Whose Side is Glenn Beck On?

In his attempted rebuttal of my post on Glenn Beck, David Horowitz agrees that Beck’s attack on Cass Sunstein was false. Yet that falsehood does not worry Horowitz. He would still rather have "Glenn Beck out there fighting for our side." But how do we define "our side"?

I have a lot of time for David Horowitz. He has written important books and a fine memoir. His organizational work on college campuses commands respect.

For those reasons, I am grieved to see that his attempted rebuttal of my post below on Glenn Beck conforms exactly to the pattern I described in my original piece.

My original piece observed:

When Glenn Beck made his Fox debut, some shrewd conservatives responded with a wink. Maybe the show was paranoid and hysterical. Maybe Beck was none too scrupulous about facts and truth. But why be squeamish? The other side did as bad, or nearly. And see how usefully he mobilized the base!

David’s response:

I don’t have a big quarrel with Frum’s view that Beck’s view of Cass Sunstein is “over the top” or off target. … Frum is right that Sunstein is not a raving leftist. … [But] Our country is under assault by a determined, deceitful and powerful left which will stop at nothing to realize its goals. Facing them, I would rather have Glenn Beck out there fighting for our side than 10,000 David Frums who think that appeasing leftists will make them think well of us. No it won’t. It will only whet their appetite for our heads.

In other words: Horowitz agrees that Beck’s attack on Sunstein was false. Yet that falsehood does not worry Horowitz. The country is “under assault.” (As the broadcaster Mark Levin has said, President Obama is “literally at war” with the American people.) In a war, truth must yield to the imperatives of victory. Any conservative qualms about the untruth of Beck’s defamation of Sunstein amounts to “appeasement” – an appeasement that will end with the left decapitating the right. This is the language and logic of Leninism. There is no truth or falsehood comrades, there is only service to the revolution or betrayal of the revolution.

Three thoughts in reply.

First, even in Leninist terms, Beck’s attack on Sunstein was stupid and counter-productive. Every legal conservative who cares about the issues of regulation and deregulation agrees that Cass Sunstein is the very best choice for the OIRA job to be hoped from a Democratic president. Had conservative opposition somehow derailed the Sunstein nomination, President Obama’s next appointment would almost certainly have been worse – very possibly, a lot worse.

Second, this right-wing Leninism exacts a terrible moral price. Notice that David Horowitz calls the left “deceitful” in his blogpost. Presumably that’s a bad thing. Likewise, when Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie” at President Obama, he did not intend that as a compliment. So truth is important to conservatives, or at least we talk as if it were. Yet now David Horowitz tells me that it’s 10,000 times more important to “fight for our side.”

Third – how do we define “our side”? Horowitz harshly condemns Obama appointee Van Jones. Van Jones was eventually forced to resign not because of any of the allegations Glenn Beck hurled at him, but because the Gateway Pundit blog unearthed evidence that Van Jones had consorted with 9/11 denialists. So that’s the other side, right? Except… the American politician who most closely associates with 9/11 denialists is Congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul. And who acts as Paul’s chief TV enthusiast and publicist? Glenn Beck of course.

David Horowitz has strong feelings about 9/11 and the post-9/11 world. He helped to lead the campaign against Ward Churchill, the disgraced University of Colorado professor who argued that the United States had brought 9/11 on itself. Question for David: If Ward Churchill is “the other side,” on which “side” do we find Ron Paul? And isn’t that the same “side” where we find Glenn Beck?

Why would David Horowitz want to place himself there?