“It’s hard to fight against a man who says God told him to kill you.”– Hercules, Samson and Achilles, Italian film, 1965

“Life is what happens when you’re making plans.” – John Lennon

During the third week of the Reagan funeral ceremonies, Attorney General John Ashcroft rose in the well of the Senate and, claiming a little known privilege granted to former members of that body who had been defeated at the polls by dead people, introduced a bill that would replace the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor with the “more welcoming” likeness of the Gipper.

It was during the Reagan administration that people began complaining on radio and television talk shows about the liberal control of media – a word barely known before its use by Nixon’s first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, and his speech writer, serial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Other criminals from the Reagan and Nixon eras came along to fill the gap– Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy, who retained for themselves a right they denied Dr. Martin Luther King: to refuse to obey a law they disagreed with. Indeed, Nixon employees practically control the media, since they number such famous charmers as Diana Sawyer and include the New York Times columnist William Safire, inventor of the Orwellian trick of appending the suffix “gate” to every political scandal since Watergate, thus equating a concerted attempt to overthrow the Constitution with the firing of a couple of travel agents.

Then came the Clinton years, which unleashed a previously closeted virulent strain of hatred on the right, best explained by saying that after Reagan made acceptable the smiling face of fundamentalist Christianity, the Republicans decided that God wanted them to have the White House, ergo, Clinton was acting in opposition to God’s will. Hence, today, they consider a couple of sneaked blowjobs a far greater stain on the Presidency than an orchestrated plan to send young Americans halfway around the world to their death on false pretenses.

And they still complain about the liberal media, while conservative punditry has become a family business. Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, years ago of the Partisan Review but now neocons (she wrote a book-length mash note to Donald Rumsfeld) are the parents of New York Post columnist John Podhoretz. Lucianne Goldberg, the agent whose attempt to get a book deal for Linda Tripp unleashed Monica Lewinsky on the world, is the mother of the perfectly named Jonah Goldberg (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION), and William F. Buckley’s son Christopher had the transcendent idea that the part of Ms. Tripp be played in the inevitable movie by Gerard Depardieu. This leaves us with the sweetly poisonous Madame DeFarge of the right, Peggy Noonan, whose leaps of faith would give a Moonie pause.

And it is leaps of faith that have gotten us here. The movement may have started with Nixon hatchet-man Chuck Colson (“When you’ve got ‘em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow”), who started a prison ministry that now extends to several correctional facilities, but George W. Bush, more than any President, wishes to abolish the separation of church and state, and God help any citizen whose faith differs from his.
When the chief law-enforcement officer of this country, Attorney General Ashcroft, says in public, “Faith and prayer are the chief sources of this nation’s strength,” when former Senator John Danforth, who mentored Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court, dons his clerical robes and presides over the memorial service for Ronald Reagan in the Capitol, the signs are clear. Fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam are approaching Armageddon while the fundamentalist Jews look on from Israel, and non-believers better get out of the way.

Which may not lead us directly to Charlie Rose, but what the hell. It isn’t that Charlie Rose is without ideology. He is beyond ideology. Someone once called him a courtier to fame, and that comes close to nailing it. He knows the people, he is their equal. He is there to explain these people to themselves; he knows more about their field than they do. He will interrupt anyone in mid-reply to reformulate their response in far better terms than they could. I have heard him tell John Frankenheimer that Frankenheimer directed The Island of Dr. Moreau “for the chance to work with Marlon,” who has never been on his program. I have heard him say that he was such good friends with Kirk Varnadoe, former Chief Curator for the Museum of Modern Art, that he “let him use my Paris apartment,” thus telling us that he had something that Varnadoe did not. He is fearless. I have seen him improvise comedy with Robin Williams. What he obviously wishes he could do is interview himself for an hour every night on the subject of his choice. And perhaps one night, when the fundamentalists have ensured that there is no one left to listen, he will.

©) 2004 Joe Goldberg

There is only one requirement for the position of media pundit: that you find someone willing to provide an outlet for your opinions. I am an example of this. Others include participants on the panel of so-called experts whom newly risen political commentator Dennis Miller assembles under the rubric "The Varsity," though, to me, the term "back bench" seems more appropriate.

Among these are the pollster Frank Luntz, often on political talk shows taking the pulse of the nation, though if he ever had a Democratic client I missed hearing about it. Shown a photo of John Kerry, the presumably even-handed interlocutor said, "He looks guilty to me." Others include the blonde, leggy pundette Ann Coulter, who displayed her deep knowledge of the Constitution she professes to revere by saying, "To disagree with the President in time of war is treason." I know these people can't write, but can't they read?

Coulter, like others of her type, is in the Me business. What they believe no longer matters, only that the camera is on them. Ariana Huffington has gone from the extreme right to the extreme left, waving to fellow traveler David Horowitz as he approaches from the opposite direction, both like foodaholics who go from McDonald's to being vegans without ever having had a decent meal in their lives. Huffington, having divorced well, is indisputably wealthy, so she needn't worry about how her eerily exact sonic resemblance to Eva Gabor makes it difficult to take her pronouncements seriously.

The smiley-faced poster child of the new-right punditti is Tucker Carlson, he of the WASP-reversible name and the bow tie announcing his membership in the George Will Wannabe Society. Carlson is a writer for the Weekly Standard, published by the Holy Child of the Ma and Pa of neoconservatism, William Kristol, who looks and sounds like a trash-compacted version of Richard Dreyfuss and who once held the exquisite title Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. Kristol used to appear on ABC's This Week, and, if we are lucky, ABC will misroute its correspondence to Billy Crystal, and Kristol will be asked to m.c. the Academy Awards.

Carlson appears regularly on CNN's shoutfest Crossfire. If he can sneak in a low blow, he will. He will invoke the name of Bill Clinton if the topic is soybean futures. Recently, he showed a two-year-old photo of Clinton with Michael Jackson, to make the point that the former President was fund-raising with "a serial pedophile." And he referred to Robert C. Byrd (Dem., West Virginia) as "a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan," even though that youthful error occurred more than 60 years ago-- or twice as long as it's been since members of the Bush cabinet found reasons not to go to Vietnam (Dick Cheney "had other priorities") but now accuse such war heroes as triple amputee Max Cleland, amputee Daniel Inouye and prisoner of war John McCain of being unpatriotic for their questioning of the war in Iraq.

Carlson's debating style is simple. He interrupts, holds up a hand for silence and shouts to his opponent, Paul Begala, "Paul, Paul, wait...that's a lie, Paul, you're afraid to argue the merits." To Carlson, Michael Moore, who just won the Cannes Palm D'Or for his anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, is guilty of the "ramblings of the lunatic fringe." "Your party is going crazy," Carlson tells Begala, while his own partner on Crossfire, Robert Novak, spouts hate through the spittle of his dentures, apparently unconcerned that he destroyed the career and possibly the life of an undercover CIA agent because her Ambassador husband made public information critical of the Bush administration. If there is a God, such gutter tactics will not serve the President well, no matter who he prays to or with. More about that next time.

A few months ago, the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal contained a piece by Dennis Miller denigrating Norman Mailer, who had just published an article against the Iraq war in the London Times, so, of course, the WSJ sicced an attack dog on him. Mr. Miller wondered why it should be he, since he had never written an Op-Ed piece before and didn't know much about Mr. Mailer. But modesty is strange, unfamiliar territory for Mr. Miller, and he didn't stay there long. Like Ken Burns deciding to do a 19-hour film about jazz or George W. Bush deciding to become President, he forged ahead, and stumbled right away, by calling Mailer "the Father of the Non-Fiction Novel." I'm not surprised that Miller doesn't know better, but you'd think that someone at the WSJ would know that it was Truman Capote who claimed the title, and perhaps even a few there who knew that it really belonged to Ernest Hemingway. But displaying contempt for people and things of which they are ignorant is virtually a job requirement of conservative punditry. Not by accident does the word ignorant contain the word rant.

Dennis Miller started out on Saturday Night Live and since he left there has preached to an ever-smaller choir (with one brief, inglorious stopover on Saturday Night Football), his ego increasing in inverse proportion to the size of his audience. Somewhere along the way, he decided he was a conservative. It happened just about the time he lost his job on HBO along with his sense of humor. (Some people say, because of his brother, Miller will never be out of work. His brother is Miller's personal manager and is also the personal manager of Jim Carrey, with whom any number of entertainment conglomerates would be delighted to do business. Anyone thinking that idea far-fetched might reflect on the fact that a man was made head of Tri-Star Films because he had once been Robert Redford's attorney. In Hollywood, relationships trump everything. It's even possible that Miller's family situation has influenced his admiration for George W. Bush, who has had to struggle through life as the son of a President of the United States.)

Miller will probably end up with seven followers and a bull horn, harassing concertgoers on their way to Disney Hall from across the street­ "Hey, don't you know who I am? I used to be Dennis Miller!" But, to employ a trope of Mr. Miller's, before he winds up like Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd, exhorting an applause machine, he will continue to think he's the equal of anyone.

He called the respected newscaster Jim Lehrer "Jimmy" on the air the other night. More egregiously, he said to the absent president of Mexico, "Vincente, don't be an idiot," insulting Vicente Fox and getting his name wrong in the process. He is always coming down hard on people who aren't there, especially O.J. Simpson. I am no fan of O.J.'s, but I would bet Mr. Miller's weekly salary that he wouldn't dare say any of those things if Mr. Simpson were within three football fields' length of him. He has mocked the senior Senator of my home state of West Virginia, Robert C. Byrd, who carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his jacket pocket, and then mocked the state itself, for its proletarian cuisine ("It's not the possum that makes you fat. It's the sauce"). I have even heard him denigrate the Constitution itself, on the grounds that it's more than 200 years old and you wouldn't drive around in a horse and buggy. So let's chuck it, along with Bach and Shakespeare.

Like most bullies, Miller is a coward. He may also have written his own epitaph. Here is what he says about Mailer and Mary Quant in the WSJ. Change it to Miller and Britney Spears and our own troubled times and see what you get: "They were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s." And, of course, even before he began speaking in public, Miller was perfectly described by Bob Dylan: "You just want to be on the side that's winning." But maybe not for long.

Next up: Tucker Carlson Marked for Death and Broadway Charlie Rose.