Man bites lap dogs!

In the book, you differentiate attack poodles from pundits who are partisan but fair, and who will admit when they're wrong. Are there any like that still working regularly?

I'm beginning to wonder. The recent Swift boat thing made me think there aren't any.

People love to talk about Michael Kinsley and William F. Buckley, about "Firing Line" being kind of the last time that it was a civil affair ...

Yeah, that was a different time. Look at what a pathetic old coot William Buckley has become. He made a very lame statement about Iraq, but when I saw him recently, promoting his new book, the main thing he wanted to come out for was the family marriage amendment. Oh, man! You've lived your life, you've learned all you've learned, you've met all these people -- and this is what you want to come out for? This is your last hurrah?

Something that really struck me: The people I would have thought were a little more classy, a little more moderate in the conservative ranks, they jumped on and defended [the Swift Boat ads]: George Will, Bill Kristol. Now that may be a sign of how desperate they are for Bush to win. In the past, the classier conservatives would have disassociated themselves from that sort of thing. Also, the more serious conservatives would have taken a step back and said, Well, what is going on in Iraq? How wrong did we get it?

The right is incredibly disciplined in having everyone close ranks and stay on message.

I think part of it is that the left doesn't have the proper infrastructure of opinion that the right has. Like with the Swift Boat thing, it bubbles up. First you've got the ads, then the pictures get leaked to Drudge, then talk radio starts talking it up, then it moves into Fox, then the other people in news outlets feel that they've got to cover it. I think the left is beginning to put that infrastructure together. Through the blogs, through Air America. They're beginning to make more of a link-up.

There's a kind of a freaky admiration that media biggies have for the right wing; they sort of admire the nastiness. They consider people on the left wimpy. And even though Democratic senators have actually served in uniform, the swagger is on the right. A lot of this is masculine mode. If you look at the way Chris Matthews talks about certain people, he gets turned on by a certain kind of machismo in politicians. It could be a totally false machismo, but that is often what people get turned on by.

Also, one of the things they like to do with liberals is call them whiny. They like to portray them, in effect, as women. There's a lot of sexism involved, not to mention there is also a tremendous amount of racism. That's where I think the liberal, the neoliberal press needs to do some real examination.

Can you give an example of racism?

The way they talk about Al Sharpton. They write about him in a dismissive way. They never write about racial issues. You go through those neoliberal writers who came up through the New Republic -- racial issues have never really been much of an issue for them, and women's issues have never really been much of an issue for them. There's a real white-guy solidarity. I believe people think that he's nuts, but I think Norman Mailer was right when he said that the kind of wars we're having now are the last stand of the white male ego. There is a lot invested in that white male ego. Even in the media, even people who don't like politics, they somehow feel that, "Well, Bush embodies that better than these liberals with their flip-flopping and their equivocations and their nuances." You've got people who went to Harvard and Yale who sneer at nuances, and at being articulate!

Who would you identify as the worst attack poodle?

I can't pick one. For a certain type of pious smarminess, you can't do better than David Frum, because he pretends to care. I think that if I were going to do an updated book, I'd do a whole section on Michelle Malkin, who I think is one of the nastiest pieces of work around. That is a classic case of the attack poodle machinery at work. She brings out this book, it starts to get talked about on the Internet, talk radio, then she's on all the shows.

She seems completely manufactured.

Completely manufactured! There are all these people writing all these very good critiques of her history, in terms of internment of the Japanese, and how she got the history wrong. And I'm sure she did. But to me that's not the real purpose of the book. One of the things I always do with the attack poodles is, I ask myself, why are they doing this now? Why this, why now? One of the things she's doing with the internment is she's laying the groundwork for all sorts of ethnic considerations and profiling. That's part of what she's doing, because if you justify the Japanese internment, you can then justify the internment of other people. If you look at her other writing, she is big on racial profiling.

Next Page: On why the left needs "wolfhounds" to maul the poodles: "There are no grown-ups anymore. The adults have left the building"

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