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PARTISAN REVIEW
future administrations . Why else did the politically motivated jour–
nalist Sidney Blumenthal, in the
Washington Post,
choose to say that
the conference had "become unstuck" after Cameron said that he no
longer supported the
contras,
even though he was told that the organ–
izers had invited him in order to have a lively discussion. Games
Ridgeway , in
The Village Voice,
wrote only about Cameron's "flip–
flopping" rather than about the rest of the meeting.) And why else
would Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn have taken
the trouble to malign these ex-radicals as "traitors for America," as
having come "from pink Pampers through Black Panthers to one–
dimensional Reaganisms ," and as suffering from "disordered men–
tality?" Did they engage in
ad hominum
attacks on the participants ,
and especially the organizers , in order to "defend" their own crum–
bling beliefs, or did they really think that freedom of the press con–
sists only of the freedom to distort? But then , slanted reporting and
guilt by accusation has become their favorite tactic. The readers of
The Nation, The Village Voice,
the
Times Literary Supplement,
and the
Washington Post,
I believe , deserve better.
But this is not what troubles me most about this leftist right–
eousness. For I am convinced that its steady drone of accusations at
anyone who doubts that whatever is "left" is good , and that all else
deserves to be maligned as conservatism, cold warriorism, or Rea–
ganism, has deflected the thoughts (and possibly the actions) of
many Americans who otherwise might think for themselves - in–
stead of simply voicing support for the liberal causes to which no one
ever has objected.
To put it more concretely: the constant flow of attacks on the
Reagan government, in the purplest of prose , has concentrated on
particulars-the Meese, Baker, or Deaver scandals, Irangate, the
Bork hearings, the Ginsburg withdrawal- to the exclusion of every–
thing else. These leftist journalists have concentrated on "getting
them" for a succession of specific malfeasances, each of them re–
placed (with equal intensity) by the succeeding one . But precisely
because this president has managed to outfox his antagonists, they
have ended up allowing him and his entourage to avoid facing up to
the much larger, and possibly irrevocable, damages he has wreaked:
the consequences of the enormous deficit that is bound to haunt the
country for years, if not forever; the outrageous celebration of celeb–
rity (replacing already thin substance) which no amount of Teflon–
calling can remedy ; the promulgation of an ideology fostering the
