson work for God, and Dowd works for Howell Raines, who thinks he’s God, so those three will find their rebukes in the privacy of quiet chats. Others have been fired. Tenure protects the rest. But it doesn’t matter who stays and who goes.
What matters, and what is simply irreversible, is the crashing even further down of any idea that elites in this country have any idea about what the country is really all about. Everyone of these named and scores of others simply do not understand the country that protects their foolishness. All of them have skills. Not one has wisdom about the country, and most lack even basic knowledge.
They will resist this self-knowledge, though all around them will whisper about it for years to come: In the test of their careers, they flunked. The journalists are particularly cursed. Such tests come only once in a lifetime. They join the November 1941 critics of FDR, and the critics of Churchill throughout the late ’30s and the Reagan bashers after Reykjavik. We don’t remember the names of any of these, except as I just have, with a generalized and deep contempt.
We do not need a little hanging. It is already done.
In the midst of a heated political battle, I was alone in pushing for a particular strategy. I stubbornly held my ground. One of my colleagues quoted her mother-in-law, a native of Ireland: “When everyone says you’re drunk, you’d better sit down.”
Ms. Dowd, Mr. Rosenberg, Mr. Rooney and the rest: You’d better sit down.
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