Most Useful Idiots: New York Times, Donahue, Ramsey Clark

Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com

Wednesday, March 5, 2003

WASHINGTON - The author of the best seller "Useful Idiots" names the New York Times, out-of-work TV host Phil Donahue and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark as the leading "Useful Idiots" of the current day.

In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, syndicated columnist Mona Charen awarded the so-called "newspaper of record" top billing in this category.

"The New York Times even today has done everything possible to thwart the war against Iraq, is constantly presenting the United States in the worst possible light," Charen told us.

The newspaper, which has consistently ignored the communist affiliations of the organizers of the appeasement demonstrations against President Bush's policies on Iraq, earned Charen's "Useful Idiots" prize for its tone deafness to national security of America. The pattern at the Times goes back more than a half century, before the outbreak of the Cold War.

The columnist named names in the Times' tarnished history:
· Walter Duranty, who lied to his readers that there was no government-induced famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when in fact those very conditions prevailed, with children dying on the street after their parents were hauled off to prison camps and executed. Their crime? They had property deemed best suited for the almighty state.
Later, it was learned that the Soviets had bribed Duranty after learning of his "sexual proclivities." That discovery became public knowledge years later after he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Charen noted the Times has not had the common decency to give back the prize or to offer an apology to the public.
The best-selling author cited others who misled New York Times readers over the decades:

· Herbert Matthews, who wrote from Cuba that Fidel Castro supported democracy, obscuring or ignoring evidence that the ultimately successful revolutionary was in fact a Soviet-backed communist.
(For another article on this topic, see "Profiles in REAL Courage.")

· Sydney Schanberg, whose reporting from Cambodia heaped scorn on the notion that there was a bloodbath in that unfortunate nation, and said "nothing could be worse for the Cambodian people than the American presence." Once the Americans left, Charen recalled, "we had one of the worst bloodbaths in the history of the world." One third of Cambodia's people were eliminated.

Later, in the book and movie "The Killing Fields," the Guilty White Liberal Schanberg is portrayed as the central tragic figure in the holocaust launched by Cambodia's communist dictatorship.
Anyone reading the New York Times' appeasement coverage of Iraq would do well to remember this track record.

The runner-up in Charen's "Useful Idiots" prize is former TV host Phil Donahue, who recently lost his slot at MSNBC because his ratings, in the words of a speaker at the annual C-PAC conference, were barely above "those of the test pattern."

Donahue excused the enemies of America in the War on Terror and played the "moral equivalence" game when the Soviet Union threatened world domination. It was just those "militarists" that were to blame, you see.

Ramsey Clark's Hatred of America

Third on this dubious honor list, in Charen's view, is Ramsey Clark. NewsMax.com has documented Clark's fronting for communist-backed groups organizing the recent appeasement rallies that benefit Saddam Hussein.
That does not negatively affect the former attorney general's standing with the liberal elite, notes Charen, and "he is still somebody that CBS doesn't hesitate to call when they need someone to broker an interview between Dan Rather and Saddam Hussein."

Clark has made pilgrimages to "every capital of a country with whom we have poor relations," including North Korea, North Vietnam, Libya, Iran, Panama and now Iraq, accusing the United States of war crimes in each and every place."

But Lyndon Johnson's attorney general outdid himself in shameful performance by representing the terrorist PLO when it was threatened with a lawsuit by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American thrown overboard from the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the 1980s.

In her NewsMax interview, Charen cited the recently arrested Florida professor Sami al-Arian, charged with ties to terrorists, as an example of people who get a pass and attain respectability in this country because of the cover given them by "useful idiots."

In just a few days after it was released, Charen's "Useful Idiots" made No. 6 on the New York Times' best-seller list. Given that the Times itself stars as part of the title role, any review of the book by the "gray lady" could be, at best, a mixed blessing.