Barone on Left's Mass Psychosis

Michael Barone writes some of the most perceptive overviews on the American political scene. His Almanac of American Politics has detailed information on every congressional district in the country and he is the first to spot trends, including the first to have discerned that the Contract With America in 1994 was gaining traction out in the hinterlands. In today's Wall Street Journal, Barone notices the strange habit Democrats have inherited from their European leftist forebearers to impose a template of the past to throw light on present political developments:

It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004.

Second, U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.

Third, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The leftward blogosphere had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon.

An elderly cousin/aunt of mine just died who would not get five minutes into a conversation before bringing up Alger Hiss and how this distinguished public servant had a promising career squelched by an evil Congressman from California named Richard Nixon. Then she would lapse into memories about how Nixon slandered "The Pink Lady" and other long-ago nastinesses by Tricky Dick. I agreed and still agree with her that Nixon was a baddie, but Alger Hiss was a traitor, something which the KGB files and Czech files proved after the fall of the USSR. The left tends only to remember its own interpretation of events, and not admit of an alternative narrative.
Barone then brings up the strange brouhaha raised by Karl Rove and the silly Plame kerfuffle:

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother's administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter's come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.
Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband's book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times' disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America's newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald's statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame's name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Tsk, tsk, Woodward should have realized which side of the bread was buttered---like the buzzing hives of MSM drones playing their mighty Wurlitzer and exciting photo shoots in Vanity Fair to incite the masses! Barone gets philosophical:

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. There's also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

Bingo!

The Editorialist Commissars on the left have been itching to extend unconstitutional concepts such as "hate crimes" into the political arena---and make questionable or dubious activities criminal through a drumbeat of publicity reminiscent of the totalitarian societies of the last century [and don't forget Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe in this century]. The MSM appears to be fomenting class and racial divisions in often lurid reporting [on in the Duke lacrosse team indictment by an appointed DA seeking to become an elected DA] and tendentious exaggeration [on the Iraq War].

If political opinion becomes criminalized, then elites replace democracy with oligarchic dirigiste administrative entities. We already see in France the sort of mandarinate that ensues when a political elite marginalizes public opinion because the elite knows better. The EU Commission in Brussels is doing the same in the new EU, making it a two-tier entity with the former east bloc entrants second-class citizens.

Barone is correct. For the left, reading recent history as a "How To Manual" leads to faulty constructs and to misreading present political reality.