Weekly Shredder 21:
Marty Peretz in The Wall Street Journal
by James Norton

John Kerry fought a good fight.

Any impartial observer would look at the diverse forces Kerry managed to unite — and the 55 million Americans who rallied around his campaign — and conclude that the Democrats made a good, solid, broad-based run against a powerful incumbent president. Kerry rallied forces old and new, slogged through crazy Rovian garbage like the the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," and came within a single swing state of winning the presidency.

But Marty Peretz is not a fair observer. Based on his recent editorial output, he is apparently a grand, cape-swirling, mustache-twirling crank who periodically emerges from a volcanic fissure in the ground in order to curse the light of the sun, blaspheme the name of God, and drink the blood of particularly slow and vulnerable golden retrievers.

Peretz, the editor in chief of the New Republic (a magazine that inexplicably defies his influence by producing inspired journalism on a regular basis) recently described Kerry's defeat with the two-word title of his article on the Op/Ed page of the Wall Street Journal:

"Good Riddance."

For archives, audio, and background about the column, click here.

OK — everyone's entitled to his own political opinions. And everyone's entitled to slam Kerry's politics and positions as they see fit. But what Peretz does in his Journal piece far exceeds anything "fair" or "balanced" or "in touch with the reality that people reading more than one news source and talking to other people on a regular basis are familiar with."

Let's begin with his jaw-dropping opening salvo:

The American people have plumb busted the hearts of the country's liberal elites, and the sentiments evoked among these elites are not dolorous but actually quite nasty.

So much so that they reminded me of a poem by the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, sardonic and rare in its anti-communist sensibility.

Whoa. Whoa-oh-oh. Whoa, Mr. Peretz. You're busting the balls of "the liberal elites" — by quoting a "sardonic" poem by "communist playwright Bertolt Brecht"?

Ignoring that delicious contradiction for just a moment. Let's step back and look at what he's doing from the get-go:

He's painting Kerry into the "liberal elite" corner.

Not content with his guy simply winning the presidency, Peretz is jumping on Kerry's head, knocking himself out in an effort to say that Kerry didn't just lose — he's also a marginal figure who drew only fringe support.

"The American people," he's suggesting, supported Bush. "The liberal elites," he's suggesting, supported Kerry.

There were farmers behind Kerry. Union people. Angry veterans. People from the inner cities. Jews and Arabs. Blacks and Cubans. And yes — well-educated people with advanced degrees prone to quoting Bertolt Brecht. Like Marty Peretz.

Only better informed.

But let's move on to more of Peretz's words.

Reading of the contempt this haughty and self-anointed elect has for the misbehaving populace as a whole (and feeling it in my hometown Cambridge, Mass., and in New York, where it is also altogether common), I am struck by the intellectual paradox with which these people live.

You dick!

Hang on — that's just sinking to his level, minus the fifty-cent SAT vocab words. It's probably best to describe Peretz's "paradox" and then outline why it's neither a legitimate criticism of his political opponents nor a substantive indictment of Kerry's platform.

The "paradox" he describes is that liberals love popular sovereignty, and therefore support plebiscitarian democracy. But they also, in contradiction to the popular rule of people, support court rulings that go their way, with their crazy liberal activist judges.

Could Peretz possible get any more sophisticated or far-seeing than this? Wow! It's an air-tight argument, because certainly the conservatives have never supported voter referendums, while simultaneously cheering partisan court decisions that override the will of the people.

Or... hang on, no. That's not at all right. That's a barn-door broad, specious argument that is less an indictment of liberalism than a celebration of the fact that Marty Peretz knows the phrase "plebiscitarian democracy," something they teach during the first semester of the H.G. Darton Preparatory School for Elitist Dicks.

Still, the extreme and bitter judgments against the citizenry after this election are especially tendentious. For what the electorate did on Nov. 2 was essentially (or maybe just merely) turn down John Kerry, a candidate who until very late in the Democratic primaries was almost no one's choice as the nominee, the party's last option because it could rally around no one else. What a pathetic vessel in which to have placed liberalism's hopes! A senator for two decades who had stood for nothing, really nothing.

Anyone who looked at Kerry's record knows that he stood for quite a lot. Richard Clarke said that Kerry "got it" when it came to fighting non-state sponsored terrorism — the senator's investigation and battle against BCCI is the hard proof.

His work with John McCain to normalize relations with Vietnam and put the POW-MIA issue to rest (something that Peretz grudgingly acknowledges) is a testament to the fact that he stood for national dialogue and progress on one of the country's most bruising foreign wars.

And his efforts to crack the case on Iran-contra, in tandem with right-wing Senator Jesse Helms, are testament to his commitment to accountable and transparent government.

Fighting terrorism. Healing international rifts. Making government accountable and transparent. Are these terrible things to stand for right now? Are they "nothing, really nothing?"

And if Kerry's record is nothing, what does Bush's dissolute lifetime add up to?

Even toward the end of the campaign, Mr. Kerry never had a day when the polls predicted his election.

A blatant untruth, forged and repeated by Rush Limbaugh and friends, and either knowingly or ignorantly advanced by Peretz in the service of the "Kerry never had a chance" pack of lies. To quote USA Today from March:

After locking up the Democratic presidential nomination, John Kerry leads President Bush 52%-44%, largely because people say Kerry would handle domestic issues better.

Kerry led (sporadically) several other times in the months to follow, but this is something the doctrinaire right has decided to quash. Or the "conservative elites," as they may be most accurately labeled.

And then... and then, feeling comfortable in his nasty little Wall Street Journal Op/Ed nest of shadows, Peretz really cuts loose:

Neither the Kerry enthusiasm (and the Bush hatred) of Eminem (himself given to vile homophobic and racist ranting) nor of Paris Hilton, of Sean Combs (with his "Vote or Die" campaign) or Whoopi Goldberg amounted to anything except publicity for themselves. And then there was the cinemathug Michael Moore, fabulist and fibster. ... It was Mr. Kerry's own enchantment with the trashy celebrities who provided the energy of his campaign.

Those of you who followed the campaign carefully may remember that Eminem did not actually endorse Kerry, and that Kerry didn't have a damn thing to do with the controversial hip hop star. Or Paris Hilton, for that matter. Or Sean Combs.

As for "Cinemathug" Michael Moore — was he better or worse than the GOP financier-financed "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"? You do the reading — you be the judge.

Kerry was never "enchanted" with trashy celebrities, although he did campaign at the side of a celebrity Peretz doesn't mention: Bruce Springsteen, one of the most thoughtful and admirable singer-songwriters of his generation.

Nor did "trashy celebrities" even arguably provide the energy for the Kerry campaign. You can argue that 527s like America Coming Together and MoveOn made a major difference for Kerry — but not Paris Hilton.

He was for the Iraq war and against it.

What a rickety canard. Kerry voted to support a resolution to give the president the right to use force that even Bush said wasn't supposed to lead to war. Then he voted for a responsible version of the $87 billion bill for our troops in Iraq that would have taken the money from the lucrative tax cuts to the very richest Americans. Then he voted against the president's fiscally irresponsible version of the same bill, knowing it had the votes to pass.

Is that so hard? Is that really so confusing, Peretz? Have the volcano fumes made you woozy, or are you a deceptive and mean little man?

He was against gay marriage but for it, at least in contrast to George Bush, whose position actually was identical to Mr. Kerry's.

It's difficult to tell, but it seems as though Peretz is suggesting that Bush's support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is the same as Kerry's opposition to that amendment.

But the problem is that many Democrats have a downright hostile attitude to the flag, to patriotism itself, which is thought by some in the party to be a retrograde sentiment.

Who is the intended audience of this particular paragraph? Dick Cheney only?

If, however, Mr. Kerry had won, there was a chance, insiders say, that Mr. Soros would have been made secretary of state or of the Treasury. Imagine Mr. Soros at his first meetings with the ministers of finance of allied countries whose currencies he'd once trashed. Perhaps he would lecture them on the virtues of multilateralism.

Lacking a fact-based conclusion, Peretz instead presents his readers with a tower built from clouds and farts. "There was a chance," notes Peretz that "insiders" "say" that Mr. Soros would have been named secretary of state.

Couldn't Peretz get his unnamed insiders — who seem quite likely to be voices "inside" Peretz's head — to at least confirm that Soros would have been made secretary of state? And Eminem the secretary of agriculture? And Paris Hilton the National Security Advisor?

Imagine if Mr. Peretz had written that article. Perhaps it would have been read by its readers as a brilliant self-mocking farce.

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)