Among all these writers, there is major agreement on the following: 1: All of Israel knows that the contemplated building is not controversial. The settlement freeze announced earlier did not apply to building in this area of Jerusalem, a stone’s throw from the Knesset.  2: While the Israelis have time and time again shown a commitment to obtaining peace with the Palestinians, both Fatah and Hamas have not produced any movement of substance to match very real Israeli moves of compromise. To the contrary, any movement by Israel has been met instead by more intransigence.  3: By singling out Israel alone for tough talk, and ignoring any similar harshness towards any of  the Palestinian factions, the administration has made it harder for Mahmoud Abbas to accept any of  Israel’s offers, since it would make him look weaker than the American President. 4: The President is clearly revealing that he is moving along the path announced last year in Cairo, when his words indicated an overwhelming desire to tilt in the direction favored by the Arab nations.

As the liberal Democrat Lanny Davis asked,  referring to the recent announcement that the “settlement” construction had to be condemned, “How could the U.S. government use such language about a democracy that has been America’s most loyal ally in the world on virtually all issues, a nation that shares our core values — protecting civil rights, women’s rights, due process and free speech — not only for Israeli citizens, but for over 1 million Israeli Arabs as well?”

It is the question, and one answer comes from Marty Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic,  who both endorsed and campaigned for Obama during the campaign, and assured his readers Obama was a keen supporter of  Israel and its alliance with the United States.  Peretz makes the following startling statement. Rather than hope that the condemnation was a “temporary aberration,” as Davis thinks it might be, Peretz writes:

That the president and his team should now take up this old Arab formula for disguising reality demonstrates the poverty of their grasp of the problem at hand. In fact, Obama seems to think that he is the superego of the conflict and that his function is to hand out dicta on how to end it. But he has no dicta for the Palestinians and plenty for the Israelis. The Jewish state has many conditions under which it would be prepared to give more rather than less. Alas, the president can’t bring himself to publicly acknowledge this. The fact is that he does not particularly like Israel. Which is why it is so frightful to have his messenger running between Jerusalem and Ramallah making demands on the Jews.

The original attempt to unite both Old Left and Old Right took place on the eve of World War II, when right-wing isolationists and classical liberals in The America First Party, and left-wing isolationists in the pacifist movement and in Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party, joined hands and argued that FDR’s Presidency was moving America to fascism at home and war abroad. During the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact between August of 1939 and June of 1941, these forces were joined by the cadre of the American Communist Party.

The next reincarnation took place during the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union that broke out in the early1950’s. One of Harry S. Truman’s advisors, Joseph P. Jones, warned  that “most of the outright opposition” to Truman’s new bi-partisan interventionist foreign policy came from “the extreme Left and the extreme Right…from a certain group of ‘liberals’ who had been long strongly critical of the administration’s stiffening policy toward the Soviet Union, and from the ‘isolationists,’ who had been consistent opponents of all foreign-policy measures that projected the United States  actively into World Affairs.”

During the Iraq War, a disparate group of similar contemporary types, from Alex Cockburn on the Left to Pat Buchanan on the Right, tried once again to forge such a new alliance in opposition to the Bush foreign policy, and even before that, to the Clinton administration’s humanitarian intervention in Bosnia against the monstrous regime in Belgrade of Slobodan Milosevic. One of the group’s stalwarts, a writer for The American Conservative, Justin Raimondo, even wrote that it was false to claim that “America is a civilized country,” and referring to World War II, wrote that “the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.”

I argued that as the United State moved to assert its world responsibility as a major power, that the new attempt to create a Red-Brown alliance (named after the alliance in Russia of old Soviet era communists with fascists and Russian nationalists) would not disappear, and would only gain new adherents.

Now, as the confused and dangerous foreign policy of the Obama administration continues on, yet another attempt is now being created to build anew such a Left-Right alliance. The cast of characters is more than familiar. I understand the temptation. During the Vietnam War era, I myself was part of a similar small attempt at just such a strange alliance. Working with my friend, the late libertarian economist Murray N. Rothbard, I wrote often for his small and largely unknown journal of opinion, aptly titled Left and Right.  Rothbard, whom William F. Buckley Jr. pushed out of the pages of National Review, saw Buckley’s successful project of creating a new conservative movement as the right-wing of Establishment liberalism. It was not surprising that before long, Rothbard himself was penning articles in the pages of the far left magazine, Ramparts.

Now, as the Obama administration and the President himself goes around the world apologizing for America’s past evils, the adherents of a Left-Right alliance have sensed that perhaps the moment is propitious for yet one more try at creating what they see as a new and effective movement, that will help push the President further towards adoption of a non-interventionist and self-proclaimed “anti-imperialist” direction.

Almost a  month ago, their supporters met at a largely unreported conference in Washington DC, at a meeting that included old Rightists, conservatives, libertarians and leftists. A report was posted at a site called Front Porch Republic by Jeff Taylor, under the McGovernite title of “Come, Home, America:Prospects for a Coalition Against Empire.”  The meeting, Taylor reports, was composed of supporters of George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 presidential campaign,  Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign, and one from Ralph Nader’s 2004 campaign. None of the participants, evidently, see the irony of how vast divergent viewpoints on domestic issues fall by the wayside as the group united around the overarching theme of anti-Americanism.

Based on what Kuznick and Stone said about their concepts, I presented a tough and cogent argument about how it promises to be one of the most ill-advised and dangerous treatments of our history by the media. I also addressed what I thought Kuznick was bringing to the documentary. I called him “yet another of the politically correct tenured radicals; a man of far left sympathies who considers Oliver Stone a man of great insight and profound truths.” And I called him a “left-wing activist whose concept of education verges on indoctrination, not scholarly inquiry.”

Now, in his new interview, Kuznick inadvertently confirms every one of the charges I made, and if anything, indicates that perhaps I was not even tough enough in my critique. First, I note that evidently my first blog hit home. Kuznick, instead of dealing with any of the specific criticisms I made, makes the following gratuitous comment:

I knew that participating in such a project would make me a target for the Ron Radoshes and David Horowitzes of the world, but that was a small price to pay for reaching such a vast audience of people eager to gain a deeper and more critical understanding of U.S. history.

To those on the left, for whom my name and David Horowitz’s name are both anathema, he manages to score a cheap point by informing his left-wing base that anything either of us says holds no weight, and he is boldly going ahead while ignoring any of our criticisms, even if they might have merit. Anyone familiar with Oliver Stone’s anti-Americanism, his profound love for every leftist dictator from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez, and his distortion of history revealed in all his fictional treatment of the Kennedy assassination, the Nixon presidency, and the rest of his work knows that one thing viewers will not receive is a “deeper and more critical understanding of U.S. history.”

In his lengthy interview, Prof. Kuznick again returns to his own student past, as he shows readers how he combined his scholarship and his activism, and never made a separation between the two. He notes that he went to Rutgers because of those “exciting scholars” he studied with, when what he means are a group of Marxist and left-wing scholars who were at Rutgers in that period. I know most of those he puts on his list. He mentions the very distinguished historian Eugene D. Genovese, but neglects to inform his readers that unlike Kuznick himself, Genovese long ago left the ranks of the left, and became one of the most critical thinkers who openly reevaluated his old premises. In a pathbreaking essay he wrote for Dissent in 1994, called “The Question: The Fall of Communism and the North American Left,” Genovese tore apart the evasions and obfuscations of the pro-Communist and anti-American left-wing, thereby showing that even an old Leninist was able to learn from history and leave the world Prof. Kuznick still is part of.

The omission is strange, since Kuznick writes that he is “very interested in understanding the process of political transformation.” Evidently, his understanding, however, goes only one way — from those who started out conservative or mainstream and became radical. Those whose thought process led them to reach very different conclusions and to hence take different paths, he either ignores or simply condemns with snide comments.

As for his own motivations for the new Showtime series, Kuznick makes it very clear that rather than anything new, what he really welcomes is the ability to reach a new mass mainstream TV audience with more left-wing and neo-Communist analysis in a well made visual format, under the auspices of an acclaimed master of cinema, Oliver Stone. As he puts it, the project was “right up my alley from the start,” since the film, like his own work, deals with “American militarism, the Cold War, and the history of the nuclear arms race.” It will be, he says, a “film series on the history of the American empire and national security state.” So anyone expecting nuance and balance with talking heads offering different interpretations are clearly not going to get any of that nonsense. This is to be  propaganda expertly done, meant to influence a new generation. Kuznick notes that some of his own efforts in this regard have so far “proved futile.”

As Kuznick notes, his intention is now to reach “an audience of tens of millions,” not just his captive students at American University. Now let me turn to how Kuznick deals with what he says is one of his expert areas: why the United States used the A-bomb to end the war against Japan. He writes that Truman used it, “despite knowing that important Japanese leaders were looking for a face-saving way to end the war and that the Soviet invasion, which Japanese leaders dreaded, was about to begin and would likely prove decisive.”  Now Kuznick should know that in fact, every point he makes in that sentence has been challenged decisively by some of the most important recent scholarship. Indeed, even when I participated in the History News Network debate a few years ago about whether or not Truman was a war criminal, much had already appeared to effectively refute what Kuznick says about the use of the A-bomb by Truman.

A definitive judgment on this was made by the historian Wilson D. Miscamble in his Truman Institute prize-winning 2007 book, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War. Miscamble writes that when Kuznick and others protested the Smithsonian’s plan to display the plane Enola Gay and demanded instead an exhibit that “held that the atomic bomb was neither necessary to end the Pacific war nor to save American lives,” that was stopped by members of Congress, WWII veterans of the Pacific war, who forced the Smithsonian to back down. Kuznick’s group (as he writes proudly in his own piece ) then argued, as Miscamble summarizes their charges, that “blatant political pressure essentially had censored a well-researched, historical interpretation.” Miscamble comments that “viewed through the perspective of the most accurate historical research of the past decade, it is clear that the veterans’ groups saved the Smithsonian from the embarrassment of highlighting a deeply flawed interpretation.” These veterans, he adds, had a view that “holds up much better than the initial view offered by…the scholars who advised” the Smithsonian curators.

As for the Alperovitz theory that Kuznick subscribes to, Miscamble writes:

Alperovitz built his approach on a quicksand of faulty assumptions especially as regards the likelihood of an early Japanese surrender, and so contributed handsomely to a generation of confusion and misunderstanding regarding the use of the atomic bomb. The time has come to move beyond him and his distorted “thesis” once and for all.

To which I add not only a hearty amen, but ask Kuznick the following question: Since your own interview rehashes the discredited theory of Alperovitz and others as if it still holds up, will your and Oliver Stone’s film continue to advance it and condemn Truman for using the bomb and not considering what he calls “other options” that in fact were never really present as a viable alternative?

The article may be found here. In this blog, I call Corrie an “Endless Martyr for Anti-Israel Hatred,” which she is indeed. If anything, the new trial instituted by her parents proves that point. When all else fails, Corrie will be resurrected to serve this purpose once again. The Open Letter to the producer of the Shepherdstown WV Theater Festival, which I reproduce in the blog, contains information from various sources about what led to Corrie’s death.

Most important of all, I think, is that the investigative reporter for the leftist monthly Mother Jones, much to his surprise, concluded that Corrie was not intentionally murdered by the IDF, as Corrie’s comrades in the International Solidarity Movement argue, and as the play about her charges, as do Corrie’s parents.

A scurrilous left-wing website I previously have not heard of, called “Just Foreign Policy,” is heralding tomorrow’s trial. It concludes: “They murdered her, and yet she dogs them. It’s almost as if she were alive.”  As we know, the IDF did not murder her. Despite the fact that this has been established by various investigations, Corrie’s supporters continue to make this spurious charge as if it has been proven true.

This is a tactic the Left always uses: repeat the lie enough times, and anyone will hopefully believe it, especially if the target is Israel or the United States.  Let us hope that if as the British Guardian asserts, Israel allowed the trial to take place because of pressure from the United States, that the Israeli government takes Lenny Ben-David’s advice: arrest and try those testifying against the IDF after they are through with their court appearance. These ISM activists got into Israel in the first place under false pretenses, and were useful idiots whose activity in Gaza was taken on behalf of Israel’s sworn enemies, and with their cooperation.

Let them get their day in court before Israeli judges, and let us see what they decide is their verdict. I bet that is something they will not look forward to.

It is important, given the close identification throughout Europe of the left-wing with Islamic radicals- the kind of alliance that prevails in Britain and is spearheaded by the likes of George Galloway- that a few brave voices on the left can be found who are not afraid to speak out. In Spain, we learn from Rohola, the situation is almost as bad as it is in Britain. She writes boldly:

Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn’t care.

It is one thing when someone like David Horowitz, who has made this valid point time and time again, says it. It is another when a writer from the same left-wing precincts as her audience makes the case.  Rahola goes on to expose in detail the hypocrisy of the European’s left’s arguments. They claim that they stand for freedom. Rohola responds: “Not true. They are never concerned with the freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan…And they are never preoccupied when Hamas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom.” She terms such logic “ideological pathologies.”

These are, indeed, very strong words. Try to imagine the anger and hostility of her comrades on the left when they read this column. As for the press, she writes, “any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide.”  And at the same time, they never pause to condemn any violence propagated against Israel from nations like Iran and Syria.

As for the left in her own country- which she inexplicably considers herself a part-she accuses them of subscribing to both “anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments” that virtually define them politically.  One left-wing group in Spain, she informs us, just expelled a pro-Israeli member, because they inform their members, “our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel.”  In Campozuelos, the leftist mayor of that town changed Shoah Day, meant to commemorate victims of the Holocaust to the Palestinian Nakba Day, mourning the creation of Israel. They compounded that act by inviting one of the first 1970’s Palestinian terrorists, Leila Khaled, to come and speak.

Most horrible is that the current President of Spain has a foreign policy, she writes, that “falls with the lunatic left…[and] is unequivocally pro Arab,” and that privately, President Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East.”  She calls this policy “madness,” and concludes by trying to explain to her leftist friends why she, not even a Jew, is not opposed to Israel. The reason, she writes, is thus:

Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.

Her final words are equally strong: “The struggle of Israel,” she writes, “even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.”

Ms. Rahola, I predict, will soon not be able to define herself as a person of the political left. She will be vilified, (and probably has already been in Spain) attacked, smeared and called both a renegade and traitor. As many of my readers already know, I received that treatment decades ago, when I first concluded that Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet spy. Like Ms. Rahola, at the time I too saw myself as a man of the left. Indeed, in the introduction I wrote to The Rosenberg File, I explained that “as a man of the democratic Left, I certainly had no interest in serving the cause of domestic reaction or in justifying the actions of the new Cold Warriors.” That tactic did not work. I was immediately attacked by Victor Navasky in the pages of The Nation, for serving the interests of the Reagan administration in fomenting the Cold War.

I went on to argue that the truth has its own claims, and that to deny the truth, would mean to “concede that the Left stands for falsehood” and perpetuation of myth. What I learned- truly a hard lesson that did not occur right away- was the truth that in fact, the left did stand for falsehood. What was important was simply to write whatever served the cause at the moment- truth be damned.

Pilar Rahola is daring to tell the truth today, and stand up in her own country against the fanatic radicals, leftist extremists, and the pro-Arab government currently in power. I, for one, welcome her outspoken voice, however she defines herself politically. Salud!

Princeton is particularly excited about their appointment: “We’re looking forward,” Princeton said, “to a year of intense engagement with Van. We hope to model the give-and-take that is a hallmark of a genuine learning environment.” Perhaps Van will start with a seminar on how 9/11 was a set-up orchestrated by the Bush administration. Oh yes, on a TV talk show last week, Jones explained how he has no idea how his name got on that “truther” petition, because of course, he does not hold such nutty ideas.

Immediately, the organizers replied that he had signed the petition in full knowledge of what he was signing. Of course they are right. The ideas behind it were perfectly consistent with the left-wing milieu that Jones was part of at that time. And what about Jones’ now well known espousal of ultra-left communist ideas, and his active work from1992 until 2002 in the small West Coast Marxist-Leninist organization STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement)? Jones has never been asked to repudiate those views, nor has he in the recent past disavowed them or even commented on them.

These ideas too are most welcome in the academy, especially in the ranks of some of our most elite schools. In other words, Jones should feel very much at home at Princeton and in their  Center for African-American Studies.  Eddie Glaude, the Chair of the African-American Studies Department and the William S. Tod Professor of Religion, stated that “for close to two decades, he has been addressing the complex issues of environment, poverty, race and politics.  His tenure at Princeton will bring to the Center for African American Studies and its students a nuanced understanding of these issues.”

What Glaude’s statement makes clear is a hidden truth about our universities today. They are, of course, private institutions that are free to make any appointments they choose. This is not the White House, where the public at large has or should have a say in the type of figure hired to represent the nation.

This time he goes after the tea party movement, and instead of a nuanced and balanced appraisal, he begins by trying to blame the murder suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, who flew his small plane into a building housing an IRS division in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 18^th, on the new movement. Rich ignores what we know about Mr. Stack. He was furious about IRS rules that prohibited him from using knowledge he had as a software engineer to start his own business. In his rambling, sometimes incoherent letter, Stack attacks “organized religion” and different laws for the rich rather than the poor (standard leftist boilerplate), and goes after the late “neo-con” Senator Daniel P. Moynihan as his arch villain, all targets that distinguish him a great deal from today’s tea party advocates.  George W. Bush, whom certainly Frank Rich did his share of attacking for months on end, is described by Stack as “the presidential puppet” of the rich who pull the strings.

Tea partier indeed! Oh, Rich covers himself by writing that he was obviously “a lone madman,” and that it would be “glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying tea partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.’” But then Rich, having made the accusation while pretending to disavow it, goes on to say that his manifesto is a “frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage” that “overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.” In other words, he was not formally a tea party member or advocate, but nevertheless well might have been because he shares their views! A distinction without a difference!

Next, Rich goes on to chastise all those Republicans whom he accuses of basically standing with or apologizing for Stack — and of course, chooses to quote those on the far right to smear all Republicans. Rep. Steve King may believe that the IRS “is unnecessary,” but do all Republicans? Quoting one is enough to brand the entire Republican establishment as a bunch of crazies.  Next is to brand the tea party as the same, citing as proof — of course — the Times’ own biased report of the movement.

Naturally, Rich then moves on to the affiliation of the tea partiers with “the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right,” which to Rich is what really threatens our nation. While he never even mentions that some of us are worried about the inability of our institutions, even our armed forces establishment, to take on the documented threat of radical Islamists in our midst, to the mind of someone like Frank Rich the real threat is the nascent right-wing extremism that Republicans are failing to stand up to.

So enough of summarizing Rich. You can read his column yourself and get a good sense of how his conspiratorial mind works. Instead, I suggest two articles that should be read carefully for a good sober analysis of the real issues.

First, one should not miss Jamie Kirchick’s article in February’s Commentary, on the very real threat of homegrown terrorism from Islamists whom the entire establishment — including of course Frank Rich — completely ignore.  As Kirchik writes, liberals have drawn all the wrong lessons from the facts:

Despite all the available evidence pointing to the destruction that homegrown terrorists can wreak on free societies, some seem to have drawn the completely opposite conclusion about their proliferation and potential. They have interpreted Hasan’s “loner” credentials as, in the words of Ezra Klein, a blogger for the Washington Post, “encouraging,” for it indicates that his killing spree was not connected to a larger series of plots designed and carried out by an extensive, international network, all orchestrated from remote, hard-to-target locations in foreign countries.

He goes on to nail precisely the syndrome that Rich exhibits:

One would think that the increase in successful and near successful domestic-terrorism plots over the past year would engender some sort of recognition on the part of people who think and write about current events that a very real threat exists. And, to be sure, reading the mainstream press and listening to elite pundits over the past year, it is clear that the peril of domestic terrorism does occupy their thoughts. But it is decidedly not Islamist terrorism that they consider to be the great danger facing the country but rather violent extremism of an altogether different sort: “right-wing” extremism.

As Kirchick continues, “The not-so-subtle purpose of this campaign has been to associate the deplorable rhetoric of a handful in the right-wing fever swamp with the appreciable mass of conservatives, thus painting the president’s critics as racists prone to violence.”  Is he correct? Yes, and the proof is that Rich writes: “Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it.”

Much to his consternation, what Port found when they stopped at the small room containing the White House Library were two books that he assumed were chosen by First Lady Michelle Obama, and that proved to him that she and the President were indeed socialists. What Port spotted on the bookshelf, and which he took pictures of, were two books, The American Socialist Movement:1897-1912, written by Ira Kipnis, and what he thought was an even more telling volume, The Social Basis of American Communism, by Nathan Glazer.

“Lookie what I found,” he wrote on the posted blog. Shocking! Two books which by themselves, he admitted, “wouldn’t be a big deal,” but in “the context of Anita Dunn saying Chairman Mao is her favorite political philosopher?  In the context of the Mao ornament on the White House Christmas tree? In the context of Obama’s economic policies? Well, I’ll let you make your own call.” Among the over 300 comments was this rather typical one: “I wonder if the liberals who mock conservatives who refer to Obama as a socialist still find it funny?”

Almost immediately, the press went to town. The British Guardian promptly investigated, and quickly found that the two books had been picked by the First Lady — not the current one, but by Jackie Kennedy, during her husband’s presidency. In 1963 a Yale University Committee had chosen the books to represent different aspects of the American past.

Port quickly backed down, posting a blog update in which he wrote: “According to the Washington Post it was First Lady Jackie Kennedy who oversaw the placing of the books in the White House library, and they’ve been there since 1963.  Apparently no administration since has changed the contents of the library. So the guide I was with didn’t give me the whole story. Either that, or we misunderstood one another.”

But he also added that this misunderstanding did not invalidate the fact that “the Chairman Mao Christmas ornament, the Obama adviser who idolizes Mao and the nationalizations of the banks, car companies and attempted nationalizations of student loans and health care are all, unfortunately, still very true.”

What Port’s comment reveals, however, is the rather simplistic view that his spotting of the books provided further proof of the White House’s secret socialist agenda. It also raises yet another point. These two volumes are considered early classics in the attempt of scholars to explain the growth in America at certain times of both vibrant socialist and communist movements and to understand why they ultimately failed.

The answer is that when it aired their obituary coverage of Howard Zinn, the station actually used a few moments of negative comments about Zinn’s work from conservative activist and writer David Horowitz, whose words they put on the air. As Horowitz notes, the offending words took all of “30 seconds” of air time! But that, for Alterman, is too much.

They should not have asked for his comments, Alterman writes, because while they did use comments from friendly supporters of the late “historian,” both Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, they were “were fellow left-wing activists and friends of Zinn. Quoting friends and peers is the customary practice in obituaries.”

Alterman should know that in fact, this is hardly the case. I don’t recall him complaining in print when the great screen director Elia Kazan died, scores of obituaries not only wrote that he was most well known for being an informer before HUAC who named names of Communists he once worked with, but went on to offer quotes and interviews with scores of Kazan’s enemies in the film community.  Go look these up. You will be hard pressed to find friendly comments featured in any of them. Many of the obituaries failed to even tell readers why Kazan was regarded as one of our country’s greatest film directors.

So Alterman has made up an obit rule of his own, and he is mad that NPR, which he obviously expected to only report favorable comments about Zinn’s work, dared to have one out of three voices critical of Zinn.  He then writes: “Horowitz, on the other hand, does not claim to have known Zinn personally, and shares neither his goals nor views. He has no specialized knowledge of Zinn whatsoever. The single qualification that David Horowitz possessed to be included in the piece on Zinn’s obituary was that he could be depended upon to be deeply critical of the deceased.”

Even if that was the case, there would be nothing wrong with that. Scores of the eulogies given for Zinn that you can find on the web are from those who simply loved him because he was a fellow leftist, and who did not know him at all. They liked him because they agreed with Zinn’s simplistic view of the world.  But in fact, Horowitz was well equipped to judge Zinn. As he responded himself on his own website, “I am eminently qualified to comment on Zinn, having written a portrait of him and his writings in Unholy Alliance, and having devoted hundreds of thousands of words to my area of expertise, which is the Communist and neo-Communist left.”

Alterman, however, should see the irony in his opposition to NPR calling Horowitz. After all, Zinn claimed to speak up regularly for the right of dissent, and Horowitz was dissenting from the chorus of hosannas for Zinn that was appearing wherever you could look. That should be enough to justify his inclusion. But Alterman has yet another reason. He accuses NPR of covering themselves because they asked Chomasky, whom he calls a “radical leftist,” and therefore wanted to balance him with Horowitz, a “radical rightist.”

That, in fact, would be a valid reason. I suspect someone at NPR realized, however, that it was simply bad journalism to ask two avid supporters of Zinn and not ask anyone who thought Zinn was anything but the greatest gift to understanding our history. Even more egregious is something I do not see Alterman complaining about. A week or so ago, Time magazine had the following last paragraph in its obituary of Zinn:

Wherever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was on the front lines: inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and humor, in his dedication to nonviolence and in his sheer decency. He changed the conscience of a generation. It’s hard to imagine how many young people’s lives were touched by his work and his life. Both leave a permanent stamp on how history is understood and the conception of how a decent and honorable life should be lived.

You cannot find a more one-sided, dishonest and inaccurate summary of Howard Zinn anywhere. Indeed, even his admirers in Alterman’s own magazine are not so euphoric. And this is Time, the nation’s preeminent newsweekly. Who wrote this, you ask? The answer is—-none other than Noam Chomsky! Yes, Henry Luce and Whitaker Chambers are turning over in their graves. It’s the equivalent in the 1800’s of the press back then asking Engels to write the obituary of Karl Marx. (well actually, he did write the gravesite eulogy.)

 We have come so far that we can now expect our MSM organs of journalism doing The Nation one better. But to return to Alterman, he notes that NPR really bothered him because they “did not quote a single historian on Zinn, given the fact that this happened to be his profession.” Maybe it’s because aside from Eric Foner- who of course raved about Zinn for their own pages-most of the historians they might have asked would immediately show how bad Zinn was, and perhaps NPR did not want to give that impression.

To ask Horowitz, they knew, would immediately enable NPR’s friends to write him off as a crazy right-winger, therefore further establishing to their audience that Zinn must really have been great. Had they gone to Sean Wilentz or Michael Kazin, both of whom Alterman actually mentions in his column, they would have got very negative responses when they would have  evaluated the body of his work. Really, would Alterman have been any more pleased? Indeed, I suspect that he would have been furious, since having legitimate historians who come from the left side of the spectrum criticizing Zinn would have actually opened up people’s eyes.

And of course, as Alterman undoubtedly knows, NPR could have come to me. I had already written a very lengthy blog  a short while before his passing about Zinn’s television special. Then I penned my own obituary for Mindingthecampus.com. They could have included this one sentence that might have taken up a scant five seconds of airtime: “Zinn ransacked the past to find alternative models for future struggles. That, of course, is not the job of the historian, but of the propagandist.” It would have worked well, but somehow, I don’t think Eric Alterman would have been more happy about it than the soundbites they used from Horowitz.

Of course, had they used me, he could not have written a one page screed about how in using Horowitz, they were not using a “legitimate” point of view.  And Alterman notes that as for the substance of Horowitz’s views, which he quotes from selectively, they are “crazy.” You can read what Horowitz writes for yourself, and you will find that they are anything but. You will find that he easily distorts what Horowitz actually says, something a historian- which Alterman is- (although he is a professor of English at Queens College which in itself is absurd) is something a historian caught doing would immediately be called on the carpet for.  He chastises Horowitz for saying that “Zinn was responsible for ‘helping Stalin’ to ‘slaughter’ and ‘enslave’ Eastern Europe.”

But he leaves off Horowitz’s first sentence, in which he writes “Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave  all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain.” In other words, Horowitz is saying that by defending Stalin and the Soviet Union during its most horrific years, Zinn was serving as an enabler who allowed him to gain supporters in the West and in the United States who fought against those who saw the necessity of opposing Stalin in the Cold War. Horowitz did not mean literally, as anyone who reads can understand, that Zinn was sitting next to Stalin helping in doing the killing.

One thing is certain. At least NPR knew enough not to phone Eric Alterman.

This is the reasoning they offer: His songs are “an icon of Americana,” and have become, so they claim, “the backbone of populist political movements.” Gee, I thought that honor was reserved for Bruce Springsteen — but the problem is that he hails from New Jersey, which leaves Mellencamp to be acclaimed as the Bruce surrogate in the Hoosier state. Moreover, he has real political credentials. What are they, you may ask?  He actually “wrote a letter to John McCain” in which the proposed new Senator asked McCain to “stop political agendas, corporate greed and overall manipulation.” Think of it. McCain might have a political agenda! Since that is obviously bad, they don’t explain whether their magazine or Mellencamp might have one also.

Well, give him that one. Writing a letter shows some political concern. From that step, it’s just an easy skip and jump into the Senate club. And remember, he appeared at Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid,  helped the middle class, and best of all, has “rocker sensibility.”  Does he know anything about legislating, meeting with constituents, negotiating with Republicans and even other Democrats? Not necessary. The man rock and rolls! What more can you ask? Best of all, “he’s a true populist,” the Left’s answer to Sarah Palin.

Not to be outdone, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel went on television this week and made public her choice of Mellencamp, whom she said “has had a long track record with working for farmers and demonstrates true populist politics.”  Well if Katrina says it herself, it’s the clue for the troops to go all out for Mellencamp.

I wonder, if she had been editor of the magazine in the 30s and 40s, whether she would have been pushing to get Woody Guthrie to run for office. The fact is, there is not one person back then who would have made that suggestion, even his comrades in the Communist Party and Pete Seeger. They preferred Woody to function as what he liked doing best, writing and performing songs, and acting as the people’s bard whose lyrics hopefully propelled the left-wing base into working harder for FDR. That was sufficient.

Have they even asked Mellencamp? I don’t think anyone in the press has asked him as yet for a comment. But perhaps while he was at the White House a week ago for the civil rights musical testimonial, he and the president had a moment to toss over the prospect of a Senate run. Who knows? Perhaps he gave the word to vanden Heuvel, and she was chosen to be the one launching a trial balloon?  With this administration, after all, anything is possible.

So run John run. Nothing, I think, would make Indiana Republicans happier.