Jim Sleeper: An open letter to John Fund, our intrepid, two-footed truth teller on the Hashemi-at-Yale case
Dear John Fund,
You called me at home Saturday, March 4, seeking information or a comment on the enrollment of the former Talibani spin doctor Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a non-degree student at Yale. You told me, as you tell readers in this, your second column in a row on the subject, that you are shocked, shocked that no one in authority at Yale would say anything about it to you. When I asked if you'd tried Charles Hill, a neoconservative Diplomat in Residence there, a Vulcan on the Iraq War and a scourge of terrorism, or the historian John Gaddis, who supports Hill as his colleague in their “Grand Strategy” seminar for bright students drawn to the national-security state, you said that even they weren't talking.
What? Not even Hill, who, writing in your own Journal in 2004, blamed inadequate intelligence performance mainly on “a decline in the quality of personnel, brought about by pressures for diversity” that bypass “broad-based historical and area-studies…. gained at ‘elite’ colleges and universities”? Gosh, John, I could almost feel the pain in your false ingenuous wonderment on the phone: Could it be that Yale, for which you have the highest regard, has something to hide here and that even its truth-tellers have been muzzled?
A journalist's and an editorial page's reputation is an accretion of many actions, encounters, and omissions over a number of years, John. It's time once again for someone to tell you, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors, and the online OpinionJournal that your reputations, even as journalists with a license to commit punditry, have gone the way of Robert Whitewater-Bartley, who, no less than The New York Times’ Howell Raines in his editorial-page phase, lashed himself to the mast of the U.S.S. Whitewater and went down with it some time ago. And maybe the one who ought to tell you this time is me, bearing as I do so proudly the body scars of one who has excoriated the liberal-left for many of its sins, yet is not a conservative, but a civic republican in the old-fashioned, disinterested sense of the term.
It's as a civic republican, not a liberal or a leftist, that I was disappointed by your call to me this morning. In a backhanded way, you reminded me of my second cousin James Wechsler, who was editorial-page editor of the New York Post at the height of its left-liberal, McCarthy-bashing, pro-labor-and-civil-rights days. Wechsler wrote a book, The Age of Suspicion, that recounted his early years as a young Communist and then as a militantly anti-Communist liberal. He gives an unforgettable description of the mental morphology and mannerisms of Party functionaries and journalists at The Daily Worker -- how they kept up appearances as serious journalists while sinuously bending the craft toward ever-reliable service to the Party line.
That lilting, gentlemanly, faux-ingenuous tone of yours on the phone this morning, John -- opening with your ingratiating reminder that your Journal editorial pages had published me a few times (the last time a decade ago) brought back to me some of the characters in Wechsler's book. Your manner doesn't quite equal Whitewater-Bartley's memorably crusty, civic-republican mien, but in every respect, down to the nicest detail, it sure does resurrect the best of the old pros at The Daily Worker.
Perhaps the saddest characteristic of minds like yours and of your predecessors in the other Party, John, is your apparent confidence that you're resourceful, clever, and brave in what is actually a rather sadly obvious towing of the predictable “Con-intern” line.
And what is the “Con-intern” line these days? The more it founders on its own yawning contradictions and blunders, the more desperate it becomes to fix blame on liberals, whom it portrays relentlessly as cowering and pusillanimous, yet somehow amazingly powerful.
So, John, you blame ditzy post-modernist professors and aging militants for doing to young minds what everyone knows a few trips to the Internet or the mall do, because torrents of corporate mass-marketed decadence are more powerful in student life than ten thousand "transgressive" academics (if there are that many). You blame liberals, from Cindy Sheehan to James Fallows, for the ignominious, wholly self-induced failure of American warmakers and policymakers in Iraq. You blame liberals for forcing out Harvard's globally gross Larry Summers, who has no small-“r” republican wisdom. ...
Read entire article at American Prospect
You called me at home Saturday, March 4, seeking information or a comment on the enrollment of the former Talibani spin doctor Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a non-degree student at Yale. You told me, as you tell readers in this, your second column in a row on the subject, that you are shocked, shocked that no one in authority at Yale would say anything about it to you. When I asked if you'd tried Charles Hill, a neoconservative Diplomat in Residence there, a Vulcan on the Iraq War and a scourge of terrorism, or the historian John Gaddis, who supports Hill as his colleague in their “Grand Strategy” seminar for bright students drawn to the national-security state, you said that even they weren't talking.
What? Not even Hill, who, writing in your own Journal in 2004, blamed inadequate intelligence performance mainly on “a decline in the quality of personnel, brought about by pressures for diversity” that bypass “broad-based historical and area-studies…. gained at ‘elite’ colleges and universities”? Gosh, John, I could almost feel the pain in your false ingenuous wonderment on the phone: Could it be that Yale, for which you have the highest regard, has something to hide here and that even its truth-tellers have been muzzled?
A journalist's and an editorial page's reputation is an accretion of many actions, encounters, and omissions over a number of years, John. It's time once again for someone to tell you, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors, and the online OpinionJournal that your reputations, even as journalists with a license to commit punditry, have gone the way of Robert Whitewater-Bartley, who, no less than The New York Times’ Howell Raines in his editorial-page phase, lashed himself to the mast of the U.S.S. Whitewater and went down with it some time ago. And maybe the one who ought to tell you this time is me, bearing as I do so proudly the body scars of one who has excoriated the liberal-left for many of its sins, yet is not a conservative, but a civic republican in the old-fashioned, disinterested sense of the term.
It's as a civic republican, not a liberal or a leftist, that I was disappointed by your call to me this morning. In a backhanded way, you reminded me of my second cousin James Wechsler, who was editorial-page editor of the New York Post at the height of its left-liberal, McCarthy-bashing, pro-labor-and-civil-rights days. Wechsler wrote a book, The Age of Suspicion, that recounted his early years as a young Communist and then as a militantly anti-Communist liberal. He gives an unforgettable description of the mental morphology and mannerisms of Party functionaries and journalists at The Daily Worker -- how they kept up appearances as serious journalists while sinuously bending the craft toward ever-reliable service to the Party line.
That lilting, gentlemanly, faux-ingenuous tone of yours on the phone this morning, John -- opening with your ingratiating reminder that your Journal editorial pages had published me a few times (the last time a decade ago) brought back to me some of the characters in Wechsler's book. Your manner doesn't quite equal Whitewater-Bartley's memorably crusty, civic-republican mien, but in every respect, down to the nicest detail, it sure does resurrect the best of the old pros at The Daily Worker.
Perhaps the saddest characteristic of minds like yours and of your predecessors in the other Party, John, is your apparent confidence that you're resourceful, clever, and brave in what is actually a rather sadly obvious towing of the predictable “Con-intern” line.
And what is the “Con-intern” line these days? The more it founders on its own yawning contradictions and blunders, the more desperate it becomes to fix blame on liberals, whom it portrays relentlessly as cowering and pusillanimous, yet somehow amazingly powerful.
So, John, you blame ditzy post-modernist professors and aging militants for doing to young minds what everyone knows a few trips to the Internet or the mall do, because torrents of corporate mass-marketed decadence are more powerful in student life than ten thousand "transgressive" academics (if there are that many). You blame liberals, from Cindy Sheehan to James Fallows, for the ignominious, wholly self-induced failure of American warmakers and policymakers in Iraq. You blame liberals for forcing out Harvard's globally gross Larry Summers, who has no small-“r” republican wisdom. ...