Bill Moyers, Christians

Libby white conservatives

By Anthony Oluwatoyin
Monday, November 14, 2005

Under normal circumstances, one would have advised that the best way to handle the recent indictment of "Scooter" Libby, now former White House Adviser and Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney, is simply to let Joe Wilson keep right on talking.

Former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson is the man whose wife, former, supposedly covert, CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was allegedly outed by Libby to reporters. That triggered the investigation, such an outing being criminal, culminating in the indictment.

The more Joe Wilson opens his mouth, the more he removes all doubt. You can't but wonder: what the heck was all the fuss with this guy in the first place? The man is exactly what Spencer Tracy, in one of his most memorable roles, called a "nin-com-POOP," that is, second "P" not at all silent.

Still, Republicans cannot simply rely on the implosions of the aging surfer-boy, who coasted on a Gentleman's "C" in college.

These are not normal circumstances.

The media will certainly not hold Wilson to account. Following the indictment, Fox News Sunday seemed to be the only program that even mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee report from last summer challenging Wilson's assertions about the Niger trip that led back to his wife.

The Senate report questioned everything from his wife's involvement in his selection for the mission to his knowledge of what he claimed were forged documents, with wrong dates and names--documents, however, that he had apparently never seen!

In sharp contrast, one commentator after another, had trouble smothering giggles with regard to the view that Libby may have lied because he was sure that he would not be betrayed by reporters to whom he spoke.

What is it about the liberal press that Conservative operatives and strategists continue to fail to understand? What is the mystery? The failure to expect the absolute worst from the media must be the real mystery.

Almost two years after the investigation began, with the names of all the main players very much in the news, there was no reasonable doubt left that anyone who had ever spoken to Libby was going to sing like a canary.

Including "Judith of Holofernes" Miller. Jailed for refusing to identify her source, she emerged barely three months later, wielding Libby's head. The media question had switched. It was no longer: why is her right to protect a source under attack? It was: why is she protecting the Bush Administration?

Never mind Loose Lips Libby. Did anyone outside the Communist Party of America, expect anything different?

In honour of my hero, that Great Plainsman, war hero, former Republican Senator and Presidential candidate Bob ("Prairie-speak") Dole, I must speak plainly: too many white conservatives just don't get it. You will forgive. I must tell it like it is. White conservatives are just too eager to be liked by the mainstream media, even while recognizing the illegitimate domination of the extreme left.

Most disturbingly, white conservatives simply feel they cannot just ignore liberals. They're just not up to what I call the Ann Coulter litmus test: An authentic conservative is at least one who does not feel that he must speak to liberals, especially when in fact he does not need to do so.

As the Libby debacle shows, sometimes white conservatives harbour such closet respect for liberals, they all but become obsessed with responding to them, no matter what logic the left does not have on its side.

One of the main reasons for this is what I call "peer-grooming." That is the unique kind of peer-pressure that comes from attending those notoriously loony-left Ivy-league schools.

It goes back to the Vietnam era, when the draft-dodging cowardly rats promoted themselves as "the best and brightest" in contradistinction to poor blacks and some poor whites, who readily took up the mantle of duty in the military.

The post-modernist myth of the anti-establishment intellectual hero was born. Every Nixon-bashing smart-mouth kid was suddenly "Berkeley Boy Brilliant"

(after the 1960s student protests at the famed University of California campus). All others were schmucks who needed the opportunities of the military to get some chance in life.

The result is double-barrelled: liberals condescend to blacks, alienating black conservatives, but being balanced out by white conservatives who secretly defer to liberals. It is a sick, symbiotic connection.

Ronald Reagan broke from the fatal mould. He had the guts to call liberals what they are and to disdain them accordingly. He famously stormed out of a Civil Rights meeting, not afraid to be called "racially insensitive". The buzz words had no fizz for our Ronnie.

Today, Conservatives all but apologize for their stunning victories at the polls both in Canada (the emergence of the Reform party) and the U.S. (George Bush's historic mid-term Congressional wins and his own subsequent re-election).

This is the backdrop against which we must view an aggrandized Joe Wilson. A man who had never been accused of analytic rigour gains sudden op-ed edge that no one dares ignore. Bone-crushingly derivative, the media defer to him as the marrow of discontent.

I said I must speak plainly. If Wilson were not white, the White House would have seen him for just another mouthpiece of the protest cabal. The instinct of too many Yaley conservatives like Libby is to respond without delay to liberal buzz.

"Libby returns calls." For the former Bush Adviser, that reputation in the liberal press was a badge of honour. 

It won't save him now.  

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