The Kopechne Effect
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Thursday afternoon, libertarian journalist David Weigel sent out
a message on
Twitter that struck me as profound: “The proliferation of liberal
media watchdogs has led to much, much, much more repetition of
what conservatives say.”
Watchdogging is perhaps the sincerest form of media flattery. If
what was written and said by conservatives on the Internet, radio
and TV had no influence on public discourse, liberals would not
be constantly monitoring Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and
Michelle Malkin. What is amusing, to anyone directly familiar
with the haphazard operating environment of right-wing
communications, is the liberal suspicion that everything
conservatives do is carefully orchestrated.
When news broke that Ted Kennedy had died, many people had a
reaction quite similar to
my own: “Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.”
It’s an old line I’d used often over the years whenever Teddy
made news. While I thought I’d stolen it from Ann Coulter,
someone else said it actually originated more than two decades
ago as a Chevy Chase punchline on Saturday Night Live.
Tasteless as that punchline may be, certainly liberals have often
shown much worse taste in their utterances about dead Republicans
who never killed any campaign aides. Turnabout may not always be
fair play, but I was not the only American who thought the events
of July 19, 1969, to have been the definitive moment in Senator
Kennedy’s career.
“The No. 1 search term at Google Trends Wednesday morning was
‘Ted Kennedy.’ Nos. 2 and 3: ‘Mary Jo Kopechne’ and
‘Chappaquiddick,’ wrote
Politico’s Michael Calderone, noting that not everyone
was observing the Massachusetts Democrat’s death in the
hagiographic style of the mainstream press.
Consensus or conspiracy? The liberal watchdogs were vigilant, and
Carly Carioli of the Boston Phoenix
pounced, decrying evidence of “a right-wing smear campaign…an
orchestrated movement” on the part of “ghoulishly insensitive
right-wingers.”
Oh, yes, like the conservative blogger who quite touchingly
recalled Kopechne’s civil-rights activism, and pondered what
the promising 28-year-old might have become, had she lived.
Democrats immediately politicized Kennedy’s death, seeking to
enlist their departed comrade — in a manner reminiscent of
Weekend at Bernie’s — as the leading advocate for
passage of health-care legislation. No liberal complained
about that, but when some Republicans mentioned
how Sen. Paul Wellstone’s 2004 funeral became an ad hoc
campaign rally, there was an outcry from the Left.
“It looks like word went out yesterday about what leading
conservative voices should say about Ted Kennedy’s death:
complain about the memorial service that hasn’t happened yet,”
wrote Steven Benen of the Washington Monthly.
All this watchdogging indicates a paranoid tendency among
soi-disant “progressives,” a fear that has its source in
their own ideology. To the liberal True Believer, “rugged
individualism” is not a lifestyle nor an attitude, but rather a
false myth propagated by Republicans for political purposes. The
liberal cannot admit that ballets and operas would exist without
taxpayer support from the National Endowment of the Arts, nor
that a family could provide for its health-care needs without
government subsidies and bureaucratic superintendence.
Therefore, it never occurs to liberals that their political
antagonists are capable of independent thought and action in the
field of communications. If Mark Levin, Michael Reagan, Glenn Reynolds and
Ann Coulter say similar
things about any particular phenomenon — e.g., the media’s
absurdly hagiographic tributes to Ted Kennedy — this can only
reflect a purposeful coordination of effort. Somewhere, there
must be some right-wing Gepetto pulling the strings.
Note how this parallels the usual liberal explanations of how the
world works. If a teenager skips school, smokes dope, hangs out
with hoodlums, accumulates a record of juvenile crime and fails
to graduate high school, no well-meaning liberal would ever
suggest that this teenager is responsible for his own failures.
No, if this youth turns 18 inside a jail cell, becomes a repeat
offender when paroled, and spends the rest of his life as one
more statistical data-point proving the “socio-economic
inequality” that liberals insist the taxpayers must pay to
alleviate, the criminal himself cannot be blamed.
Instead of considering the role of individual responsibility, the
liberal habitually attributes all human misery to nebulous forces
of evil — greed, discrimination, “Corporate America” and so
forth — which serve as ready-made scapegoats in liberal
demonology. Occasionally, when these reliable bogeymen lose their
power to terrify the gullible, liberals will conjure up new
demons — global warming, suburban sprawl, Halliburton –
representing the evils from which liberals courageously offer to
rescue the helpless citizenry.
This ideology of disempowerment, portraying the downtrodden as
passive victims of malevolent forces beyond their control,
expresses itself as paranoia whenever liberals find themselves at
a political disadvantage. If President Obama’s poll numbers are
down, if conservatives seem on the verge of defeating the
decades-old liberal dream of an all-encompassing federal
health-care bureaucracy, the consistency of their worldview
prevents liberals from accepting the most obvious explanations
for these setbacks.
It cannot be that Obama is inept, or that citizens have examined
and rejected as unworkable the legislation Democrats have
proposed. Rather, the liberal believes, there must be some
right-wing bogeyman to blame.
Enter — deus ex machina, as it were — the
“orchestrated movement” that liberals so quickly perceived in the
wake of Ted Kennedy’s death. Even as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
twisted himself into ridiculous knots to declare Obama “the
new brother…of the Kennedy tradition,” liberals fumed over the
“right-wing smear campaign” which reminded America that Teddy’s
most memorable contribution to that tradition was to get drunk
and drive an Oldsmobile off a bridge.
Whatever liberals want to blame on “ghoulishly insensitive
right-wingers,” we have yet to match that.
