David Horowitz, who has made a career and likely a fortune as well out of his conversion from left-wing nutcase to right-wing nutcase (a giant step sideways, in my book), has a blog. It includes this little gem, about the death of Archibald Cox:
Archibald Cox died over the weekend. Cox was a spear-carrier for the Kennedys who led the only real political coup in the last half century when the Kennedy clan toppled Richard Nixon in the infamous Watergate episode. Eight of the 11 special prosecutors were men who had worked for the Kennedys. The agenda was to reverse the 1972 election and deliver South Vietnam and Cambodia to the Communists. Cox and his friends were successful and the result was two and half million slaughtered peasants. Somehow I missed this little fact in the obituaries for Cox.
Conservatives love to talk about the importance of personal responsibility (and they are right to do so), but how quickly they overthrow that principle when it serves their political ends. Yesterday we saw Robert Knight blaming abuse that took place under the Bush administration's military machine on liberal permissiveness, and today we see Horowitz blaming the Kennedys for Nixon's actions.
It seems to me that Horowitz has two possible arguments to make here. Either he can argue that the Kennedy's put a gun to Nixon's head and forced him to bring in the plumbers to break into the Democratic headquarters - and I don't think he's quite that stupid - or he can argue that Nixon's crimes were not bad enough to warrant impeachment. But given his support for Clinton's impeachment, that's hardly a credible position, is it? By any sane standard, Clinton's crimes were nowhere near as serious as Nixon's.
So now we have two examples in two days of conservatives arguing that if liberals do something wrong, it's their fault. And if conservatives do something wrong, it's still the liberals' fault. And yet another irony meter explodes. I wish they made these things able to withstand the hypocrisy of partisan politics.
- Log in to post comments
It shouldn't be forgotten that in his left-wing phase, David Horowitz published THE FREE WORLD COLOSSUS, easily one of the worst revisionist books ever published on the Cold War. (See the chapter on Horowitz in Rob't Maddox, THE NEW LEFT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR.) Among other things, Horowitz's book includes lengthy passages copied almost verbatim without proper attribution from another source, something that got Stephen Ambrose in a great deal of trouble. I'm always astonished at the ease with which conservatives have welcomed left-wing loose cannons like Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens, when they start spouting a congenial line. That they've undergone a complete change from unreliable and unhinged to the opposite is prima facie unlikely. (Hitchens, for one, penned a scorched earth defense of Noam Chomsky for his disgraceful performance vis a vis the Holocaust denier Faurisson. The attack in Hitchens' article on British linguist Geoffrey Sampson for simply stating the truth is best described as shameful. Much of the same rhetorical excess is on view now in Hitchens' pro-war screeds.
I'm always astonished at the ease with which conservatives have welcomed left-wing loose cannons like Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens, when they start spouting a congenial line. That they've undergone a complete change from unreliable and unhinged to the opposite is prima facie unlikely. (Hitchens, for one, penned a scorched earth defense of Noam Chomsky for his disgraceful performance vis a vis the Holocaust denier Faurisson. The attack in Hitchens' article on British linguist Geoffrey Sampson for simply stating the truth is best described as shameful. Much of the same rhetorical excess is on view now in Hitchens' pro-war screeds.
I tend to disagree on Hitchens. I certainly find it odd that the conservatives have accepted him so casually when he has not changed his old views at all except on the question of Iraq and terrorism, but I don't think that Hitchens' current position is really much different at all from his previous ones. I also think that what he has to say about many on the left not understanding the real threat from Islamic fundamentalism and their basic hypocrisy is largely true (and one could make a similar criticism of the right, of course). As far as the charge of Hitchens and holocaust denial, I think it has been vastly overblown, and his record distorted, by those with an axe to grind against him.
I'm not familiar with the Horowitz book you refer to, but it certainly doesn't surprise me. He strikes me as a carnival barker on the political midway. He barked for the left and now he barks for the right, and in neither case does he care much for accuracy or rationality.
I wasn't suggesting any significant connection between Hitchens and holocaust denial--merely taking strong exception to his defense of Chomsky's defense of Faurisson (and yes, I'm aware that Chomsky is not a holocaust denier either).
Just a quip: what is disgraceful about Chomsky's 'support' of Faurisson? He simply wrote an introduction stating that even the Faurisson's of the world have a right to publish their 'inquiries'. If the facts don't support the claims of such publications, as they don't in this case, they will be addressed properly in the arena of public discourse, provided that arena is free of state and societal controls. Far from shameful, I think this is noble behaviour on Chomsky's part and am usually flabergasted when he is portrayed as a some sort of Neo-nazi supporter, which is so absurd it's almost comical.