Weekend Edition August 16 / 17, 2008 Right is Wrong Arianna Huffington's Blind Spot By SETH SANDRONSKY Arianna Huffington has turned it around. She was in the GOP but is now a vocal critic of the party, especially the Bush-Cheney White House. Her body of work joins a growing field of criticism for the Republican Party leadership, with Conservatives Without Conscience by John W. Dean an example of a critic-from-within the party. Huffington has a “liberal” focus in contrast to that of Dean. She inveighs against the “takeover of the Republican Party,” one at odds “on the mainstream issues.” But this trend of reaction in the U.S. polity has roots far deeper and wider than that, which she gives short shrift in Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. The author’s view of the state’s role in its two-party form of government, by and for the needs of a U.S. upper class limits the effectiveness of her analysis.
The scope of Huffington’s book is the rise of the Bush II White House, propelled by the terror attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001. Her purpose is to reveal, critically, “the Right’s playbook” on a host of policy issues at home and abroad. A prolific author and editor-in-chief of the popular Web site Huffington Post, she finds much to fault with media corporations such as Fox News, and its commentators like Ann Coulter, a voice for the Right’s agenda. “As the Right took power, so did its media mouthpieces,” according to Huffington. She notes, accurately, the Washington press corps’ concern with maintaining its access to politicians as a large factor in the decline of American journalism. The examples Huffington cites of media coverage during the U.S. government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq is telling and the book’s strengths. The so-called “liberal media” is anything but that. But is the concentrated wealth driving the decline of critical reporting in newsrooms across the nation a function primarily of the “Right” and its power? Or is the “Right” a wing of the U.S. state which an upper class relies upon for the purpose of garnering capital in national and global markets? For example, the deregulating of the U.S. telecommunications industry occurred on the watch of Bill Clinton in 1996, a Democratic president. Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp., which owns the jingoistic Fox News, benefitted. This is a significant trend which is a part of—not apart from—U.S. economics and politics. The state’s role in this is not peripheral but is central. In chapter four, in a discussion of U.S. energy policy, Huffington reveals her worldview to personalize the modern market economy and polity. She writes: “There are steps we can take right now that will begin to slow—and eventually reverse the drain of dollars to the petro-vampires, foreign and domestic. The result would be a stronger, safer, and cleaner America that would, once again, be leading the rest of the world to a more promising future.” Three pages later Huffington claims that Hugo Chávez, the elected president of oil-rich Venezuela, is a “Marxist dictator.” Is this a progressive foreign policy or a page from the playbook of Fox News, purveyor of talking points for the Bush White House? What such demonization of Chávez does partly is to fog the bipartisan unity for Washington’s investor-friendly stance in Latin America and worldwide. The typical political rhetoric for U.S. public consumption is to attack the credibility of foreign leaders like Chávez. He survived a U.S.-backed ouster in April 2002, and continues to use the nation’s oil revenues to improve the lives of low-income Venezuelans. The U.S.’s two-party system fears and loathes this development. It represents the “threat of a good example,” not the favorite cup of tea for the future quarterly earnings of corporate America and its political representatives. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/sandronsky08162008.html
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