Theater of the Absurd in Crawford

In Wednesday’s blog, David Horowitz writes: “I'm off to Crawford to see our President with 200 of his intimate friends, so the Blog will probably take a break on Friday.” This kind of name-dropping is unacceptable (By the way, Vin Diesel was total class act for hobnobbing at the XXX World Premiere after-party instead of solely hanging out in the celeb-only areas all night).

But seriously, Horowitz’s hobnobbing with Bush reveals a lot but it also raises some questions. First the questions (and for those of you familiar with my feud with Horowitz, please keep in mind that I am treading over familiar territory). Is there any concern that Bush is meeting with a man who admitted violating the Espionage Act (and is still subject to prosecution for this crime)? Is the Secret Service familiar with Horowitz’s admission--which he made multiple times? Is George W. Bush familiar with Horowitz’s prior activities? If during Bill Clinton’s presidency, Clinton had invited a person with a past similar to Horowitz's to his vacation, would there be any media attention given to this? Add on top of all this Horowitz’s endorsement of white supremacist Jared Taylor (Taylor, according to DH, “is a very intelligent and principled man.” ) Yuck. The final question: Where’s the outrage?

What the Bush-Horowitz meeting reveals should provoke further outrage. As I mentioned previously on HorowitzWatch, DH’s latest tome, How to Beat the Democrats, is a playbook for the hard right. A quick summary of the book is in order: in DH’s warped reality tunnel, Democrats are unprincipled henchmen and Republicans are well intentioned but naïve in what Horowitz calls the art of political war.
This is tripe. First, the Bush regime is full of political hit men and dirty tricks operators. A case in point, Robert Parry provides further evidence of the extent to which Bush and his henchmen were behind the violent riot to stop the vote counting in Miami-Dade County. Bush is lazy and not too bright, but he is a ruthless political strategist. Furthermore, for the past decade, significant factions in the Republican Party have been involved in unparalleled dirty tricks operations. Contrary to what apologists on the right maintain, these were not just rogue operatives. All one has to do is to follow the money from paranoid conspiracy theorist (and current sugar daddy to Horowitz) Richard Mellon Scaife; of course, some operatives—such as the members of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page—didn’t need to take Scaife’s money to spew his venom. The idea that Horowitz could teach Bush and the Republicans a thing or two about political warfare is as silly as the premise of his wretched book.