By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 28, 2017
I think it was President Eisenhower’s press secretary,
James Hagerty, who told White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, “I’m going to
gouge out your eyeballs with my car keys and skull f*** you.”
No, no, that didn’t happen. Nor did the vastly cruder
scene from the Millard Fillmore administration that I was going to go with
instead. It involved the postmaster general, a goat, a White House steward,
three farmer’s daughters, and an oak barrel full of axle grease.
I bring this up to illustrate that crude language does
not offend me, in the appropriate context. If I’m playing poker, hanging out in
my cigar shop (as I am right now), or sitting in a van pulling my ski mask over
my face before a heist, I can let the expletives fly. But curse around my kid,
or kids in general, and I get #$%^& pissed. And while this has never quite
been a family “news”letter, as the hooker said to Elliot Spitzer when he
released a kangaroo in a cowboy hat from the hotel closet, there are some lines
I will not cross, even here.
My second point is that all of the people freaking about
newly installed White House communications director Anthony “The Mooch”
Scaramucci’s language are freaking out about the wrong things. Of course, it
was crude and all that. But Tom Bevan is right: Former Obama chief of staff
Rahm Emanuel’s “colorful language” was part of his charm, at least according to
the White House press corps. Lots of people, including a few presidents, used
language that would make Paulie Walnuts wince. I used to work for a former LBJ
speechwriter. He used to tell me stories about some of the things Johnson said
— and did — with regard to his, well, namesake.
In other words, the cursing is not the issue, it’s the
context. I recall some conservatives defending Donald Trump’s tweets at Mika
Brzezinski on the grounds that Andrew Jackson had a filthy mouth too. Okay, but
he kept the blue talk out of his official statements.
The reason why the Scaramucci brouhaha is so dismaying
isn’t the less-than-shocking revelation that a guy who refers to himself in the
third person as “The Mooch” curses. Nor is it the suggestion that Steve Bannon
is one of only a handful of men to master the art of autofellatio (there’s a
Wikipedia entry on this topic that I will refrain from linking to, for the
children). That bit of rhetorical excess seems the single best illustration to
date of the imperative in the Age of Trump to take some statements seriously,
but not literally.
Communications
Misdirector
No, there are two main reasons the unfolding Scaramucci
clown show should arouse concern. The first is that he has no idea what he’s
doing and he might just be nuts. This is the White House communications director. But he apparently doesn’t know how
off-the-record interviews work. Now, for roughly 99 percent of the American
public, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. But, again, he is the White House
communications director. I am not ashamed of my ignorance about how to do all
manner of things, from how to remove a gallbladder to how to fly a plane. But I
expect these skills from surgeons and pilots.
The Mooch also doesn’t seem to grok that a public
financial-disclosure form is . . . public. Nor does he know that it’s wrong for
him to reach out to his FBI “buddies” in an effort to sic them on fellow
members of the White House staff.
Oh, and most communications professionals know that it’s
probably a bad idea to explain away your stream-of-consciousness character
assassinations with the fact that you didn’t appreciate the fact that
journalists are scum:
I made a mistake in trusting in a
reporter. It won’t happen again.
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci)
July 28, 2017
It is certainly true — and even advisable — to have a
healthy distrust of journalists. But just as surgeons know that a scalpel — as
opposed to, say, a spatula or a snapping turtle — is used to remove a
gallbladder, communications professionals know that you don’t say this kind of
thing out loud if you want to have good relationships with the press.
I Meant to Do That
Now it is possible that Scaramucci does know all these
things and he is simply playing Hamlet to shake things up, expose his enemies,
and grab attention. That is the go-to explanation for so many of the things the
president does as well. Whenever Donald Trump does something inexplicable by
Earth-logic, the immediate response in some quarters is “Brilliant!” And
sometimes, this crazy-like-a-fox explanation has some plausibility. Trump is
quite gifted in changing the narrative. But sometimes he makes the narrative
worse, not better.
Likewise, it seems to me that there’s some merit to this
theory of Scaramucci’s behavior. Either way, this is a good example of making
the narrative worse. And, again, he’s the communications
director.
Tailgunner Mooch
But even that malpractice doesn’t get to the heart of it.
Making the narrative worse is bad, but it’s the content of that narrative and
the manner by which he is crafting it that is so grotesque. Scaramucci made no
effort to confirm the truth of his accusation against Reince Priebus. He simply
accused him of committing a felony. That’s outrageous. And so are his repeated
efforts to conflate truly egregious and criminal leaks of classified
information with utterly typical and legal leaks about White House intrigue. The
leak that enraged The Mooch was about him having dinner with Sean Hannity,
former Fox News co-president Bill Shine, and President Trump. In his paranoid
fever, Scaramucci assumed it was Reince Priebus who went to the press — and
maybe it was. But that is not an illegal leak. And it’s certainly not a
disclosure of state secrets.
Indeed, the narrative Scaramucci seems Hell-bent on
crafting is that all White House
leaks are treasonous. “What I want to do is I want to f***ing kill all the
leakers,” Scaramucci told The New Yorker’s
Ryan Lizza.
Undermining the president, according to Scaramucci, is
unpatriotic. And the traitors aren’t just the leakers, but the reporters who
report them. “You’re an American citizen,” he told Lizza. “This is a major
catastrophe for the American country. So, I’m asking you as an American patriot
to give me a sense of who leaked it.”
Think about this for a moment. Scaramucci suggests that
he was betrayed by Lizza because he believed this conversation would be off the
record or on background. That means he thought he was leaking to the press
about the internal dynamics of the White House. Ergo, Scaramucci is a leaker
(something we knew already, by the way). There’s nothing inherently wrong with
leaking. This White House — like all White Houses — does it on purpose all the
time, the president himself perhaps most of all.
So, the problem isn’t leaking per se, it’s disloyalty to the president. There’s
also nothing wrong with a White House trying to punish disloyalty. That’s part
of politics.
But Scaramucci defines political loyalty to the president as a patriotic duty, not just
for the White House staff but for journalists too. And in his mind, patriotism
justifies smearing political rivals and making baseless accusations of
criminality.
There used to be a word for this sort of behavior:
McCarthyism.
Now, as a lifelong anti-Communist — never mind a National Review guy — I am happy to
concede that McCarthy was on the right side of the argument. But he undermined
the cause by the demagogic and dishonest way he tried to win the argument. He
made up evidence, wildly exaggerated, and accused anyone who disagreed with him
or his tactics of being traitors. The Left wanted to make any concern about
Communist infiltration of the government into a disreputable “witch hunt.”
McCarthy helped them make that claim more easily. But the truth is that,
despite whatever witch-hunt atmosphere there may have been, there were actual
witches to be worried about.
Consider the difference between these two contexts.
During the Cold War, the Soviets were determined to overthrow the United States
of America, at least in theory. In practice, they were definitely determined to
undermine American interests at home and abroad. Treating people who were
sympathetic to the Soviet cause — never mind actively engaged in helping them —
as less than patriotic is to my mind entirely justified.
But here we have a man who thinks McCarthyite tactics are
justified to support Donald Trump.
Scaramucci says he’s doing this to advance the “president’s agenda” to make
America great again. But it seems more obvious that his first priority is to
curry favor with the boss and solidify his own power.
Also, let me just say that loyalty to a person isn’t how
we define patriotism in this country. Patriotism is about adherence to ideas
and principles. Rich Lowry would be the first to insist it’s also defined as
loyalty to historic concepts of nationhood. That’s fine. But it’s not defined
by loyalty to man. Not here.
And that brings me to the second reason why this is all
so disturbing. Trump apparently approves of what Scaramucci is doing and how
he’s doing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment