Better Late Than Never
Last week, NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru chided me for suggesting that "anger, paranoia, and extremism" beset the "talk radio right."
This week NRO provides space to Daniel Griswold of Cato to apply a mild but firm rebuke to Fox's Sean Hannity for showcasing ... well my phrase "anger, paranoia and extremism" serves pretty well.
Griswold is concerned that Fox helped to launch a new book by conspiracy fantasist Jerome Corsi.
Boosted by a friendly Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in October, the book has been selling reasonably well. The people buying it are presumably the same conservative-leaning folks who opposed Obama’s election and are now fueling the Tea Party movement. Libertarians and conservatives who value free markets and limited government, however, should keep their distance from this bestselling prophet.
Griswold worries:
While Corsi takes passing shots at government spending and climate-change legislation, his real target is “free trade,” “globalism,” and international agreements such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. The villains in his book are trade agreements, trade deficits, growing Chinese foreign-currency reserves, and oil imports, all of which threaten to undermine the U.S. dollar, American independence, and the middle class. Orchestrating our decline is a cast of characters from around the globe, both familiar and obscure, working in public and in secret.
Griswold does not do justice to the nuttiness of Corsi's fears of a Nafta superhighway, a road that will supposedly expedite the shipping of containers from Mexico through the middle United States to Duluth and thence across the border due north to ... Quetico Provincial Park, a pristine nature reserve almost 1000 miles from the nearest Canadian factory.
Nor does Griswold deal with Corsi's previous adventure in 9/11 denialism or his insinuations in his 2008 book, ObamaNation, that candidate Obama was a practising Muslim. Yet that book too was heavily promoted on Fox, and that time without criticism from NRO. On the contrary, NRO gave considerable space to those who wished to criticize criticism of Corsi.
As an NR alumnus, I've been waiting hopefully for the moment when NRO would resume its historical vocation of countering "anger, paranoia, and extremism" on the right. It's good to see these positive signs, however tentative. Welcome, friends: we've been keeping your seat warm.