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TO THIS UNABASHED lefty, it all adds up to one thing: We’re back, baby, we’re back!
And, man, it feels good! For almost two years, liberals have been the conservatives’ rag doll, questioning the White House with all the effectiveness of that weirdo in Times Square who’s been screaming “The End is Near!” since 1978. For two years, we’ve foolishly heeded then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer’s McCarthyite warning that liberals needed to “watch what they say and watch what they do” because our loyal, patriotic opposition was un-American. Yes, we kept our mouths shut while the right-wing took sole possession of God, the flag, national security and family values (things we think are pretty damn important, too — except, of course, God).
But liberal tongues have finally become untied. Just look at the best-seller list this week: Five of the top 10 hard covers are liberal treatises, including Al Franken’s “Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them),” Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose’s “Bushwacked” and “The Great Unraveling” by the great Paul Krugman. Even Madeleine Albright’s “Madam Secretary” and Hillary’s “Living History” are in the top 10. If these two pieces of garbage can be best-sellers, liberals must truly be ascendant.
And the best-seller list is probably going to soon make room for Alan Colmes’ “Red, White and Liberal,” David Corn’s “The Lies of George W. Bush” and Michael Moore’s just-released “Dude, Where’s My Country.” And don’t forget the book that started it all: Joe Conason’s “Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth,” which came out in late summer. It’s still ranked No. 5 on Amazon.com’s nonfiction list—well ahead of Ann Coulter’s scabrous “Treason.”
Reading all of them over the past two weeks, I felt as if all my pent-up liberal anger had finally been released—like a sailor ending a two-year tour of duty with a shore leave at the nearest brothel. In other words, aaaahhhhh!
The hot new liberal books do more than bash Bush, but revive the very notion of liberalism. In fact, all the books point out that polls show that most people consider themselves politically liberal, even if they would never use that defiled word to describe themselves. And the authors point out that conservatives have tricked us into believing that they stand with the working man when, in fact, right-wing economic policy will always—always—defend the interests of the “corporate jet conservatives” first and then merely hope that the pigs will stop feeding at the trough for a few minutes to let the rest of us get a bite.
Conason reminds us that liberalism is actually Americanism: “If your workplace is safe, if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor, if you are paid a living wage, including overtime...if your food is not poisoned and your water drinkable...if our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn’t black with pollution...if people of all races can share the same public facilities, if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race, you can thank liberals. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of these advances.” Say it is so, Joe!
Moore’s book is so angry that you can’t help but watch (albeit sometimes in that car-crash sense.) Who else but Moore, for example, would lay out no less than three separate cases for Bush’s impeachment? Who else but the creator of “Bowling for Columbine” and “Stupid White Men” could mix conspiracy theory (the president wants “war without end”) and class demagoguery (“the system is rigged” against the working man) with some genuine journalism? To be sure, “Dude, Where’s My Country” is not a fair-and-balanced argument, but a bitter, slash-and-burn polemic that will revive the spirits of disheartened Democrats. After a decade of listening to Bill O’Reilly flat out lie, that sounds fair to me.
The conservative media has so successfully painted liberals as unpatriotic and treasonous that we’re forced to spend most of our time simply arguing for legitimacyrather than getting our message out on the issues. Colmes points this out this through humor, even including dozens of hateful emails he’s gotten from conservatives. “If I could reach through the screen, I would crush your throat,” wrote one of Colmes’ more-eloquent correspondents. I get the same kinds of mail and have drawn the same conclusion as Colmes: “Conservatives Are Downright Mean.” It’s one thing to disagree with me, but are you really “praying” that my 2-year-old daughter “will die of cancer in the next three years...and that you and your wife commit suicide after it happens” or that you hope I “die in some awful car accident” because I’m a liberal? I received both of these emails after writing a vaguely liberal piece about how much I hated Madonna’s kid’s book. You should see the stuff I get when I slam President Bush (I’ll save you the trouble of hunting me down: it’s gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net).
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With all these reasonable liberals making our case, it’s going to be a great fall in the blue states. How emboldened are liberals? Consider:
 Every day for the past week, Moore’s publishing company took out big ads asking each of the seven questions that Moore believes the president has refused to answer about our real motivations for the war in Iraq. Among them: “Why did you allow a private Saudi jet to fly around the United States in the days after September 11 and pick up members of the bin Laden family and then fly them out of the country without a proper investigation by the F.B.I.?” Just asking such a question reminds us that the White House did not even give the FBI a chance to debrief the bin Laden family after one of its own committed one of the worst crimes in history. “Imagine in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing [if] Bill Clinton suddenly started worrying about the ‘safety’ of the McVeigh family—and then arranged for a free trip for them out of the country. What would you and the Republicans have said about that?...[You] would’ve skinned Clinton alive and thrown what was left of his carcass in Gitmo.” (To his credit, Moore indicates that Clinton would’ve deserved it. So why no tar-and-feathering of Bush?).
Feeling emboldened, Jonathan Chait wrote in the New Republic, “I hate President George W. Bush,” whom he called “a pampered frat boy masquerading as a rough-hewn Texan...to disguise his plutocratic nature.” He went on, saying that we have been duped into believing that this “transparently mediocre man” is a “moral and strategic giant.” Again, unfair, but, oooh, so enjoyable.
On ESPN recently, Rush Limbaugh said the same vaguely racist things he’s been saying for years, but this time, it finally got him fired. Perhaps conservatives now need to watch what they say and watch what they do. (Limbaugh, by the way, is in detox after admitting that he’s no better than the drug addicts he’s constantly railing about).
Realizing that the American public is starting to question whether it was lied to about why we invaded Iraq, the Bush administration has been on a public-relations offensive to restore the president’s slipping poll numbers. How desperate! How pathetic! How Clintonian!
Anti-Bush souvenirs are starting to sell as well as all the Clinton-bashing trinkets once did. Around about the time that the White House had put out that 55-card deck that featured the Most Wanted Iraqis and their crimes against humanity, a guy named Zach Levy created his own deck of playing cards featuring the 55 top administration officials and their offenses against their countrymen. In addition to Bush cards, a woman in Providence, Rhode Island has set up a greeting card company called “Card Carrying Liberal.” Check them out at www.cardcarryingliberal.com.
Seventy-two-year-old Yankee bench coach Don Zimmer was slammed to the turf during a bench-clearing brawl with the Boston Red Sox. You may not think this has anything to do with the liberal renaissance, but Zimmer’s Yankees represent the evils of unregulated, unrepentant capitalism, and the team’s cockiness often reaches Bush administration levels. To see him slammed to the turf was admittedly appalling, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy it.
Gersh Kuntzman is also Brooklyn bureau chief for The New York Post. His website is at www.gersh.tv
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