Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (19 page)

Newsweek
⁴⁶

“... the
surprise bestselling
impeachment guidebook
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
...”

U.S. News & World Report
⁴⁷

“[The Conservative Party British prime minister’s] 774-page memoir, titled
John Major: The Autobiography
... is already a
surprise best seller
in Britain.”

USA Today
⁴⁶

“[Flags of Our Fathers,
the story of the six young men who raised a flag on Iwo Jima] is the
surprise runaway nonfiction best seller
of the season.”

New York Times
^4<>

“... the
surprise best-seller The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life
...”

Entertainment Weekly*’-

“Books by conservatives are hot these days, but it still comes as a
surprise
to see that Bernard Goldberg’s
Bias
has bounced to the top of the
New York Times best-seller
list.”

Time
⁵¹

The surprise of conservative books repeatedly showing up on the best-seller list evidently never gets any less surprising. Growing weary of all the surprises, the left is itching to silence conservatives once and for all.

No conservative book will have a major rollout on the
Today
show, be excerpted in
Vanity Fair,
lead to an appearance on
Conan,
or merely be politely reviewed in the
New York Times.
Conservative books will not be assigned to mammoth college lecture courses and their purchase subsidized by student loans. Their authors will never be hailed as geniuses and poets and feted at Manhattan cocktail parties. Leaving nothing to chance, liberals also hide conservative books. The hiding-books trick—long well-known to conservatives—eventually became comical enough to be written up in the
New York Times.

The publisher of David Brock’s
The Real Anita Hill
(written when Brock was a conservative) told of wandering through bookstores in Harvard Square and finding “every feminist book you can think of... prominently displayed.” Brock’s book, which was then number three on the
New York Times
best-seller list, was “hidden in obscure corners as though it were a piece of pornography.” And that was when it was available at all.
⁵²
The owner of now-deceased Shakespeare & Company Booksellers on the Upper West Side of Manhattan proudly admitted to hiding Brock’s book. He noted the store also “carr[ied]
Mein Kampf,
although we don’t display that prominently, either.”
⁵³

Despite liberals’ little tricks,
The Real Anita Hill
was a best-seller. It was called “sleaze with footnotes” on the op-ed page of the
New York Times.
⁵⁴
The Nation proclaimed that “no reputable publishing house should have touched” the book.
⁵⁵
It was denounced as a fraud and a scam in the
New Yorker
by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, who later wrote their own book flacking for Hill. (Brock’s critical treatment of Anita Hill would sell about 40 percent more than Mayer and Abramson’s book fawning over Anita Hill.
⁵⁶
)

The popularity of Brock’s book with book buyers—”despite generally negative reviews”
⁵⁷
—came as a total shock to liberals. It always does. Criticism of Anita Hill would never see the light of day on the nation’s op-ed pages or network news: Who was buying all these books?

Publishing houses react to conservative authors like Linda Blair to holy water. Yet and still, people keep reading conservative books and somehow they keep landing on the
New York Times
best-seller list. If books by minorities were treated the way books by conservatives are, the nation would be consumed by wailing and gnashing of teeth in reaction to the manifest prejudice of the publishing industry.

There are many happy stories of books rejected by big-name publishers that, when finally published, become runaway best-sellers. A suspiciously large number of these stories involve conservative books. Imitating an Alzheimer’s joke, every successive conservative best-seller genuinely is a “surprise best-seller” to publishers. By contrast, it’s hard to think of a single liberal book whose commercial appeal eluded publishing houses—even those that went on to spectacular failure.

In 1989, every major New York publishing house turned down Leo Damore’s
Senatorial Privilege,
about Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s 1969 auto accident at Chappaquiddick. Only ideology-driven insanity could explain how New York publishers would refuse to recognize the commercial potential of such a book. After Regnery Publishing put it out, Damore’s book immediately shot to number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list, and remained on the list for twenty weeks. In response to the Cinderella story of
Senatorial Privilege,
the
New York Times
rushed in to deny “that the big publishing houses practice censorship” or follow a narrow “ideological line.” As the
Times
explained: “They do not.”
⁵⁸
With that, the inquiry was complete.

Also having nothing to do with ideological agendas was the publishing world’s reaction to William F. Buckley’s
God and Man at Yale
back in 1951. The University of Chicago’s Great Books Foundation broke its contract with Regnery merely for having published the book, stripping Regnery of a lucrative textbook series. Was that evidence of an ideological agenda?
⁵⁹

For another couple of decades, conservative books spurned by the big publishers kept reliably turning up on the best-seller list. Finally, even the
Times
wearied of denying that political censorship was at work. In 2001,
Flags of Our Fathers
by James Bradley spent forty-four weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list after having been rejected by twenty-seven New York publishing houses. This time, the
Times
gingerly raised the possibility of a “subliminal reason” leading to publishers’ consistent rejection of certain types of books. As the
Times
put it: “Most book editors and publishers were culturally formed by the 1960’s and 70’s and seem to suffer that Manhattan-West Coast ambivalence if not aversion to things military.”
⁶⁰
Military books, one publisher explained, are seen as “Middle America books, which is still a hard sell to editors.” (This is opposed to the easy sell of having no military and getting used to planes flying into your skyscrapers.)

“Middle America” means you—you reading this book. After Rush Limbaugh’s first book,
The Way Things Ought to Be,
had spent fifty-four weeks at the top of the
New York Times
best-seller list, a
Times
book reviewer sought to explain the author’s peculiar popularity by saying Limbaugh’s “appeal is to a part of middle America—call it the silent majority or the American People or the booboisie.”
⁶¹
That is how New York publishers think of people who buy books.

Still puzzling over the ceaseless surprise of conservative books on the best-seller list, in January 2002 the
New York Times
was shocked again: “I was startled to learn,” a reporter wrote, “that five books appealing to political conservatives, a third of the total, will be on the
New York Times
hardcover nonfiction best-seller list on Jan. 20 and that one of them will be No. I.”
⁶²

Casting about for an explanation of the conservative dominance of the best-seller list despite the fact that this had been true for generations, the
Times
attributed it to conservative authors’ “broadcasting celebrity.” Being permitted to give opinion commentary “from the right!” within a McGovernite universe—where George Stephanopoulos, Jesse Jackson, Lesley Stahl, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Bryant Gumbel are deemed objective reporters, and William Safire (voted for Clinton) and David Gergen (worked for Clinton) are considered “conservatives”—is what gives conservatives their mysterious edge in book sales.

The number one book that week,
Bias
by Bernard Goldberg, the
Times
reported, had been turned down by many “mainstream publishers.” Once again, Regnery was left to publish another runaway best-seller. Faced with the hard evidence that by publishing conservative books, Regnery had been able to produce a mind-bogglingly high percentage of best-sellers, the
Times’s
demented conclusion was: “Where Regnery has the missionary zeal as well as the profit motive, mainstream houses publish books by conservatives (or nearly anyone) mostly for the profit.” Ah! So the real reason mainstream publishers refuse to publish an entire category of popular best-selling books is savvy business judgment.

Liberals pretend to believe that when two random hoodlums kill a gay man in Oklahoma, it’s evidence of a national trend, but when a million people buy a book, it proves absolutely nothing about the book-buying public. These great opponents of “intolerance” are so fanatically intolerant of conservatives they will sacrifice the bottom line to prevent conservative books from being published.

Gigantic book advances go to all sorts of authors—liberal historians, liberal feminists, liberal celebrities, liberal Clinton aides, liberal fighter pilots, liberal comedians. But you can be sure that enormous advances that turn out to be enormous mistakes will never be lavished on any of those “surprise best-sellers.” Book advances are pure wealth transfers to liberal gabbers.

Feminist Naomi Wolf is regularly given mammoth advances, averaging half a million dollars apiece,
⁶³
for such intriguing themes as how Naomi lost her virginity.
⁶⁴
Despite colossal media interest more appropriate to the Second Coming, the actual books sell relatively poorly.

In its characteristic understatement, the
New York Times
called Wolf’s first book,
The Beauty Myth,
about how women are victimized by the cosmetics industry (men)—I quote—”one of the most important books of the 20th century.”
⁶⁵
It was given an adulatory write-up in a coveted
New York Times
book review. It was listed among the
Times’s
recommended “Summer Reading 1991: Books for Vacation Reading.” It was among the honored “Notable Books of the Year 1991.” Of course
The Beauty Myth
also made the
Times’?,
“And Bear in Mind” (“Editors’ choices of other recent books of particular interest”)
⁶⁶
special listing for books (by liberals) that the
Times
feels ought to be on the best-seller list but aren’t.

Eventually, the endless press attention bumped Wolf’s book to the lower end of the best-seller list for three weeks—coming in at numbers 16,13, and 13. Also on the
New York Times
best-seller list at about the same time were Dinesh D’Souza’s
Illiberal Education
—which spent fifteen weeks on the list—and P. J. O’Rourke’s
Parliament of Whores
—which spent thirty-eight weeks on the list.

O’Rourke’s book got a 146-word blurb from the
Times,
and D’Souza won a rare (for a conservative)
New York Times
book review—which said dourly of D’Souza’s runaway best-seller: “There is a place for good muckraking, but this book does not fill it.”
⁶⁷
With no establishment press flacking whatsoever, D’Souza’s book spent five times as long on the best-seller list (and at much higher numbers) than Wolf’s book. For his next book D’Souza got an advance of $150,000. For Wolf’s next book, Random House paid her an advance of $600,000.

Though Wolf’s next book,
Fire with Fire,
also didn’t sell well, her insipid feminist scribblings produced another media rapture. (Insights from her book worth $600,000: “The rape crisis center starved for lack of fun.”
⁶⁸
) Needless to say, it was reliably included among the “Notable Books of the Year”
⁶⁹
and again the next year as one of the “New & Noteworthy Paperbacks.”
⁷⁰
It was reviewed in the
Times
and mentioned in a dozen columns there as well. Sadly, having the
New York Times
doing publicity for her wasn’t enough to bump Wolf onto the best-seller list this time. But that didn’t put an end to her half-million-dollar book advances.

The head of Random House cited Wolf as an author he was “proud” of—irrespective of book sales.
⁷¹
(A few years later, the
New Yorker
reported Random House had lost $50 million in unearned advances.
⁷²
) Making money is less important in the book business than publishing liberals editors can be “proud” of.

In the first of his many establishment rewards for having worked for a Democrat president, who was later impeached and disbarred, George Stephanopoulos was given a $2.75 million advance by Little, Brown for his book, titled
All Too Human.
Another monopoly media rapture ensued. Stephanopoulos was interviewed about his book on NBC’s
Today
show (twice!), ABC’s
Good Morning America, CBS This Morning,
CNBC’s
Tim Russert Show,
CNN’s
Larry King Live,
Fox News’s
Special Report with Brit Hume,
Fox News’s
The Crier Report,
CBS News’s
Saturday Morning.
His book was the topic of dozens of other programs. He had an appearance on
Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
Stephanopoulos’s book was excerpted in
Newsweek
three days before it was released. It was written up in six separate articles in the
New York Times
alone the first week it came out—and another dozen times over the next month. That level of publicity is enough to make Britney Spears a star.