Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos has only been hosting ABC’s “This Week” program for a few weeks, but he has already redefined the program as a leader in Sunday morning political shows.
The leader, that is, in softball questions.
Grazing past a couple of times, I have found the experience excruciating without even offering the guilty pleasure that some truly awful TV shows provide: the pleasure of seeing people serve tripe and see only filet mignon. So I have an excuse for missing Sen. John Edwards’ visit to “This Week” a couple of weekends ago as he announced his exploratory bid for the presidency and tried to lived down his previous, underwhelming appearance on Tim Russert’s far-better “Meet the Press” program.
Reading Robert Novak’s political wrap-up, though, made me regret having missed the show. Apparently I would have witnessed a serious candidate for the White House, according to some misguided individuals, endorse as his “favorite book” a piece of political propaganda by a radical leftist and “journalist” who reportedly served as a paid agent for the Soviet Union.
The book is The Trial of Socrates. The author is the late I.F. “Iggy” Stone, who spent decades as a newsletter publisher, socialist gadfly, and mentor to dozens if not hundreds of misguided or demented writers of a conspiratorial, hard-left bent. Ironically, he was himself a cog in a conspiracy cooked up by the KGB to use paid assets to subvert the United States through propaganda and misinformation. It appears that Stone received payments of some sort for decades, though he refused any more Soviet subsidies after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Some of Stone’s fans have tried to defend him as merely getting free lunches from the Reds, though the fact that this appeared to go on for years, and that he mindlessly defended Stalin’s revolution throughout the 1930s and 1940s despite ample evidence that it was one of the most bestial developments in human history, hardly make this a credible apologia.
Jonah Goldberg of National Review once made an interesting comparison between I.F. Stone and Matt Drudge. I’m not sure I buy it completely, but the comparison at least serves to place Stone in an appropriate category. Imagine what would happen if a presidential candidate said his favorite author was Matt Drudge. I’m not saying that Drudge’s web site doesn’t provide a useful service – I visit it as a convenience several times a week – but one would hope no candidate would cite him as some kind of intellectual touchstone.
Edwards got a pass on this because few people recognize I.F. Stone’s name any more, which in a way is a good thing, and because the news media have already moved on to other presidential flavors of the week such as Joe Lieberman and Richard Gephardt. I’ve written that our senior senator deserves to be taken seriously. It seems he’s made it a personal goal to prove me wrong.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.