Cyrus Nowrasteh, the man who wrote the screenplay for the ABC docudrama, "The Path to 9/11," declares "I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe." Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. By what he says and where he says it, Mr. Nowrasteh, in fact, has removed all doubt that he is, sure enough, an orthodox rightwing partisan ideologue.
Mr. Nowrasteh has written an op-ed piece titled "The Path to Hysteria" in today's Wall Street Journal. It is a textbook example of how today's "conservatives" are such partisans that they either do not know or do not care how flippant references to "communists" reveal their ideological rigidity.
Remember, this guy is supposed to be some kind of "expert" on U.S. politics during the years leading to 9/11. Mr. Nowrasteh writes that he "considered it a privilege" to write about "the most distressing and important story It will ever fall on me to tell." Very well. Does he not know that Robert L. Bartley, Paul Gigot, Daniel Henninger, John Fund, and the rest of the
Wall Street Journal crew were foaming-at-the-mouth Clinton-haters in the 1990s? Does he not know they obsessed over Whitewater for longer than Mr. Clinton's eight years in the White House? Does he not know those fanatics not only denounced Clinton for lying and cheating, but for drug-dealing, rape, and murder? People who want to convince the world they are not "partisans" in the Arab-Israeli conflict do not write op-ed pieces for
Aljazeera.
Mr. Nowrasteh begins with a ritual declaration of American Exceptionalism:
My Iranian parents fled tyranny and oppression. I know and appreciate deeply the sanctuary America has offered. Only in this country could a person such as I have had the life, liberty and opportunity that I have had.
I know, I know. Everybody does this in the Good 'ole U.S.A. It's like the prayer of invocation at the beginning of a church service or other solemn public event. That may be okay for politicians and high school coaches, but if you are charged to research and write what you, yourself, describe as "the most distressing and important story," then you need to have a more grown-up view of the real world than that.
The paragraph that really got me was the Some - of - my - best - friends - are - Hollywood - liberals defense.
...much was made of my "friendship" with Rush Limbaugh (a connection limited to two social encounters), but nothing of any acquaintance with well-known names on the other side of the political spectrum. No reference to Abby Mann, for instance, with whom I worked on "10,000 Black Men Named George" (whose hero is an African-American communist)...
Wait just a cotton-pickin' minute!
What was that reference to "10,000 Black Men Named George?"
For those who don't know, this film is about A. Philip Randolph, the legendary labor and civil rights leader. It is about how Mr. Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters as the first nationally recognized Black union in the 1930s. See below a brief synopsis of the film posted on Net Flix.
During the Depression, gainful employment is practically nonexistent for African-Americans. The only available jobs are as porters for the Pullman Rail Company (which pay blacks one-third of what white employees make).
Journalist A. Philip Randolph (Andre Braugher) makes it his mission to help these forgotten workers -- called "George," after company founder George Pullman -- and helps form the first black union in America. Robert Townsend directs.
Mr. Randolph went on to serve for many years on the national board of the AFL-CIO and organized the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King game his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
As a young man, Mr. Randolph was an editor of a socialist newspaper, but A. Philip Randolph was absolutely, positively never a communist and never accused of being a communist.
Indeed, there are a couple of tremendous ironies to this story. One is that it was none other than A. Philip Randolph who gently persuaded the fiery young John Lewis of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to water down his revolutionary rhetoric in 1963. Finally, Mr. Randolph, like most of the AFL-CIO top leadership, strongly supported the Vietnam War.
The only people in the whole world who would consider a great man like A. Phillip Randolph a communist are the kind of rightwing whackos who write editorials and commentary for The Wall Street Journal. According to their sick ideology, any good labor leader is a communist, and especially an "uppity" Black man man who didn't know enough to "stay in his place" back in what all U.S. "conservatives" consider the "good old days" of Jim Crow.
Nowrasteh says: "I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe," but ends up "outing" himself for being just that.