Left and Right: Venom and Vitriol

As the post-Sept. 11 era dragged into its third week without apparent military action from the U.S., the nation’s right and left magazine commentators grew restless. They’d already rattled the sabers or lobbied for peace. It was time to return to their favorite activity: infighting. Fratricidal warfare over interpretations of the terrorist attacks broke out on both sides. Charges of censorship rang out and were hotly disputed. One opinion-monger jumped ship, another came out of hiding. Not since the Afghani mujahedeen have ideological soul mates attacked one another with such rancor.

On The Nation’s website, iconoclast Christopher Hitchens stepped up his attacks on fellow leftists for attempting to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the terror. While he raged in general about “indecent” liberals who “act as self-appointed interpreter for the killers,” his particular bile was saved for linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky, whom he disparaged for suggesting that Sept. 11’s terror could be seen as an outgrowth of such U.S. actions as the 1998 U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

Hitchens compared Chomsky’s conduct unfavorably with that of the valiant airline passengers who are presumed to have prevented terrorists from crashing their plane into the White House or Capitol buildings. “One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of Sept. 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998,” Hitchens opined. “To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible.”

After days of silence, Chomsky struck back, but said he did so “only partially, and reluctantly.”

“The reason for the reluctance is that Hitchens cannot mean what he is saying.” Chomsky sniped in a response that also ran in The Nation. “He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply. This single atrocity [the Khartoum bombing] destroyed half the pharmaceutical supplies of a poor African country and the facilities for replenishing them, with an enormous human toll.

“Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously, there is no reason for anyone else to do so,” Chomsky concluded. “The fair and sensible reaction is to treat all of this as some aberration, and to await the return of the author to the important work that he has often done in the past.” (Like bashing Mother Teresa?)

But the venom on the left was no match for the vitriol on the right, where veteran Clinton-hater and columnist Ann Coulter’s increasingly strident anti-Muslim rhetoric touched off a brouhaha that ended with her expulsion from the pages of the conservative National Review Online.

Coulter first launched her own private jihad by suggesting that the U.S. invade anti-American countries, kill their leaders and convert the rest to Christianity.

Coulter later weighed in on airport security, saying that tactics such as searching her purse were “useless” because there had been no “rash of hijackings by Connecticut WASP girls” and suggesting passport checks on domestic flights for “any suspicious-looking swarthy males.” She also called for a “Terrorist Deportation Plan” to send all Muslims back to their countries of origin. “Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims--at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America that leaves 7,000 people dead in under two hours,” she wrote.

It was all too much for the National Review, which refused to run the “swarthy males” column. Claiming that the Review had fired her, Coulter gave an interview to the Washington Post, in which she accused her former colleagues of being “just girly-boys” who caved in to PC hysteria.

Editor Jonah Goldberg insisted Coulter was not fired but quit, and said the issue was not politics but journalistic competence.

“In the same 20 days in which Ann says--over and over and over again--that NR has succumbed to ‘PC hysteria,’ we’ve run pieces celebrating every PC shibboleth and bogeyman .... Paul Johnson has criticized Islam as an imperial religion. William F. Buckley Jr. himself has called, essentially, for a holy war. Rich Lowry wants to bring back the Shah, and I’ve written that Western Civilization has every right to wave the giant foam ‘We’re Number 1!’ finger as high as it wants .... Ann didn’t fail as a person--as all her critics on the Left say--she failed as WRITER, which for us is almost as bad,” Goldberg wrote.

In a final dig, Goldberg congratulated conservative writer David Horowitz’s online magazine FrontPage Magazine for picking up Coulter for the $5 a month fee she (falsely) claimed she’d been getting from the Review.

“They’ll be getting more than what they’re paying for, I’m sure,” he added.

Also last week, conservative scribe Andrew Sullivan came under fire from Slate’s Timothy Noah for writing in the Sunday Times of London that the “decadent left” in its pockets on the coasts “may well mount a fifth column.” Noah’s inclusion of the comment in his “Retract This, Please” column drew a tepid apology from Sullivan.

“I have no reason to believe that even those sharp critics of this war would actually aid and abet the enemy in any more tangible ways than they have done already...,” Sullivan wrote on his website. “By fifth column, I meant simply their ambivalence about the outcome of a war on which I believe the future of liberty hangs. Again, I retract nothing. But I am sorry that one sentence was not written more clearly to dispel any and all such doubts about its meaning. Writing 6,000 words under deadline in the heat of war can lead to occasional sentences whose meaning is open to misinterpretation.” One can only imagine how the words will fly when war actually breaks out.

And even with all the infighting, the right was still able to find energy for its other favorite pastime: Clinton bashing.

Commenting on the previous administration’s failure to capture Osama bin Laden, Sullivan said: “Through the dust clouds of September 11, and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage--and that is Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker and darker with each passing day.”

Lee Bockhorn in the Weekly Standard, addressing reports that Clinton has told friends he regrets that he didn’t face a challenge like the terror attacks: “At his core, Bill Clinton is a narcissist, and he continues to demonstrate a classic tendency of narcissists: the urge to relentlessly interpret everything, even events of immense world import simply as a part of his own grand personal drama. Thus the attack of Sept. 11 becomes not just an assault upon the nation and its principles, but a missed opportunity for the greater glory of The Man from Hope.

And finally, the National Review’s Goldberg (who comes by his Clinton-bashing honestly--his mother, Lucianne Goldberg, was Linda Tripp’s literary agent): “He even bragged about his ability to do 100 things at once. Hell, he multitasked Monica Lewinsky senseless. But ... Bill’s juggling act is one of the reasons we’re pulling bodies out of the rubble.”