Kaus With His Hands in the Times' Cookie Jar

A few righty blogs, like Power Line, have been following the Judith Miller/Valery Plame scandal stories with interest, noting that the ex-con journalist has now become the story herself. Mickey Kaus, blogging at Slate, notes that some elements of the media are starting to turn on Miller for several possible reasons, one of which is:

Treason: Miller wasn't just perceived as in cahoots with
neocons in foisting the war off onto the public. She was doing it from within the New York Times, which the Left correctly perceives as one of "its" institutions. As a traitor within the liberal camp, she has to be expelled and punished, in a way she wouldn't be punished if she'd been an equally mistaken and influential reporter for National Review. The host body rejects her.

Kaus has a few other plausible theories, some or all of which might be working concurrently at the increasingly disgraced New York Times. But the one we've quoted is interesting to us, as it touches upon one of the ways our favorite subject, the literary and academic world, has increasingly walled itself off by institutionalizing a reflexive and paranoid leftism that angrily rejects any individual other than a lockstep fellow traveler. In accord with the stealth Marxism espoused by Antonio Gramsci, the left, slowly and surely since roughtly 1935, has infiltrated and taken over many of our cultural institutions, turning them into propaganda mills for a mindlessly violent and throroughly discredited collectivist mentality.

Thus, Time magazine, for example, once quite conservative under the wing of the Luce family, is now solidly and predictably left. So, too, many of today's now-failing daily papers, including the NYT and the Washington Post. Add in the publishing industry, nearly all college English Departments (which now teach more theory than literature) and you begin to build a pretty grim picture that starts to explain why so many folks in this country reflexively revile the US, even when it tries to defend itself proactively, as it did after 9/11. All these institutions, and many more, most with a profound influence on our culture--and thus how Americans think of themselves and of their place in the world--now strive to undermine our much-envied national confidence and optimism, in order to turn us into just another doorless room with No Exit, as our friends in France have allowed their country to become.

Over the months and years, we'll return to this theme again in an effort to expose the extent to which the Gramscian mindset has taken over and pretty much ruined our literary and artistic culture. But we'll also explore ways in which we can begin to take it back.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting indeed to see if Miller--who was portrayed as someone akin to St. Joan just a couple of weeks ago--and her once stellar career end up wrecked on the shoals of a vengeful left as Mickey Kaus--himself not exactly a Republican--suggests.