politics

Kristof Gets an Earful from the Addled

June 30, 2004

Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times‘s globetrotting columnist, must have popped into Manhattan on home leave recently, and gotten an earful of the dark conspiracy theories currently in fashion at somber gatherings of the local literati and politico-theorists.

And he’s still reeling from toxic overdose.

How else to explain Kristof’s Op-ed-page column today, in which he holds this strange breed up to the light, like an astonished anthropologist examining the skull of a heretofore unstudied species?

Skipping all niceties, Kristof gets right to work, with this opener: “So is President Bush a liar?”

He notes that tables in bookstores everywhere these days overflow with anti-Bush polemics with the words “lies,” “lying” or “liar” in the title, and he gloomily reports that the picture painted in Michael Moore’s scalding documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11” — that the president is fundamentally an evil schemer up to nothing more noble than enriching himself and his friends — now represents an emerging consensus on the left.

The observation that liberals really don’t like Bush — and sometimes even question his motives — isn’t exactly newsworthy. But Kristof, who usually spends more time interviewing people in distant lands than those in his own country, is stunned by the fervor he encounters at home. To him, Moore’s movie, even more than the books, is a marker, representing “the polarization of yet another form of media,” and he glumly observes that

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One medium after another has found it profitable to turn from information to entertainment, from nuance to table-thumping.

Talk radio pioneered this strategy, then cable television. Political books lately have become as subtle as professional wrestling, and the Internet is adding to the polarization. Now, with the economic success of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” look for more documentaries that shriek rather than explain.

Kristof confides that left-wing acquaintances have taken him aside and, in all seriousness, asked if there’s any truth to the rumor that the U.S. has already captured Osama bin Laden but that the White House is keeping him under wraps until closer to election day, or to the suspicion that there is a Bush plot afoot to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

He writes, “Those are the questions of a conspiracy theorist,” and concludes that the left wing is now fully as “addled” as the wing-nuts on the far-right who spent the 1990’s agreeing that Bill Clinton was a serial killer.

To Kristof, pinning the “liar” label on Bush isn’t much different: “I’m against the ‘liar’ label for two reasons. First, it further polarizes the political cesspool. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.”

As Kristof sees it, there is abundant evidence that Bush is “self-deluded,” “overzealous” and “confused,” but little that he is either a liar or ill-intentioned.

He concludes: “Bush got us into a mess by overdosing on moral clarity and self-righteousness, and embracing conspiracy theories of like-minded zealots. How sad that many liberals now seem intent on making the same mistakes.”

Hey Nick — Welcome to 2004. Glad you could drop in and join us.

–Steve Lovelady

Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.