Portrait of an America Hater
MF Ogilvie
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 2, 2003
For nearly two decades Robert Scheer has been a "national
correspondent" and then regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times,
where he has specialized in national security issues.
From one of the most powerful press platforms in the country, Scheer
articulates, on a weekly basis, the left's corrosive assertions about
the moral deficiencies of our nation, our president, and our efforts
in the war on terrorism. It is but a continuation of what he did
before he ever got the times. While posturing as someone who cares
about the welfare of our nation, Scheer has spent his entire adult
life as a passionate America-hating Leftist. He first signaled his
political inclinations long ago when he co-authored a 1961 book
defending Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in Cuba. In 1965 he ran
for liberal Democrat Jeffrey Cohelan's congressional seat, attacking
Cohelan from the radical left. He was the political editor of the
largest magazine of the radical left, Ramparts, and was given the
diaries of Che Guevara to publish by the Cuban dictatorship itself.
Later in the decade, Scheer and Tom Hayden co-founded Berkeley's Red
Family - a commune of urban guerrillas, which trained its members in
the use of explosives and firearms and called for the creation of
"liberated zones" in the United States - a liberation to be
accomplished by force of arms. Dedicated to Maoist principles, Red
Family leaders adorned the walls of their headquarters with portraits
of such Communist heroes as Ho Chi Minh and North Korean dictator Kim
Il Sung, and Black Panther thug, Huey Newton.
Scheer strongly supported the violent Black Panther Party in the
Sixties, and devoted a great deal of time and energy to helping
Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther whose volcanic hatred for whites and
police officers was legendary. Scheer not only got Cleaver out of the
prison where he was serving an indeterminate sentence for rape, but
also edited Cleaver's writings for publication in book form.
Distinguishing himself from the mass of what he deemed "racist
whites," Scheer felt great solidarity with the Panthers' cause. In his
introduction to an article in which Cleaver declared his intention to
kill whites - an article that Scheer himself titled "The Courage to
Kill" - Scheer expressed his approval for Cleaver's sentiments with
the exclamation, "Right on, Eldridge!" After Cleaver fled the US
following his ambush of two San Francisco policemen in 1968, Scheer
joined a Red Family overseas delegation to visit the fugitive.
In the early 1970s, Scheer joined the Red Sun Rising commune which was
devoted to "armed struggle" and the teachings of Kim Il-Sung. In the
three decades that followed he rose to influence at the LA Times - in
part through his marriage to Narda Zacchino one of the Times top
editors, became a friend of Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Warren
Beatty, and in his columns vigorously opposed America's Cold War
efforts against the Soviet bloc. In his L.A. Times columns, Scheer
regaled the same unfounded, hate-driven denunciations of American
policies and motives that now dominate the speeches heard at anti-war
rallies around the country.
"What the heck, let's bomb Baghdad," is how he recently depicted the
supposed lack of gravity that "our accidental president" attached to
his decision to forcibly disarm Saddam Hussein. "Sure," Scheer wrote
sardonically, ". . . many of its more than 3 million inhabitants will
probably end up as 'collateral damage,' but if George the Younger is
determined to avenge his father and keep his standings in the polls,
that's the price to be paid."
Beyond accusing President Bush of going to war simply to boost his own
popularity and to settle an old score in his father's name, Scheer
joins his chorus of fellow leftists in asserting that Bush is animated
by an unspoken lust to create a globe-spanning American empire. "The
world's current unprecedented hostility toward the United States," he
writes, is "a profound alarm over the imperial endpoint of Bush's
design for the world." "Imperialist greed," he says, "is what 'regime
change' in Iraq and 'anticipatory self-defense' are all about, and all
of the rest of the Bush administration's talk about security and
democracy is a bunch of malarkey." Echoing the sentiments of Muslim
fundamentalists who accuse Bush of waging a cruel "war against Islam,"
Scheer deems it "fitting" that, just prior to the current war, Bush
met to strategize with his British and Spanish counterparts in the
Azores, "an island chain originally settled by a Portuguese Crusader
whose goal was to encircle the Muslim world with Christian armies."
Scheer sees lust for oil as yet another of Bush's motivations for war,
explaining that "oil is black gold, and Iraq has a whole heck of a lot
of it." Despite Bush's innumerable public proclamations that Iraq's
oil wells are to be preserved solely for the benefit of the Iraqi
people, Scheer lectures Bush about the wisdom of the "peace" crowd's
"No Blood for Oil" mantra. Moreover, he deems it suspicious that
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice once "served as a Chevron
director and had an oil tanker named after her."
And of course, no litany of ascriptions for Bush's war motives would
be complete without the ever-popular charge of "diversion." True to
form, Scheer calls the current war "the modern equivalent of the Roman
Circus, drawing the people's attention away from the failures of those
who rule them"; "a smoke screen to obscure our floundering economy";
and a "convenient distraction" from President Bush's "close personal
and financial ties to the company - Enron - whose demise is the most
glaring symbol of the broad moral disarray of the nation's corporate
culture."
While these reckless assertions betray Scheer's deep contempt for
Bush, they are utterly barren of intellectual integrity. Any
fair-minded person understands that, given war's many uncertainties,
Bush's military initiative in no way assures his continued popularity,
but rather places it in peril; that America is not in any way an
imperialistic nation; that Bush has repeatedly gone on record before
the entire listening world, proclaiming that Iraq's oil wells belong
to its people; and that the threat of weapons transfers from rogue
states to terrorists is no mere concocted "distraction," but a deadly
serious concern.
Scheer, however, is not the fair-minded person he pretends to be.
Indeed, who but an America-hating leftist could, as Scheer does, draw
moral equivalence between Osama bin Laden and Enron CEO Kenneth Lay?
Asserting that America's military efforts in the war on terror are
founded on the "simplistic" notion of a struggle between good and
evil, Scheer smugly contends that the most destructive practitioners
of evil reside not in some far-off land, but rather in the Bush
administration
and corporate America. "Is there any doubt," he asks rhetorically,
"that the chicanery of Enron executives and [other] top CEOs has done
more long-term damage to the US economy than the efforts of
anti-American terrorists?" It takes remarkable chutzpah to write such
words.
Scheer's assertions about Bush's motives for going to war reveal an
immense double standard, given that Scheer routinely criticized those
who, during the previous administration, in any way questioned the
motives behind the actions of Bill Clinton - whom he deems "a great
president," "supremely capable," and "one of the hardest working, most
competent, fundamentally decent and smartest men to ever serve in the
office." This assessment of Clinton is surely based in part on their
shared background as counter-culture leftists who, in their younger
days, never shrank from an opportunity to publicly denounce their
country But more than this, it is rooted in Scheer's well-known
appetite for access to the high and mighty, in short his opportunism.
Scheer enjoyed his friendships with the Clinton White House operatives
like James Carville and Sidney Blumenthal as much as he savored the
salons of the Hollywood left. Such associations inflate his uncomely
sense of superiority over those who figuratively stand on the outside,
looking in. In a revealing moment, Scheer once cruelly mocked an
unemployed journalist thusly: "Look at you. You support the System,
and you're struggling, while I attack it and have a six-figure salary
and a yacht, and am surrounded by Hollywood stars." (Reported in David
Horowitz's Radical Son.)
Scheer's opportunism is evident in the double standards that governed
his reporting on the Clinton Administration. Now Scheer is writing
columns which assert that even one Iraqi killed by American arms
constitutes a war crime. But in December 1998, when Clinton ordered
the firing of 450 missiles into Iraq (more than in the entire Gulf
War) and did so on the eve of the impeachment vote in the House,
Scheer saw nothing suspicious about the timing. When Clinton ordered
the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, Scheer flatly rejected the notion that
Clinton may have been using military action as a means of diverting
attention away from the stubborn Lewinsky scandal or the recently
discovered Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Scheer
was the biggest press defender of Wen Ho Lee). Such accusations were
merely the senseless rantings of partisan "jackals" intent on making
Clinton feel "the lash of the self-righteous," said Scheer. Only Bush,
it seems, can be accused of hidden agendas and ignoble motives.
Consider also Scheer's reaction after Clinton ordered the infamous
1998 missile attacks on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998. The
attack in the Sudan was in response to terrorist attacks on two
American embassies and destroyed the country's only medicine factory
which Clinton claimed was a chemical weapons plant. Clinton got no UN
approval, did not demand an inspection of the plant, and got no
congressional authorization. Scheer who has viciously attacked Bush
for dereliction on these grounds not only found nothing wrong with
Clinton's actions, he defend them. Denouncing those who wondered
whether Clinton was "wagging the dog" in an effort to tone down the
Lewinsky headlines, Scheer saw nothing objectionable or even
suspicious that Clinton launched this strike into a foreign "Third
World" country on the very day that Lewinsky was scheduled to testify
before a grand jury. Even when the Sudanese site proved to be an
aspirin factory that produced half of that war- and famine-ravaged
country's legitimate drugs, Scheer called Clinton's missile attack "an
appropriate response to the carnage" at the American embassies. "If
our modern and very expensive weapons cannot be used against
terrorists," he wrote, "what good are they in this post-Cold War
world?" In essence, Scheer was endorsing the very policy for which he
now condemns President Bush.
Despite Bush's dogged attempts to disarm Saddam via UN Resolutions and
meaningful inspections - all on the heels of twelve years of Iraq's
refusal to abide by its disarmament obligations - Scheer depicts Bush
as a warmonger less deserving of trust than the Iraqi dictator. In
recent months, this has become a fashionable tactic of the "pro-peace"
left. As Scheer bluntly puts it, "Hussein is not the aggressor - we
are." "[T]o anyone not rabid for war," he pontificated shortly before
the war commenced, "the United Nations inspections would seem to be
going well. As regards the hunt for weapons of mass destruction,
Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is now arguably the most open society in
the world. Certainly no other nation has been willing to allow deeply
suspicious foreign experts access to every nook and cranny . . . to
ensure that bad things are not being done." These comments illustrate
Scheer's penchant for extravagant hyperbole in the service of
misrepresentation of the facts. Scheer's extolling of Iraq's
"willingness" to allow inspections, failed to recognize the role
played in this change of approach (if not change of heart) by hundreds
of thousands of American troops dispatched to Iraq's borders.
The real war criminals, according to Scheer, are Americans. "How could
one blame George W.," writes Scheer, "if he is among the vast majority
of Americans who blissfully and conveniently forget that we are the
only ones to ever actually use a nuclear weapon? [This] may explain
why even those who love freedom and democracy as much as we do are
frightened not only of Saddam Hussein, but increasingly of us."
Japanese imperialism, war atrocities, voracious military aggression
and determination to kill hundreds of thousands of American soldiers
in making their last stand of course had nothing to do with the
dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. This was just American
terror.
According to Scheer, "the most outrageous Big Lie of the Bush
administration [is] that delaying an invasion to wait for the UN to
complete inspections would endanger the US. The fact is that for more
than a decade the military containment of Iraq has effectively
neutered Hussein, and there is no reason to believe that can't
continue." Yet Scheer argued for years in the Times to end the
containment of Saddam's weapons program, repeatedly condemning as a
cruel means of "punish[ing] the Iraqis for failing to overthrow
Hussein." "In Iraq," he recently wrote, " . . . more than one million
children [who] suffer from malnutrition . . . are the true victims of
our embargo, not Hussein, who continues to live the high life." On
another occasion he wrote, "It is in the interests of innocent
civilians that we begin the process of normalization [lifting the
sanctions], as was called for in an editorial. . . in the state-run
Baghdad Observer." The only consistency in Scheer's columns on Iraq's
weapons program is his service to the propaganda line of Saddam's
regime.
Like so many leftists who consider George Bush an illegitimate
President, Scheer is clearly more prepared to place his faith in the
words and pledges of ruthless dictators than in those of Bush. Indeed
in June 2000, Scheer crowed jubilantly about Kim Jong Il's declaration
that he would work toward the peaceful reunification of North and
South Korea. "If the two Koreas . . . can come to terms," wrote
Scheer, "what warring parties can't?" "The threat from . . . 'rogue
nations,'" he said, "can be met far more cheaply with talk, trade, and
aid than with . . . warrior fantasies." Rejecting the very concept of
"evil" as a simplistic, culturally biased judgment rooted in
"differing values," Scheer prefers to attach that label to America
rather than to a regime that has tortured hundreds of thousands of its
citizens in political prisons and starved millions of its people to
death. Though in recent months Kim has defiantly terminated his
nation's nuclear nonproliferation pledges and ominously threatened to
invalidate the 1953 Korean War cease-fire agreement, Scheer maintains
that "people of all stripes want to make love, not war."
Consistent with his efforts to help Saddam circumvent the UN
restrictions on his weapons of mass destruction program, Scheer
praises the misguided efforts of Jimmy Carter - the very man whose
benign assessment of North Korean leadership in 1994 led him to
broker, for the Clinton administration, the disastrous deal that
supplied Pyongyang with fuel, food, and light water nuclear reactors
in exchange for a hollow, unverifiable pledge not to develop nuclear
weapons. Now that the pledge has been broken, we face a potential
international crisis - thanks in large measure to the man who Scheer
says "won the Nobel Peace Prize for a career of successfully waging
peace." "While Carter has exhibited the patience of the peacemaker,"
writes Scheer, "a sweet Jesus for our time, willing to rebuke
contemptible leaders while offering them a path for redemption, Bush
has become a self-fulfilling prophet of war, delighting in the
discovery of what he defines as immutable evil, thereby justifying an
endless crusade against the infidels." Of course, there is no instance
on record where Bush has even remotely intimated that he was
conducting such a "crusade," though there are myriad examples of
Islamic terrorists candidly pronouncing their desire to murder every
last "infidel" loyal to the "Great Satan." Unfortunately, Scheer and
the left prefer to attribute such hateful bigotry only to Americans,
particularly if they happen to be Republicans.
Just prior to the start of the current war, Scheer asserted that
because "Iraq at this time poses no direct threat to the well-being of
the American people," it logically followed that "the maiming or
killing of a single Iraqi civilian in an attack by the United States
would constitute a war crime." He complained that the US, by
aggressively enforcing Resolution 1441 over the objections of some
other nations, had "gutted" the UN. But when the UN backed an
American-led coalition to drive Iraq's invading army out of Kuwait
twelve years ago, he wasn't nearly such a stickler for following that
organization's decrees. In March 1991, Scheer decried Americans'
"patriotic orgy" over the coalition's campaign of "terrorism" that was
not unlike the "hijacking [of] a commercial aircraft - treating
civilians as combatants." Thus we are presumably to understand that
twelve years ago America practiced terrorism by following the UN
mandate, and that today America practices terrorism by failing to push
harder for additional UN mandates. The fact is that for Scheer,
America is the villain - unless his friends are in the White House -
no matter what it does.