Orange County Weekly: Facts and Feces

[question everything]

Facts and Feces

Rewrite history with the Register! It’s fun!

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The Register’s editorial writers are alchemists too, though they work not in lead and gold but in feces and facts. And they do so for the narrowest ideological purposes. Take Steven Greenhut’s item on George W. Bush’s trip to Eastern Europe and Russia. Writing May 12 on the paper’s blog, Greenhut attacked a National Public Radio commentator who “seemed aghast” that “Bush had actually criticized the Yalta agreement, which consigned much of the East to communist slavery. The president said, correctly, that the United States was part of ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history.’ Tough words, but essentially correct. Who would argue that communist domination of Eastern Europe was not a horrific wrong? So why get so upset when the president says so?”

There’s so much wrong in those few words that sensible people hardly know where to begin. But start with the Yalta accord, signed by Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt just weeks before Hitler ate cyanide and shot himself in the head, effectively ending the Second World War. Yalta guaranteed “the right of all peoples” liberated from fascism “to choose the form of Government under which they will live” in order that “all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” Eventually, of course, the Soviets reneged, and, as Churchill himself put it a year later, “an iron curtain . . . descended across the Continent.” But at the treaty’s signing he was so pleased that he was, an aide later recalled, “drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man.”

So, first, there’s Greenhut’s straw man: the NPR commentator, Daniel Hamilton, a European specialist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., didn’t say that communism is good. In fact, he sounded pretty anti-communist. He agreed with Ronald Reagan, who, “not known for being soft on communism, was very adamant, saying that any interpretation of Yalta that suggests that the United States agreed to division of spheres of influence is absolutely wrong. He pointed out at that time that the agreement was to permit free and fair elections . . . and that in his words the Soviet Union, you know, broke its agreement.” And that leads to our second point: there’s a difference between deliberately selling out Eastern Europe and being party to a contract later broken. But that distinction is apparently lost on some conservatives. And that’s why intelligent Americans, and not just Hamilton, are aghast: because the president is either ignorant of recent history or a liar. And the same goes for Greenhut.

What’s eating Greenhut (and Bush) is Roosevelt. FDR still haunts American conservatives; it was to stop the wildly popular Democrat that Republicans amended the Constitution to limit presidents to two terms. They didn’t pause there, of course: at the Register you’d swear Roosevelt was tanned, rested and ready for ’08; Greenhut’s colleague, John Seiler, recently likened Roosevelt to Hitler and called him “Franklin ‘D. for Dictator’ Roosevelt.”

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http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/05/38/news-media.php