Opinion/Mark Steyn: I'd barely heard of Noam Chomsky before 9/11. I'd dipped into Manufacturing Consent, but I kept dozing off, usually in the middle of phrases like "premises of discourse".
But, insofar as I understand it, the premise of its discourse is this - everything you read, hear or see in a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV show is part of one almighty shell trick designed to serve "the elite domination of media and marginalisation of dissidents". Reality is a mere Matrix, to use a now discredited pop culture allusion from the day before yesterday. As Morpheus would have said to Keanu Reeves, the media is the blue pill: you take them and the façade of normality persists. Noam is the red pill: read him and you'll understand how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
The great advantage of declaring that reality is a racket is that you can never be wrong. For two years, the anti-war left has been chugging down red pills way beyond the recommended dosage, and they're now so deep down the rabbit hole they'll never get back. None of this seems to trouble its icons: nothing they predict ever happens - millions dead in Afghanistan, millions dead in Iraq, humanitarian disaster, etc. Nonetheless, it's Bush and Blair who are the "liars", even though most of the alleged "lies" fall into the category of not yet fully verifiable circumstantial inferences, and most of them get a little more firmed up with each month - Saddam's nuclear shopping in Africa, Mohammed Atta's ties to Baghdad, etc.
Meanwhile, the lefty superstars simply move on to a new fantasy. In Noam's rabbit hole, the buck never stops with him. Ask him about the "silent genocide" he said was going on in Afghanistan in October 2001 and Noam replies, "That is an interesting fabrication." He doesn't deny that he used the words, "Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide" - he simply denies that the words mean what they appear to mean to anyone whose first language is non-university English.
What a great country America is! Where else can you get rich by convincing people that your getting everything wrong is merely conclusive proof of the pervasive distortions of "the prevailing moral and intellectual culture"? I can see why an ambitious college kid might want to be Noam Chomsky; I can't see why he'd want to read Noam Chomsky.
Likewise, Michael Moore, the carnival freakshow version of the Chomsky act - Bush is a "deserter", he knew about 9/11 in advance because of his family's ties to the bin Laden family, etc. - Moore has got rich by peddling cynicism to the naïve. Moore is so cynical he's cynical about cynicism: he's figured out that in a postmodern culture a large segment of the population so yearns for the pose of cynicism it'll fall for any old hooey. There's no one quite so naïve as a wannabe cynic who longs to fall in line with the herd of iconoclasts parrotting the Moore/Chomsky slogans: it's the intellectual equivalent of those teenagers who express their individuality by wearing exactly the same clothes as everyone else.
Which brings us to the Democratic Party. With one or two slightly surprising exceptions (Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden), some time in late 2001 they overdosed on the Chomsky-Moore red pills, and, unlike the insulated poppers of academe and showbiz, they've set themselves up for a series of bumpy falls to reality.
Not long before Saddam's capture, I caught Massachusetts Senator John Kerry on the stump in New Hampshire: "The President can't find Saddam Hussein, he can't find Osama bin Laden, he can't even find the leaker in the White House."
It's true that the coalition was having a difficult time hunting down the Baathist butcher. It's a big country. It's as hard to find one man in Iraq as it is to find a single John Kerry campaign sign in the northern half of New Hampshire. I tried the other week and eventually I found one outside a farmhouse halfway up Route 10, but I had to devote enormous resources and manpower to it and I wasted a lot of time relying on leads from flawed intelligence. Kerry and co ought to have got the message by now: the balance of probability is that things will go the administration's way.
Of Sen Kerry's three presidential failures, Saddam has been found, "the leaker" is some nothing story no one cares about, and, as for the third, if whatever's left of Osama has enough granules to be scraped out of the rubble and identified in an FBI lab, isn't the balance of probability that in the fullness of time this will be an all too predictable third strike for the Dems? Even Osama's silence looks, with each passing week, less like lying low than an inability to get up again: already the period since 9/11 is the longest in a decade between al-Qaeda strikes on US government targets.
In the right circumstances, the Hillary tack might conceivably work for the Democrats. The Chomsky-Moore-BBC-French approach never will. The presidential candidates may not yet have figured this out, but there are signs the less deranged Democratic primary voters have - and they've no inclination to assist party leaders digging themselves in deeper and deeper.
Gov Dean faces the voters of Iowa today and, however the peculiarities of their caucus system tally up by midnight, it looks like the scrappy insurgent has peaked.
Even among Democrats, it seems there's a relatively limited market for a conspirazoid campaign running on the thin gruel of Mooronic rage. If you want to pinpoint the moment when this became obvious, I'd say it was the day of Saddam's capture, when I heard Howard Dean's attempt at a gracious statement on this turn of events described on the radio as "damage control".
That's the party's problem right there: when what's good news for the Iraqi people, the American people and the civilised world is something you have to do "damage control" on, you know you're way too far down the rabbit hole.