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Conspiring on the Naysayer Platform Barry Farber He was what I call an aggressive "downsizer" and I was his favorite victim. A downsizer is someone who remains ever alert for a way to diminish you while artfully pretending to be doing nothing of the kind. When I had a local radio show in New York, for instance, he would introduce me to a friend as the host of a "national radio show." When I promptly explained to the wide-eyed and overly impressed friend that I did not have a national show, I had a LOCAL show, the downsizer would jump in with mock anguish and say, "Oh, I see. I see. Your show is NOT national. It's just – it's just – HERE! I'm sorry. I'll remember." The downsizer's quite deliberate point was to convert the headline from "My friend Barry has a radio show in the biggest city in America" all the way down to "Oh. He's just heard HERE! I'm sorry. I got it wrong." If I had been elected president of the United States and run into the downsizer on the street, I would have told him I'd just been elected president and he would have said, "Really! President of what?" Then I'd tell him president of the United States and he'd immediately ask, "Does that include Canada, too?" And then I'd say, "No," and he'd quickly knife in with that mock anguish and say, "Oh, I see. Not Canada, too. Just … just HERE! Well, that's fine. That's real fine." My many brushes with the downsizer put me in excellent field position now to catch mass media red-handed when they go into their political and ideological downsizing routines. Those exercises used to be subtle and hard to spot. They've lately become about as subtle as a stuffed moose head over a fireplace. Let's start with the victory of Republican Brian Bilbray in San Diego retaining that House seat for the Republicans. For months before the election the drumbeat of Democratic victory amid a Republican meltdown rose in sharp crescendo across the mass media: "Bush can't do anything right. Iraq is a disaster. The Republican Party is a crime family. The GOP is a filthy cobweb about to come into contact with a Democratic blowtorch." And then some.
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Then what happened? That special election to replace the (indeed, corrupt) Duke Cunningham was won by Republican Brian Bilbray, who beat Democrat Francine Busby by 4 percentage points. Busby gathered no more votes than John Kerry had in that district in 2004. OK; not a landslide in that solid Republican district. But a "meltdown"? "A cobweb confronting a blowtorch"? Not quite. What came next was both shameless and hilarious. I was traveling that election Tuesday in early June and the first I heard of this Republican victory was the CNN commentator saying, "Republicans manage to hang on to their House seat in San Diego ..." and then with increased volume and energy, "But that may not be good news for the White House!" And why, exactly, is a win dramatically replacing a seemingly certain loss not good news for the head of the winning team? It seems that winner Bilbray "disagrees with the president on the issue of immigration!" That may not have actually downsized Republican glee among the champagne poppers at GOP headquarters, but it was a neat little try. A child who goes to bed without supper is nowhere near as stranded as a Bush hater who has to wake up on Wednesday without his win.
The successful targeting of al-Zarqawi the very next day belongs on the cover of the downsizer's manual. For months the administration had to endure the taunts of those who, seeking a change of lyric from "You've failed to get bin Laden all these years" over to "Zarqawi is right there under your nose in Iraq and you you're running out of excuses for failing to get him. "He's getting bigger and more menacing every day and gaining support and obviously winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis because nobody's tipping you off as to where he's hiding." Solemn essays in print and on the air told us how Zarqawi was encroaching on and even surpassing the legend of bin Laden and, wow, he's right there in Iraq and this inept bunch called "Bush's coalition" still can't find him. Two 500-pound bombs later, the script changed without delay or embarrassment. We then heard, "Zarqawi was always overrated as a terrorist. The Bush team built him up to where he looked real big but, in truth, Zarqawi never amounted to more than 10 percent of the insurgency!" Downsizers are also adept at upsizing. You may have noticed much of the mass media not thinking very highly of Israel, the only democracy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. After either an errant Israeli shell or a Palestinian land mine killed six picnickers on a Gaza beach, Hamas, the group that taught Iranian President Ahmadinejad the words and melody of "Let's wipe Israel off the Map!" vowed to break the cease-fire and resume operations aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state.
"And Hamas quickly backed up its words with action," chortled the woman on TV. Did I hear something like a mix of admiration and approval in her voice? She continued, "Hamas immediately fired six rockets from Gaza into Israel." She didn't stick around long enough to tell us that none of the Hamas rockets hit anybody or anything and three of them landed on Palestinian territory. Oh, well. Upsizing, like downsizing, is very much in the heart.
Easily the most absurd recent example of upsizing was the attempt to turn Tropical Storm Alberto into a hurricane. This storm had it all, and the possibilities to damage Bush were irresistible. The more the dis-admirers of the administration can validate the claims of global warming, the more contempt you can cook up for an administration that stonewalls all the "civilization-saving" measures like getting behind the Kyoto Treaty and the repression of fossil-fuel emissions. Then, here's this storm, Alberto, unusually early in the hurricane season and all they needed was winds of three or four more miles per hour to have a spectacularly early hurricane!
CNN strung reporters all along Florida's West Coast exuberating that, even though they didn't yet have their hurricane, they definitely had "HURRICANE WARNINGS!"
When I was 5, my mother entertained me with a little ditty that went "Two little country boys sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of 99 cents." And that's what it sounded like they were doing. Alas, their hurricane started out weak and gradually tapered off.
When the anchorman announced around 8:20 on the morning of June 13 that Alberto's wind speed had dropped all the way down to 50 mph, he sounded like a candidate who'd been emulsified at the polls giving his concession speech. Even nature gets upsized if that might push the president's poll numbers lower still. Who's the world's champion upsizer/downsizer? It's a tie at the top between two contenders – by an odd coincidence, one Nazi and one communist.
Adolf Hitler's star broadcast "journalist" was an enthusiastic Nazi named Ludwig Sertorius. Ludwig had a grand old time up to October 1942, when the German Afrika Korps under Gen. Erwin Rommel was chasing the British across North Africa to a point no more than 40 miles from Cairo. Nazi officers were choosing which hotel suites they would commandeer for their private use when they took Cairo. All of a sudden British General Bernard Montgomery's Eighty Army scored a smashing breakthrough at El Alamein, which resulted in the Germans giving the world the longest and fastest retreat in history. As the Nazi forces were reeling westward, pedal-to-the-metal to escape being overtaken by the British, Ludwig Sertorius took to the airwaves and proclaimed, "All British attempts to interfere with our systematic advance to the rear have been successfully smashed." Ludwig's communist co-owner of the world title was a plainclothes agit-prop agent in Moscow in the summer of 1956, the first summer after the war when foreigners were allowed into the Soviet Union as tourists. The job of the agit-prop men was to keep crowds moving and make sure the Russian masses didn't get too impressed with the superior clothing and gadgets of the visiting foreigners. I think I should put myself under oath for this one. I want the Lord to take me in one violent flash without getting sulfur burns on anybody else if one jot or tittle of this story is false or exaggerated! I happened to have the world's very first transistor radio with me, an American model named the Regency. It wasn't even out yet in America. My uncle was advertising manager of a big music store in New York and he gave it to me as a going-away present to take to Russia. A radio you could put in your pocket would have drawn dozens of onlookers back then even in America. In Moscow's Red Square I drew hundreds! They all crowded around to see this little American miracle of technology. The agit-prop man came zooming in like a heat-seeking missile until he got right beside me. He took one look at that tiny radio and then cupped his hands to his lips and yelled, "We make them better in the Soviet Union!" He then turned to me and said, "What is it?"
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