The Slander Network

It's a rare pleasure to see that Going Rogue doing so well ahead of publication. (Even though rescheduling the publishing date delayed my book -- but I forgive you, lass). When it appears, there's little doubt it will go through the roof.

Along with fits from the Olbermanns and Courics of the world, we can look forward to seeing a few myths definitively punctured -- the "I can see Russia" story, the shooting wolves from a helicopter narrative, or alternately, the "she can't shoot a gun" claim. (Really, Levi? After a lifetime of hunting trips with her father? Are you absolutely sure?) Punctured, but not put to rest -- because these stories were not designed to be put to rest

The choice of "designed" is deliberate. Sarah Palin was the victim of the most vicious, global, and organized campaign ever carried out against a modern politician. It might have begun spontaneously, as the standard mud-flinging attendant to any political campaign. (Yeah, I know - liberals don't actually do that, they sit around on chaise longues wearing togas discussing policy in Socratic dialogue. I'm just being a throwback.) But it soon expanded well beyond the customary level of heated campaign rhetoric to fill every last niche of the media sphere, a process that could not have occurred without manipulation at every last turn.

The anti-Palin campaign was intended to implant myths so complex, so convoluted, and so widespread that they could never be completely countered. The American left has developed the art of slander to a degree never previously achieved. It's one thing they're good at. Not even the most acid-tongued gossips of the Bourbon court at Versailles were quite the match of contemporary left-wing political operatives.

But with the uproar that greeted the emergence of Governor Palin, art may have been transformed into science. What follows is of necessity speculative in nature. But if the developments discussed here do not yet exist, they will, and in either case need to be combated.

The basic hypothesis is simple: that there exists an organized, centrally-controlled network, based on the Internet and related technical systems, entirely devoted to spreading slander and disinformation against individuals -- primarily politicians -- opposed to the progressive program. This system utilizes e-mail, comment threads, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever somebody invented last week. It is staffed and operated by the usual left-wing suspects -- students, eccentrics, outpatients, paranoiacs -- layabouts with plenty of time on their hands. It operates in loose coordination with the legacy media and liberal political operatives, forming the third leg of a national left-wing propaganda machine. It operates sub-rosa and without acknowledgement -- exposure would leech it of much of its power.

Something along these lines has been taken for granted in center-right circles for some time. While little concrete evidence exists, the effects are there. It's like a sniper in the trees. You can't see him, but when people keep falling over, you'd better have a move ready to make. That follows is an attempt to map the tree in which the sniper hides.

Vicious innuendo has been part of the left's toolkit for generations. Long before Saul Alinsky formalized the practice, mud-throwing was a central element of left-wing strategy. Reading some of the attacks written by Marx and Lenin would make your hair stand on end. (Curiously, most of this stuff was aimed, not at the capitalist oppressor, but at lefty comrades, including Marx's brethren in the Socialist International and Lenin's direct competitors, the Mensheviks.)

This kind of thing entered liberalism with its shift leftward in the wake of the New Deal, overwhelming the genteel, mannered tea drinkers that comprised the liberal ascendancy of the period. Liberalism used to be noted for high-class (and high-strung) types such as Walter Lippmann and Lionel Trilling. Those days ended long before Michael Moore picked up his first camera.

The end of polite liberalism can be dated with certainty to 1964. In the previous decade nasty remarks had been thrown at Ike ("the Great Golfer" and so forth), all pretty tame by current standards. This was followed by a strange and still unexplained public hysteria beginning in 1962 involving claims that right-wing armies were drilling in the backwoods ready to sweep into the cities, or that, alternately, the military was under the control of a clique of rogue officers up to some barely describable form of mischief.

The 1964 election marked the culmination of this fever. The GOP candidate was Barry Goldwater, a no-nonsense western conservative, viewed as stalwart, straightforward, and a little dull. Then Goldwater declared his candidacy and was immediately transformed into a fire-breathing right-wing lunatic. JFK had been murdered only months earlier, and no Republican had much of a chance, but the left pulled out all stops anyway. Ralph Ginzburg, a glossy porn merchant (and no relation to poet Allen, though I thought that myself for years), published a claim by "500 psychiatrists" that Goldwater was a paranoid schizophrenic. The charge was a complete fabrication -- Ginzburg may as well have said 5,000 or 5 million -- but it was repeated across the country all the same. After traveling to Germany to meet members of the center-right Christian Democrats, Goldwater, whose father was Jewish, was accused of meeting with Nazis. (A friend of mine, a stolid old-school suburban Republican, was painted as a Nazi by The New York Times for campaigning for Goldwater. An apology? Are you kidding?) About the only thing Goldwater wasn't accused of was hunting wolves from the air.

The effort climaxed with a slander orchestrated by that moral paragon, Bill Moyers, who oversaw the creation of possibly the most infamous campaign commercial of all time, the "little girl" or "daisy" ad (the ad can be found here and is certainly worth checking out). A cute little girl is seen pulling the petals off a flower and chanting to herself. A gruff voice suddenly overrides hers, counting down from 10. As the voice reaches "1", the scene -- child, flowers and all -- is obliterated by a nuclear blast. On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of Democratic candidate Lyndon B. Johnson misreciting a line of poetry from W.H. Auden: "We must love one another, or die." (Actually, coming from LBJ, it sounded more like, "We mus' luv one unadda, er dah.")

Moyers' ad was vicious, inaccurate, and very effective. As the culminating ad in a series (there were three or four others, each just as meretricious, none quite as powerful), it had the impact of a knockout punch. For days afterward, few politically-aware Americans spoke of anything else.

Although many people recall it, few saw the actual ad itself, which was broadcast only in the New York City area. What they remember seeing were the news reports that night, in which all three (and only three, believe it or not) networks replayed the ad in toto. Need we go into reasons? With the Moyers ad, the American news media crossed a line from reportage into open advocacy. Never before had the national media -- at that time undergoing its transformation from the "press" -- worked directly to destroy a candidate. Never again was it to hesitate.

Richard M. Nixon was hated by the left for his role in running down Soviet spy Alger Hiss in the late 40s.

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