Kumbaya Watch: Rich Hysteria
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 29, 2001 12:50 p.m.

n a fascinating column, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reports on the growing disconnect between the press's anthrax-related hysteria and the general calm prevailing in America at large. Kurtz notes that while the media has been portraying government officials as "bumblers who failed to move aggressively against anthrax-tainted mail while offering shifting explanations of the danger," the majority of Americans have kept cooler heads. "An ABC News poll," he writes, "found that 92 percent of Americans think their own mail is safe. In a USA Today survey, 77 percent said they are confident the government can respond effectively to a major outbreak of anthrax. And 60 percent say the media are overreacting to the anthrax threat."

Exhibit A for this chattering-class overreaction is Frank Rich of the New York Times, who entitles his ponderous Saturday column [link requires registration] "How To Lose a War." (No stiff upper lips here, obviously — and we've only been fighting for a month.) Mr. Rich, who was never much for bipartisan spirit anyway, accuses President Bush of letting "special interests — particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest theocrats of the right — have veto power over public safety, public health and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime." He pillories Bush on tax cuts, on the airline bailouts, on refusing to break Bayer's patent on Cipro — and that's just for starters.

It's not until midway through the column that Rich gets around to tackling his real target — the Religious Right, of course. Sure, ordinary, unsophisticated people might think that it would be a tad difficult to blame religious conservatives for the government response to the anthrax outbreak. But where there's a will, there's a way, and Rich finds it by taking up the cause of "poor Tom Ridge":

Mr. Ridge ... was widely rumored to be a candidate for various jobs, including the vice presidency. But after being pilloried by the right because he supports abortion rights, he got zilch. Instead of Mr. Ridge, the administration signed on the pro-life John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson — who have brought us where we are today.

Now, one assumes that Rich does not actually mean that by appointing pro-lifers to Cabinet posts, Bush "brought us" to September 11 and its aftermath, although that might seem to be a logical implication of his bizarre claim. Rather, he's upset because Thompson backed Bush's stem-cell decision last summer (what that has to do with "where we are today" is never made clear), and because the Health and Human Services Secretary "kept the federal government's house physician — David Satcher, the surgeon general and a much-needed honest broker of public health — locked away, presumably because Dr. Satcher, a Clinton appointee, became persona non grata in the Bush administration for issuing a June report on teenage sexuality that angered the religious right."

This failure to utilize Dr. Satcher's vast powers of reassurance (does anyone in America even know who he is?) should "be on Mr. Thompson's conscience" Rich writes, as if people are dying daily just because the surgeon general was kept off TV. And then, with a typically hysterical flourish, he adds that "only after Mr. Ridge arrived on the scene was the surgeon general liberated from the gulag." Robert Scheer's post-September-11-America-as-Communist-Russia line is catching on, apparently.

As for Ashcroft, Rich gripes that the attorney general has "gone so far as to turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political reasons." Specifically, he hasn't met with Planned Parenthood (yep, there's that abortion issue again) since taking office, even though they have "a decade's worth of leads on the convergence of international and domestic terrorism."

So let's get this straight — with everything that's going on, Ashcroft is to be faulted because he hasn't tapped into Planned Parenthood's intelligence network? What's next — a story on the ACLU's underutilitized Green Berets?

"Not everything changes that fast — least of all Washington," Rich notes. Including, apparently, the tedious polemics of certain out-of-touch columnists. But hey, at least the rest of the country isn't overreacting.