Newsbusters earlier today, and they have it transcribed and framed nicely but a few points remain to be made about it.
The gist is that Al Gore’s former wardrobe specialist, Naomi Wolf, appeared on Mornin’ Joe to hawk her new book, the terrifyingly titled The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. She is, as the title implies, prophesying the end of democracy as we know at the hands of the Bushfuerher.
No, really. She makes the Nazi connection plain, ripping through Godwin’s Law with abandon. And Scarborough goes right along with it.
Like too many liberals, Wolf starts with a premise — Republicans are evil and George W. Bush is more evil than most Republicans — and works backward from that conclusion to find or manufacture evidence to support it. It’s not science, but it is political science.
It always intrigues me that people consistently leave the Soviets out of their “evidence of encroaching totalitarianism” analogies.
The Soviets were no less totalitarian than the Nazis, and had several decades more practice at it than their German socialist counterparts, and Stalin’s body count was either equal to or higher than Hitler’s. Why don’t the Commissars rate?
It also intrigues me that here, Wolf not only sheepishly giggles through an interview about a creeping police state that she either really believes or cynically says is just around the corner, but that she also plays fast and loose with the facts concerning Jose Padilla.
She states twice that what happened to him can happen to any American. The fact is, as Wolf surely knows if she spent more than half a minute looking into the case, is that Padilla was apprehended on the evidence given up by captured al Qaeda handler Abu Zubaydah and he had filled out a terrorist job application form while in an al Qaeda post.
I guess if you’re on Zubaydah’s rolodex and he can tell US authorities where you’re traveling and when you’re traveling there and that you’re on a scouting mission for the terrorist group, and if you’ve filled out al Qaeda’s human resources paperwork, then yeah, what happened to Padilla can happen to you too. Otherwise, no, Naomi, it can’t happen to any American.
She and Scarborough also trade kisses over roving wiretap authority, which Joe at least mentioned began under Clinton and before 9-11. But again, the two consistently miss the point that from what we know of the Bush wiretaps, they were limited to incoming calls from known terrorist sources. Why is this not a reasonable thing to do, since we know that a cell on US soil perpetrated 9-11 and there are very probably more cells lurking about either getting ready to attack or awaiting orders?
Wolf states a couple of times in the interview that she believes the threat of terrorism is real. But she consistently opposes all efforts to actually stop terrorists from attacking Americans and turns the bulk of her ideological guns on the Bush administration, not the terrorists.
And, by writing books and going on national TV to “expose” the creeping Bushreich, Wolf is evidence herself that America is becoming no such thing. The same goes double for those Loose Change half-wits, who seriously believe that a government that will kill 3,000 of its own people in broad daylight in its largest city won’t slip a switchblade into its most strident critics in the dead of night. It’s absurd.
What Wolf and the Loose Change guys have in common, I believe, is narcissism. Neither can face the 21st Century reality of global jihad and terrorism, so both rewrite the story to cast themselves as heroes.
It’s what gets them through the night. And in Wolf’s case, it’s what helps her sell books.
