[NYTr] Conservation isn't What it Used to Be

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Sep 17, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09172007.html

Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

When I was in the Reagan administration, America had a lively press
that never hesitated to take us to task.  Even the “Teflon President”
received more brickbats than Bush and Cheney.

The lively press disappeared along with its independence in the media
concentration engineered during the Clinton administration.  Shortly
thereafter all the liberal news anchors disappeared as well.  Today the
US  press a serves as propaganda ministry for the government’s wars and
police state. Yet, some conservatives continue to rant on about “the
liberal media.”

That other conservative bugaboo, liberal academia, has also been
crushed.  Universities once controlled their appointments, but no
more.  Recently, the political science faculty at DePaul, a Catholic
university, voted to give tenure to the courageous scholar and teacher
Norman Finkelstein. The department was unable to make its tenure
decision stick over the objections of the Israel Lobby and their
conservative allies, who were able to reach in over the heads of the
political science department and the College Personnel Committee and
force DePaul’s president to block Finkelstein’s tenure. Finkelstein had
angered the Israel Lobby with his criticisms of Israel’s misuse of the
holocaust sufferings of Jews to oppress the Palestinians and to silence
critics. On September 14, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that the
appointment of the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the
Dean of a new law school at the University of California at Irvine had
been withdrawn by the university’s chancellor, Michael V. Drake, who
gave in to the demands of conservatives outside the university.
Conservatives are outraged at Chemerinsky because he criticized
Attorney General Gonzales.  In withdrawing Chemerinsky’s appointment,
Drake told him: “I didn’t realize there would be conservatives out to
get you.” Gonzales is the attorney general who wrote memos justifying
torture and denying that the Bush administration was bound by the
Geneva Conventions.  Gonzales told a stunned Senate Judiciary Committee
that the US Constitution did not provide habeas corpus protection to
American citizens.  

To experience an attorney general of the US fiercely attacking the US
Constitution, rending its every provision, is the most frightening
experience of my lifetime. That the head of the legal branch of the
executive, sworn to uphold the Constitution, would turn against it in
order to enhance unaccountable executive power is a clear impeachable
offense.  If anyone anywhere in the world deserved criticism, Gonzales
did. But when Chemerinsky unbraided the despicable Gonzales,
conservatives rushed to Gonzales’ defense, not to the defense of the
American Constitution.

It seems only yesterday that conservatives were complaining about the
liberties that liberals took with the Constitution.  Liberals were
expanding rights, fancifully perhaps. But today conservatives are
curtailing long established rights, such as habeas corpus and
protection against self-incrimination.  Conservatives abandoned
“original intent” and all of their constitutional scruples once they
had a chance to cram more power into the presidency.

In my conservative days as an academic, I experienced some liberal
blackballs. But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se. The
new conservatives despise academic freedom and have created
organizations to monitor departments of Middle East studies in order to
lower the boom on scholars who follow the truth instead of
neoconservative ideology or Israeli policy. Today academic freedom has
disappeared just like the independent media. No one but powerful
organized interest groups has a voice.  In the media truth can only
emerge on comic shows like The Colbert Report and Jon Stewart’s The
Daily Show.

In years past, conservatives were often shouted down on university
campuses by left-wing students. But today speakers disapproved by
powerful interest groups are simply disinvited in advance. Even Harvard
University has fallen to the new censorship. On September 14, 2007, the
Harvard Crimson reported that the Israel Lobby was able to force
Harvard University to disinvite three speakers, an Oxford University
professor, a DePaul professor, and a Rutgers professor, because they
had criticized Israeli policy.

In America today, speaking your mind in the media or in academia is a
thing of the past. A country that has no voices independent of powerful
interests is a country in which freedom is dead.

[Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He
is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at:
PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com ]