As Mrs. Clinton plans her move to New York State to run for the
Senate, and the president now feels safely free of Monicagate and
impeachment, the elite establishment liberal media has smugly turned its
focus to settling some old scores with non-establishment conservatives.
Nowhere was this more evident last week than in the venerable old
newspaper of the left, The New York Times.
In a hit piece of major proportions, Frank Rich, fresh from an
honorable mention in my column "The Ethical Decline of Liberal Jewish Intelligentsia Under Clinton,"
attempts to dismember fellow Jewish, but conservative, Internet
journalist Matt Drudge. In his Dec. 4 chef d'oeuvre entitled,
"The Strange Legacy of Matt Drudge," Rich dances on the grave of
Drudge's now moribund relationship with Fox News and gleefully writes,
- As those whose memories haven't entirely purged Monicagate will
recall, Mr. Drudge is the fedora-wearing grandstander whom many, I
included, once feared as the Devil of journalism incarnate. He
published malicious rumors as fact and, with new-fangled speed of the
Internet at his back, browbeat some insecure Old Media news
organizations into repeating them. He hijacked scoops from other
reporters. He boasted about his lack of education and his contempt for
professional standards. So what if he got some stories wrong, prompting
a major defamation suit. He got some big ones -- including The Dress --
right.
From there, Rich goes on to add,
- When Fox yanked Mr. Drudge's weekly show, he cried censorship (of
a fetal photo), but since when does a Rupert Murdoch enterprise muzzle
right-wing ideologues? There was no public outcry supporting the
defanged Drudge because not enough people cared.
Not to be outdone in furthering the left's post-Monica
inquisition of non-establishment conservatives, Maureen Dowd, another
self-styled intellectual of the only journal which reports "all the news
that's fit to print," lynched black Republican presidential candidate
Alan Keyes, a day later. Fresh from kicking the behind of all other
presidential candidates in a New Hampshire debate, Dowd had quite a few
things to say about Keyes:
- Have you ever noticed that Alan Keyes and Marvin the Martian
sound alike? ... Mr. Keyes warns of a "howling moral void." Mr. Martian
warns of a void. - This weekend might have been a big Keyes moment. According to an
Internet survey done for Fox News by Dick Morris after the Republican
debate, Mr. Keyes was the runaway winner. But nobody else accepted that
verdict. - Even some of Mr. Keyes's friends think that all these lonely
years running for president as a black right-wing Republican have made
him a little loopy. He does not seem to accept the fact that it is his
own party that dismisses his candidacy as an oddity, useful only in
enabling Republicans to make a perverse claim to diversity. - Shouldn't he be worried less about the press and more about
Willie Horton attitudes in his own party?
If a conservative had labeled Mr. Keyes a Martian (indeed, a
student was thrown out of the University of Pennsylvania for calling an
African-American student a water buffalo), mocked his courageous
attempts to run for the Republican presidential nomination as a black
man and told him that he should be more concerned with Willie Horton, he
would have been associated with "the likes of David Duke," as the
editor of WorldNetDaily was libeled recently by ombudsman E.R.
Shipp
of the other major national liberal rag, The Washington Post.
Similarly, Mr. Rich's attacks on Matt Drudge unmask a hypocrisy at
least one hundred miles deep -- since Rich, as much as any other liberal
journalist, has spewed forth questionable columns concerning the
Clintons for the last seven years since their coronation. And, contrary
to Drudge, Rich has not broken one major story.
In their zeal to mop up on non-establishment conservatives -- as many
of their traditional media allies, such as Fox News, now appear to be
abandoning them -- the journalistic left conveniently forgets that the
tables may one day be turned. Despite recent political gains in
socialist Western Europe and Russia, and despite thus far being able to
lie their way out of one Clinton/Democrat scandal after another in this
country, the left has its day of reckoning in store. For as demonstrated
in Seattle, it has succeeded in destroying the trust of the American
people in good and honest government, and the masses -- fearful that
bureaucrats no longer represent their interests in trade or anything
else -- have taken to the streets.
When a major crisis hits -- such as a terrorist attack on a major
U.S. city or the Panama Canal -- it may not be long into the future that
these hordes, when faced with a real need to believe the commander in
chief, will be yelling, in figurative Shakespearean chant, "Kill all the
liberal journalists," who, in their zeal to prop-up a corrupt
administration, lied to them during the Clinton presidency.