Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe - Hardcover

Arianna Huffington is the cofounder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and the author of twelve books. She is also cohost of Left, Right & Center, public radio’s popular political roundtable program. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people. Originally from Greece, Huffington moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. She lives in Los Angeles with her two daughters.

The Radical Takeover

The most sweeping takeover of the new millennium didn’t take place among the telecoms or the big oil companies, or in Silicon Valley. It took place in Washington, but we can see and hear and feel its effects nationwide on our televisions, radios, and computer screens. And America is much the worse because of it. I’m talking about the takeover of the Republican Party by its own lunatic fringe, and the Right’s hijacking of America.

Ronald Reagan’s GOP has been replaced by the dark, moldering, putrefied party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, and Coulter. Morning in America has given way to Midnight in America.

Yes, the Republican Party has always had its far-right cowboys, its Jesse Helmses and Spiro Agnews. Yet they were removed from the party’s more sober core.

But these days, judging by the opinions and actions of the Republicans in office and the party’s candidates for president, it has become impossible to tell where this core stops and the fanatical fringe begins. Just look at what the party is endorsing.

We have a Republican Party that continues to back the White House’s delusions about Iraq at the expense of our military, our trea- sure, our safety, and our standing in the world.

We have a mainstream on the Right that supports torture, that confirmed an attorney general nominee who is officially agnostic on torture, and that rallies behind a president who refuses to define what the very word “torture” means.

We have a mainstream that supports—even applauds—the behavior of thuggish Blackwater mercenaries, that supports the gutting of our civil liberties, that opposes universal health care, and that has views on immigration that wouldn’t have been heard outside a John Birch Society meeting ten years ago.

It can no longer be denied: the right-wing lunatics are running the Republican asylum and their madness has infected the entire country and poisoned the world beyond.

And just look who the GOP settled on as its 2008 standard bearer: the most hawkish candidate in the running, who has said he wants the United States to stay in Iraq somewhere between one hundred years and ten thousand years—John McCain.

Despite an avalanche of evidence showing that McCain the Maverick has long ago been replaced by McCain the Pandering Pawn of the Party’s Right Wing, the press refuses to believe its own eyes. Right Is Wrong will show how the “Straight Talk Express” and its conductor have completely and cravenly gone off the tracks—and how the media steadfastly refuse to notice.

Even those bastions of the so-called liberal media, The New Yorker and The New York Times, have continued to portray McCain as a moderate who, in the words New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza, has “the rare opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a Republican.”

Let’s see, over the last few years McCain has bowed to the party’s lunatic fringe on tax cuts, immigration, the intolerance of religious bigots, and torture . . . so you might wonder how is he reinventing what it means to be a Republican?

During the primary campaign, I waited in vain for one of the leading GOP presidential candidates to step away from the twitchy ideologues who have taken over their party, but instead they all held hands with Kristol, Rove, and Limbaugh and jumped. To a man, every one of the top-tier candidates—Giuliani, Romney, McCain, Thompson, and Huckabee—seemed intent on competing to see who could out-Bush Bush. Not a single one of them tried to put any distance between himself and the president—especially on foreign policy, the area of Bush’s most catastrophic errors. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee made a halfhearted attempt to speak out against an “arrogant bunker mentality” at one point and was called out by Mitt Romney to apologize. Huckabee promptly shut up, putting an end to any further rebellious attempts to amble off the reservation. As conservative pundit George F. Will put it, “They are, if anything, to the right of [Bush] on foreign policy. There’s a bidding war to see who can be more hawkish toward Iran.”

The reign of Bush and Cheney and the rise of the neocons and the “nea-cons” (the “neanderthal conservatives”) have alienated traditional conservative intellectuals like they have Bill Buckley, the godfather of modern conservatism. In April of 2007, writing about Iraq, Buckley called public opinion on the war “savagely decisive” and concluded, “There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican Party will survive this dilemma.”

And Michael Gerson, once Bush’s top speechwriter, offered this gloomy 2007 assessment of the state of the GOP: “The party is in a funk. There is a lack of creativity, very little domestic policy energy. I think it’s going to be a problem.” Of course, along with being one of the party’s brightest thinkers, Gerson is a Bush loyalist, so his calling it “a problem” can be translated as “a disaster.” If the Republican Party in its current form loses the next general election and ends up fading into obscurity and irrelevancy we can use the words of Don Rumsfeld (trying to sugarcoat a different debacle) for its epitaph: “The dead-enders are still with us, those remnants of the defeated regimes who’ll go on fighting long after their cause is lost.”

And that’s why it is vitally important to recognize what has happened, to see how the Right’s radical ideas became ordinary, and to know how to spot their remnants and echoes wherever they crop up. Regardless of the outcome of this election, the lingering after-effects of the neaconservative shift will be with us for a very long time.

A key to understanding the fanatical Right’s takeover of the Republican Party and how these ideas spread to the rest of the country is looking at the role of the media—not the Fox News pseudo-newsmen or the talk radio blowhards—but the respectable, supposedly liberal media. Without the enabling of the traditional media—with their obsession with “balance” and their pathological devotion to the idea that truth is always found in the middle—the radical Right would never have been able to have its ideas taken seriously. If not for the media’s appeals to balance, movement conservatism would have been laughed out of the court of public opinion long ago. And when the press does attempt to dig into the ideological underpinnings of debates about policy and current affairs, it becomes trapped by another form of the media’s bipolar disorder. Besides seeing two sides to every issue, they insist on seeing most political battles through the lens of right vs. left. By reporting everything that’s happening in American politics through this prism the media missed the big story: the hijacking of America by the lunatic Right.

The other not-so-innocent bystanders to the Right’s takeover are the Democrats who have continued to tread far too lightly when it comes to holding the GOP’s fanatical core accountable. Time and time again, the Democratic leadership has allowed itself to get played, run over, or distracted. Republicans wanted to deflect discussion of the war by arguing over newspaper ads and radio comments? Okay, Democratic leaders were game. Republicans wanted to avoid talking about children without health care by whining about Demo- cratic Representative Pete Stark’s tough assessment of the president and the Iraq war? (“President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq,” Stark said on the House floor. “The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up.”) Sure, Democratic leaders were more than willing to take the GOP bait and reprimand one of their own.

Democrats are in the majority today because the positions they campaigned are in line with mainstream America. But if the lunatic fringe group now known as the Republican Party is to be stopped in its efforts to radically remake this country, Democrats are going to have to step up and defend the mainstream that swept them into power in 2006. So far, they have shown little stomach for that fight.

The Republican race to replace George W. Bush turned into a competition to see Who Could Be the Biggest Neanderthal. Who would stay in Iraq the longest? Who would cut taxes the deep- est? Who would be all right with firing gay Americans from their jobs? Who would jump for joy the highest if Roe v. Wade were reversed? Who would build the biggest fence around America? Who would put an end to stem cell research the fastest? Who would reject evolution most passionately?

The problem for the nea-con Right is not that it is at odds with my views, but that it is at odds with the views of the American people. By significant majorities, the American people believe in the science of evolution, don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned, don’t want to turn back the clock on job discrimination laws, and want to bring our troops home from Iraq. The Right flashing back to the Reagan era is one thing; the Right flashing back to the Dark Ages and trying to take the country with it is quite another.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear

The Right’s hijacking of America would not have been possible without its masterful use of fear to sway a nation terrified by the 9/11 attacks. It’s a symptom of just how sick the radical Right is that their immediate response to 9/11 was to look for opportunities to push their agenda. Abroad they saw a pretext for an attack on Iraq, a long-cherished objective. At home, they saw a chance to solidify a permanent Republican stranglehold on power if they could recast themselves as the “party that wil...