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David Broder, the dean who became a dhimmi
Eight years ago during the Monica Lewinsky scandal David Broder, the touted dean of the Washington press corps, said some critical things about President Clinton’s conduct. Liberals turned on him furiously, he collapsed in the face of their attack, and from that moment forward he became a muted, inconsequential figure, almost a ghost of his former self. Not that he had been any great shakes earlier, but he had had a quality of authority which after 1998 disappeared. When he spoke on tv opinion shows you could almost sense him looking over his shoulder. Now, in the light of the total meltdown of the vicious and absurd Plame-Wilson charges, Broder seems to have regained a sliver of his old confidence. He writes:
[Newsweek, The American Prospect] and other publications owe Karl Rove an apology. And all of journalism needs to relearn the lesson: Can the conspiracy theories and stick to the facts.Michelle Malkin congratulates Broder for speaking up, and my first instinct is to agree with her. However, at the beginning of the same column, Broder inadvertently admits what a weak character he has been in recent years: “I have written almost nothing about the Wilson-Plame case, because it seemed overblown to me from the start.” Well, given that the political world was in an uproar about this overblown (translation: false) case since 2003, and that incredible, damaging charges were being flung about and widely believed without a shred of evidence backing them up, why didn’t Broder say anything? It was because, as I indicated above, the liberal phalanx that formed around Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal and that slapped down Broder for issuing a moral judgment on Clinton, had conveyed to Broder the message that the shared moral universe he had thought he had inhabited, and in which an old-fashioned liberal like himself would be respected, no longer existed. So he cowardly gave up, rather than say anything against the corrupted and radicalized liberal consensus of the time. As for Plamegate, it is only now, when liberals themselves are admitting that the charges against the White House were a total fraud, so that speaking up on the issue won’t cost him anything, that Broder has finally spoken up. On second thought, then, I take back what I said about his having regained a sliver of courage.
People like to imagine that the Clinton age ended with the election of George W. Bush. Not so. The explicit rejection of morality by a majority of the American people in response to Clinton’s crimes and abuses of office (“Everybody does it”) consummated the decades-long dissolution of America’s former moral ethos. It was a historic catastrophe the consequences of which we are still suffering from at this moment. Email entry |