Dana Blankenhorn

Stopping the Haties

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 38 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The most urgent political task before America today is to remove the Haties from our political discussions, to exile them, to set boundaries on the right which politicians and the media dare not cross for fear of being marginalized.

Nixon and Agnew's great success, that is to say William Safire's and Pat Buchanan's great success, was to set such boundaries for the left.

Ever since 1969 the work of conservatism has been to push these boundaries inward. That's part of what a political thesis does. It channels what is legitimate and exiles those who cross the border to the margins of political life. It falls when this becomes bad policy, irrelevant to the times, and when it makes this obvious to the people, as conservatism did in the floods of Katrina.

This was pretty easy for Buchanan, for Safire, and for Nixon. The hippies of the late 1960s were never a serious threat. Their ideology was faintly foreign. They were, even then, just a fringe of the Democratic Party. George McGovern would never have gotten close to a Presidential nomination but for "the horrors" of Watergate that destroyed everyone to his right.

Unfortunately the Haties are buried deep within the Republican Party center. You can say they are its center. Until recently they were our rulers -- even when Haties have rejected George W. Bush as a person they have embraced his policies, including their excesses.

Before Katrina, I would argue, the Haties were the mainstream and the non-Haties were the exiled. The success of writing the Dixie Chicks out of our public life, of transforming Howard Dean into a screaming meamie, and of intimidating the media into printing the lies about Iraq without question, all attest to this fact.

Why reporters should be heroes

I was brought up to believe that being a reporter is a pretty cool thing.

One important lesson of my career is that most people don't think so. The assumption of a reporter as hero is, generally, an American assumption.

In much of the world, especially Asia, a reporter is either a stenographer or a threat to civil order. This may be why nominal democracies there don't act the way they do here. That is, it takes an enormous effort to dump a government because the truth-telling role of journalists is assumed not to exist.

I got an unexpected taste of this at CompuTex. The Taiwanese authorities (above) held a press conference on the third day of the show. The four bureaucrats sat at their table, they read their statements, they asked for questions.

Except for me, there was silence. I asked a question, got an answer. Waited a while and asked another. I thought I was being polite. These people had gone to great trouble to speak with us. They laid out coffee, cakes, and lunch. The least I could do, I thought, was to take what they said seriously, to ask some serious questions, and follow up.

Not true. A Europe-based reporter clued me in. They were shocked to be asked real questions, he said. They expected that reporters would repeat what they said, verbatim, and leave it at that.

Self-censorship is a bad habit, but that's the habit of most reporters around the world. At least most of those who get paid for it.