The Half-Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

Is one of the blathering blowhards of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy about to suffer fallout from his election year antics?

This Washington Whispers column from the current online edition of U. S. News & World Report describes the political cost of playing a one-sided game of hardball:

You might notice something missing from Hardball With Chris Matthews soon: Republicans. "Hardball may seem more like badminton during the Republican National Convention," threatens a GOP insider. What's up? The GOP thinks Matthews has gone over to Sen. John Kerry 's side and is too critical of the Bush campaign's editing of a Hardball interview with Kerry posted on the party's negative site, www.kerryoniraq.com. As payback, they've stopped urging Republicans to appear on the show. Hardball executive producer Tammy Haddad dismisses charges Matthews is biased: "We beat everybody up." So far, nobody from the White House has told her of the show's being blackballed.

Let's urge the GOP to make good on this threat. If you agree, please write to the office of RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie at Chairman@gop.com and ask him to discourage Republicans from guesting on Hardball and Crossfire during the convention.

Chris Matthews is shamelessly disrespectful to guests with whom he disagrees and even, according to the experience recounted by Michelle Malkin, manipulative, arrogant, and bullying. I could add more adjectives, but then there wouldn't be room for the following list of potential pundits and their e-mail addresses:

Jed Babbin jednro@aol.com
Michael Barone MichaelBarone@MichaelBarone.com
Tony Blankley tblankley@washingtontimes.com
David Brooks dabrooks@nytimes.com
Tammy Bruce heytammybruce@yahoo.com
Mona Charen mcharen@compuserve.com
Linda Chavez comment@ceousa.org
Rod Dreher rdreher@dallasnews.com
Larry Elder sage@larryelder.com
David Frum dfrum@aei.org
Frank Gaffney info@centerforsecuritypolicy.org
Jim Geraghty j.geraghty@starpower.net
Paul Gigot wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Jim Glassman jglassman@techcentralstation.com
Jonah Goldberg JonahNRO@aol.com
Victor Davis Hanson author@victorhanson.com
Hugh Hewitt hugh@hughhewitt.com
Laura Ingraham suggestions@lauraingraham.com
Jeff Jacoby jacoby@globe.com
Michael Ledeen mledeen@aei.org
David Limbaugh david@davidlimbaugh.com
Kathryn Jean Lopez klopez@nationalreview.com
Rich Lowry comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
Cliff May info@defenddemocracy.org
Deroy Murdock murdock2000@ibm.net
Kate O'Beirne comments.obeirne@nationalreview.com
Jim Pinkerton pinkerto@ix.netcom.com
John Podhoretz Podhoretz@nypost.com
Dennis Prager tpp@dennisprager.com
Glenn Reynolds pundit@instapundit.com
Peter Robinson RbnsEggBlu@aol.com
William Safire safire@nytimes.com
Mark Steyn mark@steynonline.com
Emmett Tyrrell editor@spectator.org
Armstrong Williams arightside@aol.com
Walter Williams wwilliam@gmu.edu
Byron York byork@nationalreview.com

I will be e-mailing each of these commentators to thank them for their constructive contributions to political discourse and encourage them to avoid Spitball, a.k.a. Hardball, and Crossfire during the Republican National Convention and until November 2, 2004.

Blackball "Hardball"

What if they taped a Hardball and nobody came?

No Republican or conservative, that is. The same for Crossfire. The last time I watched either of these shows was the last time, period. I was so aggravated that I didn’t know who would have an aneurysm first, Chris Matthews or me. I have often marveled that seemingly rational Republicans continue to participate in such an ugly, pointless, cacophonous spectacle when there are other venues for civil discourse.

The primary difference between Michelle Malkin and other right-thinking guests who were shouted down and shut up by Matthews, Carville and Begala (sounds like a team of ham-fisted proctologists) is that Malkin did not go quietly into the blogosphere. I hope details will be forthcoming from Ann Coulter, John O’Neill and others who experienced similar treatment.

The format of these shows requires the illusion of ideological balance. So I ask again: what if the conservative/Republican chairs were left empty during this campaign season?

No, I am not suggesting an audience boycott, which would be redundant since the ratings confirm that an overwhelming majority of the cable news audience already tunes out, but rather a guest boycott. I’m sure Chris Matthews could still attract some attention craving GOP politicos from his cocktail circuit, but I wonder if his producer’s Rolodex is deep enough to fill five shows per week. Even David Dreier and John McCain have to work some time.

I will post a list of e-mail addresses for regular and potential guests of Hardball and Crossfire if you would like to join me in urging those who are our political kin to refuse invitations to appear until after the November 2nd election at least. The mainstream media are long overdue for a comeuppance and their talk show mouthpieces are a good place to start.

Political Week in Review

According to conventional wisdom, the Clintons want John Kerry to sink so that Hillary can run for Prez quickly before something else tarnishes the family name. So why aren't they leaning on their friends in the mainstream media to cover the issue of Kerry's Cambodian Christmas Eve and other tall tales that are potentially fatal to his campaign? Maybe the CNN-MSNBC-New York Times-Time-Newsweek crowd hates Bush more than they love Clinton. If Kerry is elected, what happens to the career of Dick Morris and will he be supplanted by the first of the "Band of Brothers" to go AWOL from the DNC dinghy? Meanwhile, Clinton apologist emeritus Lanny Davis is on the crisis containment circuit, defending Kerry's legend and reminding us that a professional spinmeister is a Democrat president's best friend. Kerry will surely need a boatload of them.

Responding to the call to relive bygone battles, those other heroes who saved us from the evil military and CIA, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, are making separate political comebacks this election year. I'm sure that will endear Vietnam vets even more to the Kerry campaign. I hope the paths of Hanoi Jane, Cambodia Kerry and Chicago Seven Tom meet in Little Saigon, which is located in Loretta Sanchez's congressional district where Asian-American voters remember what Lt. Kerry did after the war and are overwhelmingly in favor of President Bush.

My son Chris thinks that Teresa Heinz Kerry looks and acts sedated in public. Did you see Teresa playing the air violin during the concert-with-fireworks immediately after the Democrat convention was adjourned? Her husband looked uncomfortable as usual and turned away to join the Edwardses, but her televised performance continued. In a world of celebrity wives with exhibitionist tendencies, she is more like Courtney Love than Jackie Kennedy. Clearly Teresa's unhappiness reached critical mass at the Grand Canyon photo op. Someone in the Kerry campaign should tell Madame that her Mercury is retrograde until November 2 and until then travel is not advised.

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy theory is alive and well on Meet the Press. While discussing the "shove it" incident with William Safire on August 8, Tim Russert defended Teresa's outburst. Safire reiterated that Heinz Kerry had denied using the word un-American after clearly uttering it earlier onstage. Russert's reply? But the reporter worked for Richard Mellon Scaife. Oh, well, that changes everything. Never mind that we all heard the audio proof ourselves belying Teresa's denial. As Governor McGreevey might say, it's not what the truth is but whose truth it is.

I stopped watching Hardball in even-numbered years, when a Democrat is on the ballot somewhere and Chris Matthews cannot even pretend to entertain opposing points of view. I have decided that his more rational demeanor during the Clinton years, of which Matthews was not a fan, was an anomaly. Along with James Carville and Paul Begala, Matthews represents the worst sort of gotcha television talk. He cynically exploits Ronald Prescott Reagan, who was never a Republican nor a Reaganite, as a political trophy, albeit one symbolic of nothing except family dysfunction. Likewise, John Kerry's focus on four months of disputed military service and Chris Matthews' ready acceptance of it as a substitute for experienced leadership and judgment reveal that both Matthews and Kerry view the war on terror as little more than a campaign issue to be mitigated. With the truth emerging about Kerry's swift boat adventures, Vietnam seems for him to have been a combination of premeditated resume padding and the ultimate extreme sport.

"What are we going to do about Joe?" That's what the MSNBC brain trust must be asking itself about Scarborough Country. Joe Scarborough took a break this summer and returned a changed host. I suspect he had surgery to remove his conservative clarity and convictions, which the head of NBC keeps in a jar on his nightstand. For awhile he was paired with Pat Buchanan and Ron Reagan the lesser, but this week he has returned to his old format. However, far from the feisty O'Reilly wannabe he used to be, Scarborough now equivocates tentatively as though some programming bigwig is holding a knife to the rest of his intellectual property.

The Dennis Miller show on CNBC and Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC are must "C" TV. Their multimedia equivalent is Hugh Hewitt, whose radio show and web site are touchstones for center-right conservatism. Hugh is the hub of the blogosphere that is responsible for the deconstruction of Kerry's Cambodia fable. His new book If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat is on my birthday wish list. I live in Hugh’s home territory, but our local station KRLA delays the third hour of his broadcast for three hours. Why? So they can carry Michael Savage during drive time. Savage does not fit in the same lineup with influential thinkers William Bennett, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt.

In Memory of My Sister

Beyond the door,
There's peace I'm sure,
And I know there'll be no more
Tears in heaven.

On September 18, 2003, my only sister, Donna, died unexpectedly. Today would be her 58th birthday.

Donna was larger than life, an overused cliché but it fits literally and figuratively. One day as she walked ahead of him, our father said her derriere looked like two cats in a bag, fighting. And that was when she was a slim teenager! At any size, from the tall, skinny, beautiful child to the big, beautiful woman she became, her body could not contain the vibrant force of her personality. Donna was the kind of person who spilled over everywhere she went. Strangers became instant friends and, in recent years, internet correspondents. The dozens of people on her e-mail list know what I mean. Our brother Bob and I begged her to write at least one personal message for every ten she sent that were forwarded jokes and inspirational stories. But at least her global messages balanced out all the spam about Viagra and anatomy enlargement.

I was blessed with three mother figures: my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my sister. As the classic bossy older sister, Donna dominated my life in a completely unique way that empowered her to say and do things I would never tolerate from anyone else. The friendship that developed from our sibling bond was tested frequently, especially after our parents passed away, but endured, to my eternal gratitude. The ten-year gap in our ages could have been hard to bridge, but Donna decided early to keep her bratty little sister close, despite countless impediments that would have discouraged most older sisters.

She is responsible for my love of rock ’n’ roll, music in general and dancing. She taught me how to do the Twist and then entered me in a dance contest for teenagers, which I won at the age of 4. She convinced Mom and Dad to send me to dance school soon thereafter and later she lobbied for me to have the professional music lessons she would have loved, since she was frustrated flautist. She bought me my first record album (Beatles) and took me to my first concert (Dave Clark Five). She forgave me for giving her boyfriend’s class ring to my Kindergarten sweetheart; for defacing her school yearbooks; for letting our parents find out she had a yellow, fringed, go-go dancer bikini when I dug it out of her dresser drawer and wore it around the house; for warping her favorite 45rpm singles in the summer heat.

In return, she generously included me in many teenage activities, which in Orange County in the mid-1960s usually meant going cruising, to drive-in movies or to the beach. How many boy-crazy 18-year-olds would do that? I remember many weekends together when she would go surfing at the legendary Wedge in Newport Beach, where it was too treacherous for me to even play in the waves, just so she could impress the cute, wild guys. When a co-worker she was dating invited her to attend their company picnic, I tagged along. She was always the best tour guide and delighted in introducing me to new places that I might have missed otherwise.

Such was her influence over me that she shaped who I am, providing an example of what to be and sometimes what not to be. Donna was the family rebel and so I became the family late-bloomer. She was a trailblazer on many of the social issues that were controversial in the 1960s but acceptable and commonplace by the 1970s. She was often too gutsy and daring for her own good, but quintessentially she was a romantic soul who longed to be a wife and a mother. Her shyness and insecurity around the most important men in her life belied her reputation as a boisterous extrovert.

When she moved back to the San Fernando Valley for 12 years, where she married and started her own family, she would borrow me for a few weeks every summer. It sure wasn’t for my housekeeping or baby-sitting abilities. Without her patient devotion throughout my prolonged childhood, our relationship might have been a casualty of the distances and differences between us.

Those were painfully difficult years for Donna because of her husband’s addictions. The house they bought was filled with friends, music and undercurrents of chaos. During their seven years together, which ended horrifically with his murder, she tried to create a family and a stable, traditional home. In search of her soulmate, she dated in her teens, in her twenties, in her thirties, in her forties, and even in her fifties, when she met her last love who was with her at the end. She formed several significant long-term relationships but never remarried.

She loved to travel and took road trips all over North America. She was the most proficient, trustworthy driver I ever knew and at one time was a professional test driver for Volkswagen. I could get carsick even driving myself, but I almost never had a bad ride when she was at the wheel. She used to race against other amateurs at the local drag strip. Boy, that was another era before excessive litigation spoiled our recreational options. At different times, she owned a hot new Corvette, a brand new Camaro convertible (which much later became my high school and college wheels), and a Porsche that spent one day on the road before it went back on wood blocks.

Throughout her life, she had special empathy for the less fortunate and could never resist coming to their rescue. Her favorite catchphrase began, “When I’m rich and famous, …” She played the lottery whenever finances allowed and entered every contest and sweepstakes in the western hemisphere in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Her big fairytale jackpot never materialized, but she shared with those she loved her meager winnings, such as the oversized Snapple jacket circa 1993, and her dreams of how much better their lives would be when her elusive ship came in.

Donna inherited our mother’s stubborn strength and Teutonic toughness and our father’s resourceful problem-solving skills and quick wit. Her indestructible will and humor carried her cheerfully through decades of challenges and disappointments. She was always the first to poke fun at herself, as the signs she used for wall decorations confirm: Fat Is Only Deep Skin and I'm Fat but You're Ugly and I Can Diet. Someone gave her a coin bank that looked like a parking meter and of course she put it next to her bed. No hardship, no trauma, no crisis could long quench her appetite for fun. Even motherhood did not diminish the enthusiastic child within; she just had more companions to take on her adventures. Her laugh was the loudest in any room and she was always at the center of conversation and merriment.

Like Dad, she could fix almost anything and was amazingly competent in emergencies, unless her sons Glen and Charlie were at risk. One summer we took them on a vacation through more than thirty states. One of the boys fell face first out of her van as we were trying in vain to find a vacant motel room in Buffalo. When the clerk refused to let us take some ice for his head, Donna was so outraged that she ordered me to drive all night through the darkness and fog until we got to Ohio. Her grudge against upstate New York multiplied with each retelling of the episode.

I will never forget the frantic phone call I got in the middle of the night in the early 1980s. A section of Glen’s sinuses burst open, pushing his eye downward and almost out of its socket. I arrived from my 30-minute drive to find Donna in worse shape than Glen. I got them to the hospital and ultimately all was well, except for Glen’s class picture that year.

One memory I will always cherish dates back to my last day as a single woman. Donna, Glen, Charlie, and our oldest brother Richard were living in Phoenix but came home for the holidays and to attend my first wedding. Donna sprang for expensive suede leather athletic shoes the kids put on their Christmas lists. Somehow a neighborhood weasel who always liked to torment Glen and Charlie had coerced one of the boys to hold his own brother down while the weasel soaked his new shoes with a garden hose. Donna, on a tight budget as always, was furious when she saw the shoes, stiffened beyond redemption. The day before the wedding, while Mom slaved away in the kitchen preparing for the post-nuptial reception, Donna spied the weasel whizzing past our house in what appeared to be brand new roller skates with suede boots. As swiftly as a gazelle or an avenging mother, she pulled me outside and grabbed the little weasel, yelling at me to turn our hose on full blast. Limbs were flailing wildly and the language was not appropriate for repeating in this public forum. Donna ended up in the emergency room with a broken toe, but the weasel, whose Christmas skates were ruined, did not bother the boys ever again. In fact, he and Glen became friends years later.

This last incident notwithstanding, Donna had a genuine connection with and understanding of children. She treated her sons’ male and female friends as if they were her friends, often to the boys' annoyance. She was the coolest aunt, as my son Chris and Bob’s daughter Kellie can attest. She would take Chris and Kellie and their best buddies for long weekends and treks to the desert, laser light shows at the observatory, and other unforgettable experiences.

She served as my Lamaze coach when I was pregnant with Chris after his father expressed doubts about his ability to witness the blood and pain of childbirth. She hosted my baby shower, which was held right around her birthday, where I surprised her and the assembled guests by hiring a male dancer to deliver a very personal singing strip-o-gram to her as he undressed down to his red thermal underwear. Hers was the longest sustained laugh I have ever heard and her ribs were sore for days. When I went into labor, she drove me to the hospital and distracted me by playing Yahtzee, one of her favorite games. After my water broke, there was no distracting me, but she waited nearby with ice chips, washcloths, soothing reassurances and a camera.

When Chris’s dad decided he wanted to see the delivery after all, Donna refused to surrender her role and told the nurses he was drunk, which may not have been her first or last fib. Despite this, she maintained a better relationship with my ex-husband than I did. When I went back to work full-time after Chris was born, she was Auntie Daycare, which made the difficult mother-son separation bearable. When I decided Chris and I deserved a better fate, she picked us up, packed us up, and moved us in with our parents. She remained a steadfast cornerstone in Chris’s life. When he was a toddler, he would sit entranced on her lap as she read to him. Oh, how she loved to read aloud, almost as much as she liked to tell stories or give advice. During one reading, he told her that she was as comfortable and fluffy as a cloud. Thereafter, her nickname became Auntie Cloud.

She never got to meet her first grandchild, who was born earlier the month she died, or nibble on his "baby ribs," her trademark tickling game. But she had been planning a return trip from her home in Florida just to see him. Donna must have been so weakened and broken at the end because I am certain she was kicking and clawing to hold on for her grandson’s sake. She would have been the most endearingly obnoxious, boastful, e-mail sending grandmother ever.

As the years exacted their toll, it hurt to see how her failing body humbled her and how her restless spirit was bound by her declining mobility. Despite numerous obstacles, she and Richard made what would be her final visit alive to California last summer. Unencumbered by the conflicts of the past, we spent several memorable mellow days enjoying our rare togetherness, including the Fourth of July and her 57th birthday. I realized how sick she was when we went to a restaurant for all-you-can-eat whole Maine lobster, her absolute favorite food, and she struggled to finish one tail and a pair of claws. Still, she seemed more concerned about my diagnosis of breast cancer, recent surgery and impending chemotherapy. In a private moment with my son, she helped him admit to her and later to me how emotionally distraught he was about my cancer, which he had tried to stifle so as not to add to my burden.

The last conversation we had occurred six weeks after our summer visit ended and six days before her death. Her tone was urgent as she spoke at length about my husband, Luis, whom she adored and respected. Luis and I could be considered an unlikely couple due to differences in age, experience, culture, and socio-economic background. Donna directed me to ask Luis what compelled him, a good-looking young man with a surplus of positive attributes and potential, to choose me, a middle-aged single mom, over all the other women he could have courted. Donna insisted emphatically that she believed God sent Luis to Chris and me in our time of greatest need.

I told Donna that I must be the luckiest woman ever. My ex-husband suffered a catastrophic breakdown when Chris was 10 years old. He became delusional and imagined he was the son of God, from which lofty perspective he foresaw the imminent demise of the world and offered me sanctuary if Chris and I would come back to him. So I joked that my first husband thought he was the son of God and my second husband might be a gift from God! But she was unusually grave, emotional and intense, which haunts me still.

For nearly 25 years, Donna served as caregiver for our brother Richard, who due to a difficult forceps delivery was left deaf at birth with learning disabilities. Richard and I have always been close, but living on opposite coasts for seven years made our goodbyes so hard for me that I would sob inconsolably. After Donna’s death, I was in chemotherapy, so Luis flew to Florida (he dislikes flying) to move Richard (Luis could not speak sign language) back to California with his service dog, a Doberman (Luis is terrified of large dogs), and drove 3,000 miles in three days (Luis is lousy with maps and directions) in a U-Haul truck (Luis had never driven a truck before). You see, I am the luckiest woman! At my time of greatest need, Richard has also been a constant source of help and comfort. I believe Richard is a gift from Donna.

The driving force in my sister’s life was love. She loved passionately and defiantly, and she yearned to be loved and accepted for who she really was, flawed as we all are. I am not going to pretend that Donna was an angel. If angels exist, I have never met one. Had I the power to change just one thing about Donna, I would have healed the gnawing hole in her heart that kept her from the true, complete happiness she deserved. At her innermost vulnerable core, Donna seemed afraid to simply be herself. If Donna is watching over us, I hope she can feel the love of those who knew her best, who loved her unconditionally, and who will miss her on birthdays, holidays, and everyday days.

For nearly fifteen years, I have been writing and rewriting the same endless novel, which probably is autobiographical unless it ever gets published, in which case it is a work of fiction and is not based on any real persons past or present. Anyway, it chronicles doomed romance, the devastating loss of loved ones, squandered opportunities and a crisis of faith. I call it “Goodbye Happens.” Distilled to its essence, it tells the story of the complicated relationship between two sisters, but it’s the younger sister who faces a life-threatening illness and the older sister becomes her improbable hero. On this of all days, I don’t aspire to second-guess God. But I can’t help it. I like my ending better.

Big Changes for American Idol (Parody)

A major shakeup is in the works for the fourth season of American Idol, this reporter has learned. A Setside Source close to people whose people know AI producer Simon Fuller’s people sat down for an exclusive interview over double-doubles protein-style at Hollywood’s trendy In-N-Out Burger on Sunset Boulevard.

“They spent a week watching tapes from the whole season,” A.S.S. revealed. “You know, reviewing what worked, what didn’t work. Basically, the only thing that worked in season three was Fantasia Barrino lying on the floor in front of the judges. The head honchos liked that so much they had her do it twice.”

A.S.S. said the new format will feature singers on the floor, in cages, and maybe even on leashes. However, the judges who have been stalwart staples since the show debuted two years ago are out and three new judges have been signed.

“Many viewers were repelled by Simon Cowell drooling over a 19-year-old single mother,” A.S.S. whispered knowingly. “Comments from the test audience include ‘too icky,’‘dirty old Brit,’ and ‘hasn't Fantasia suffered enough.’”

Slated to fill Simon Cowell’s leather chair is Howard Stern, who technically is Cowell’s elder. “But Howard did much better with the test audience,” said A.S.S. “He was rated ‘not as creepy’ and did especially well with males 18 to 35," a new demographic that the Idol crew is excited to draw.

Filling the Big Dawg collar of Randy Jackson is Snoop Dogg, who will bring his authentic brand of doggedness, as well as undeniable credibility with younger viewers that has been missing from the panel. According to A.S.S., Snoop is already putting his own stamp on the Idol formula. “Forget all those tired, old audition episodes,” cautioned A.S.S. “The first six weeks will feature Snoop and Howard doing Idol Girls Gone Wild.”

As has been rumored, the new minimum age for contestants will be 18, A.S.S. confirmed, but not for the obvious artistic reasons. “Jail bait,” A.S.S. said with a wink and a nod.

“Seacrest out” wasn’t just an annoying tag line; it was a harbinger of changes to come. To appeal to the teenage girls that the show cannot afford to lose, avuncular host Ryan Seacrest will be replaced by “that kid from Punk’d,” said A.S.S. Not Ashton Kutcher, but his underage sidekick from season one.

Filling the booster seat vacated by Paula Abdul is recently described suck-up Dorothy Lucey, seen weekdays on the nationally syndicated Good Day Live. This reporter found the notoriously nice Ms. Lucey with her son Nash at Chuck E. Cheese, where I shared my exclusive news. “You mean, I won’t be sitting next to my Simon?” she screeched. “I thought Paula was leaving because of the whole thumb nail thing.”

Howard Stern hailed the liberty judges enjoy to say and do as they please with no apparent consequences from the producers or the FCC. "American Idol is the last bastion of freedom on the airwaves in this era of repressive political correctness," said Robin Quivers, who confided that she is negotiating with Good Day Live to replace Cowell's girlfriend Terri Seymour as their feature reporter.

Simon Cowell issued a terse response. “The golden days of American Idol are over,” his spokesperson read from a press release. “When I left, Idol was merely a train wreck. Mark my words, this is going to be the Hindenburg.”