Reading from Left to Right

Remember after Sept. 11, how we all were going to get along? Well, somebody forgot to tell the ideologues the plan.

Right and left political fulminators are at it as usual, this time railing about dueling volumes on the U.S. bestseller lists. It’s an odd moment politically, when diatribes from both the right and left are flying off bookstore shelves. There are the conservative tomes: Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone,” former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias,” an exploration of liberal media slant, and Sept. 11 victim Barbara Olson’s anti-Clinton “The Final Days.” The abundance of riches from the right is “enough to take your breath away,” Stanley Kurtz, in the right-leaning National Review Online, exulted.

But left scribes have been tapping those keys as well: There’s David Brock’s “Blinded by the Right” and Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men.” Even Kurtz had to concede they’re out there: “The Left is back--and it’s mad,” he wrote. By April 7, the New York Times bestseller list looked like a right-left horse race: “White Men,” by lefty populist Moore (of “Roger and Me” fame), was at No. 1, “Bias” followed at No. 3, with “Blinded” close on its heels in the No. 4 slot. Coming up on the inside rail were “Shakedown,” an investigative biography of the Rev. Jesse Jackson by conservative gadfly Kenneth R. Timmerman, and right-wing populist Patrick J. Buchanan’s anti-immigrant broadside “The Death of the West.”

One suspects that the popularity of these books has less to do with ideological fervor than with the modern taste for World Wrestling Federation-style smack-downs. Moore’s pre-Sept. 11 “Thief-in-Chief” diatribe, which his publisher unsuccessfully tried to water down, features an open letter asking Bush whether he is a functional illiterate, whether he is a felon and whether he is getting the drug and alcohol counseling he needs. In “Bias,” Goldberg, a middle-aged, conservative white guy, describes his former employer: “If CBS were a prison ... three-quarters of the producers and 100% of the vice presidents would be Dan [Rather]’s bitches.”

Whether raucously entertaining or just cranks, these authors are catnip for right and left magazines and Web sites, not the least because most of them feature a sexy subtext of betrayal. “Blinded” author Brock is the former American Spectator “investigative” writer who smeared Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” His Troopergate/Gov. Clinton sexcapades story smoked out Paula Jones, leading indirectly to the Clinton impeachment.

Now in “Blinded,” Brock tells us that Hillary Rodham Clinton was right about the “vast right-wing conspiracy”--and he was its hit man. Brock’s apostasy has been a long time coming: He first apologized for his Hill hit piece in 1997, and he has published several magazine mea culpas since. The big question now is who do you believe? Brock, the right-wing hit man? Or Brock, the born-again penitent? Robert L. Borosage, in the liberal American Prospect, comes down squarely on the side of the new Brock, insisting he has something more important to say than I’m sorry.

“The ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ against Clinton isn’t news,” Borosage wrote. “More important is what Brock describes in passing: the ... arrangements that enable the right to drive the political debate.”

The right’s relative hush on Brock’s book suggests that he’s telling the truth, Michael Tomasky said in the leftist magazine The Nation. “My hunch is that they hope they can bury it with their silence,” Tomasky wrote. “That tells me that David Brock, while no longer right, is, in fact, right as rain.”

Maybe Tomasky just hasn’t been reading the right right writers. While there have been few, if any, point-by-point refutations of Brock’s book, the right has missed no opportunity to impugn the conservative turncoat. National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. implied that Brock was unreliable. “The new book turning, apparently, this way and that, on this and that, redefining the Brockian view of things,” the mandarin conservative dean sniffed.

Conservative media watchdog L. Brent Bozell III savaged Brock and Bill Clinton in the same breath. “Clinton earned his bad reputation, and Brock has cemented his with this sloppy, bitter, vengeful little book,” Bozell said on his Web site mediaresearch.org. Bozell failed to disclose, however, that the conservative foundations that funded Brock’s anti-Clinton assault also help keep his own Media Research Center afloat, mediawhoresonline.com, a watchdog group, noted.

But it took one of Brock’s former colleagues, former American Spectator managing editor Wlady Pleszczynski, to sign a real poison-pen review: “Even Brock wouldn’t have been awestruck by Brock--badly stooped shoulders, pasty complexion and a formless mouth that’s been lying too long,” Pleszczynski sniped on the conservative site americanprowler.org. “Old friends worry about Brock’s future. I don’t. Yasser Arafat is bound to need a new spokesman.”

Goldberg’s “Bias” is also a betrayal, of the media that gave him a professional home for 28 years. Eric Alterman, MSNBC commentator and Nation columnist, led the anti-Goldberg charge. “A number-one best-seller is indeed an impressive accomplishment for a clumsily written screed whose author never even bothers to prove his thesis, much less attempts to convince anyone who does not already know the conservative secret handshake.”

Geoffrey Nunberg, in American Prospect, took on Goldberg’s claim that conservatives are labeled more frequently than liberals because of a lefty media bias. A database search of 20 major U.S. dailies, he wrote, revealed that “the average liberal legislator has a better than 30% greater likelihood of being given a political label than the average conservative does.” Ditto liberal actors, judges and columnists.

“The fact is, though, that however you cherry-pick the groups, there’s no way to make the survey come out as Goldberg claims it should, where conservatives are systematically labeled more than liberals are,” Nunberg concluded. “If the media wind up labeling liberals somewhat more than conservatives, that’s chiefly an indication of how phobic they’ve become about charges of bias from the right.”

The right, however, sees “liberal bias” and “media” as redundant terms. National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg (no relation) said he hadn’t yet read “Bias,” but that’s OK, because he “pretty much know what it’s going to say.

“The fact is everybody knows that Dan Rather is an egomaniacal liberal. Everybody knows that the major news networks lean to the left,” he noted.

Alterman, however, pointed out that the self-same Goldberg (Jonah, not Bernard) just signed on as a regular commentator at CNN, the network GOP leader Tom DeLay calls the “Communist News Network.” And not everybody on the right is on board the pro-”Bias” train. Executive editor Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, perhaps still clinging to those warm, fuzzy, let’s-all-get-along feelings of the recent past, mused that the book’s main argument has been undercut by the media’s response to Sept. 11.

“You’d never have guessed from “Bias” (written months before Sept. 11) that Dan Rather would emerge as the war on terrorism’s leading media supporter,” Barnes said.

Moore and Buchanan are populists who dwell on the outer fringes of their respective left and right camps. Not surprisingly, the attacks on them have come from their more mainstream ideological allies.

The ubiquitous Jonah Goldberg accused Buchanan of mirroring the identity politics of the left.

“Buchanan’s new book ... spends an awful lot of time talking about how European-Americans, by which he means white Christians (Asian, Hispanic and African Christians don’t count) are being besieged by a tidal wave of cultural, political and demographic trends,” Goldberg says. But then he admits he has not finished Buchanan’s book, either, which raises a question: Is Goldberg a reading lightweight, or are the current political screeds not all that entertaining?

Even Moore’s critics concede “Stupid White Men” is a good read. “Biting satire,” according to Ben Fritz of spinsanity.org, a left-leaning, but equal-opportunity GOP/Dem-bashing media watchdog site. But Fritz says that Moore’s otherwise welcome dissent was marred by factual errors and stolen material.

“Just how did Moore get so many of his facts wrong?” Fritz asked in a commentary also published on Web magazine Salon. “Lazy cribbing from media outlets and the Internet seems the most likely culprit.”

Appearing on CNN’s Lou Dobbs show, Moore responded to Fritz’s charge by invoking the satire exemption. Here is spinsanity’s partial transcript of the conversation:

MOORE: ... How can there be inaccuracy in comedy? You know.

DOBBS: That does give one license ....Filled with glaring inaccuracies.

MOORE: Filled with glaring, comedic inaccuracies. And actually written by sweatshop workers in Honduras. Has that been pointed out yet? I think we might as well reveal all right now.

Factually challenged though the books may be, NRO’s Kurtz believes we’re going to see a lot more “Stupid White Men”-style broadsides. The war on terrorism, he believes, could spur the next crop.

“In time, I expect, we’ll see a best-seller list filled with books that try to make sense of the war from competing cultural perspectives,” Kurtz said. Is that a warning--or a threat?