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By David Rogers
Monday, February 28, 2004
The New Editor
Last weekend I spent at an annual reunion with a group of college friends self-described as
“loosey-goosey lefty-liberals,” and this weekend at the 25th Anniversary convention of the
Young Conservatives of Texas.
The highlight of the YCT weekend was a speech by Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard,
who focused primarily on the “conservative moment” we are currently enjoying in America.
Barnes cribbed some of the talk from Karl Rove’s address to C-PAC earlier this month (he
also stole a joke from Jay Leno), but the most interesting part of Barnes’ speech was his
discussion of the prerequisites for the conservative moment.
There are positive prerequisites that Barnes enumerated; like having a leader who wants to
change history, not merely be a spectator (a “clerk” as President, in Barnes phrase), and the
rise of conservative books, not merely of the Rush Limbaugh / Sean Hannity variety, but also
the books of ideas by a wide variety of authors (in which number Barnes included Ann
Coulter, to my surprise and delight). And Barnes stressed the importance of political
organization, noting particularly George W. Bush’s denomination of Karl Rove as “the
Architect.”
Barnes seemed more focused, though, on what I’ll call the negative prerequisites: the
unraveling of the mainstream media (which he dated at Sept. 9, 2004) and the complete
disarray of the opposition.
Now, this is a topic on which The New Editor has written before.
Barnes focused on the extent to which the Sandbox Left has taken over even ordinary
Democrats, like “labor-liberals” Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), who hosted a
community forum in Ithaca, New York where he publicly blamed Karl Rove for “planting”
the fake documents in RatherGate, and CBS News Senior Political Editor (described by
Barnes as “CBS chief pollster”) Dotty Lynch, who claimed a conspiracy nexus between Rove
and Talon News reporter Jeff Gannon.
Since I didn’t take notes, I’m relying on memory, but I’m pretty sure Barnes called that kind
of thinking “delusional.”
To which I can only add: amen.
Which brings me back to my loosey-goosey lefty-liberal friends from the previous weekend.
Now, one of them is a typography expert who confirmed for me the fakeness of the
RatherGate forgeries on day one of that scandal. He lamented that the use of those forgeries
was almost certain to lead to Bush’s re-election. As far as I know, none of them have
wandered off into Hinchey-land.
But they are uniformly, strikingly, convinced of conspiracy theories for which there is
precious little evidence. “Bush lied” about Iraq is for them a self-evident truism; that the Swift
Boat vets lied, and Karl Rove put them up to it are similarly unquestioned verities.
What struck me most was the outrage over the questioning of John Kerry’s medals. I hadn’t
heard that from liberals before. But the line, from one liberal whose father served in Vietnam,
and came home with a fistful of medals, including a Bronze Star, was: “You question one,
you question them all.”
I was dumbstruck. My liberal friend was saying that in saying John Kerry was a dishonest
opportunist, I (and conservatives generally) was saying that all Vietnam veterans were
dishonest opportunists.
Amazing.
David Rogers is a contributing editor for The New Editor.
Paul Geary
David Rogers