My main problem with today’s Beltway political media isn’t that it leans conservative & too easily parrots GOP lies without fact-checking them — it’s that today’s Beltway political media is far too cozy to power.
Take, for example, the Washington Post’s extraordinarily sympathetic intro to its profile of Fred Malek, making his anti-Jew crusade sound on par with a one-time accounting slip-up:
Frederic V. Malek, who is among Washington’s wealthiest Republican power brokers, is discovering that even a single problematic episode in government service can be hard to shake.
Jeez, the guy organizes a secret campaign targeting Jews ONE TIME & here we are 30 years later still calling him a secret Jew campaign targeter! Can’t we give the poor guy a break? Hasn’t he already suffered enough?
Of course, that presumes the Jew targeting campaign was the only shady thing Malek did for Nixon. Which it wasn’t. From Jonathan Schell’s The Time of Illusion:
At the pettiest level, White House social life came to be regulated by a system of punishments and rewards. During the summer, an aide named Frederic Malek, who kept an eye on this aspect of White House affairs, told a reporter, “We’ve corralled all the goodies that are available.” Cabinet aides who were “deserving” or who needed a boost “from a morale standpoint” would be rewarded with an engraved invitation to a White House black-tie function. Under the old, disorganized system of socializing at the White House, Malek pointed out, the President “could be inviting someone we want to get rid of.” Now anyone of that kind would be left out in the cold. Malek was also empowered to impose more serious punishment. One of his principal jobs, he told the reporter, was to ferret out “bad guys” and to fire them. […]
A “responsiveness program” was set up, under Malek’s guidance, which channelled federal money to groups that gave the President political support, and cut off federal money from groups that opposed the President.
OK, so he did shady stuff for Nixon TWO TIMES! Is it so bad to target Jews & use taxpayer money for political gain? Cut the man some slack!
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
