Lazy daze

It didn't hurt Scheer's path to success that he married Narda Zacchino, long an influential editor at the Los Angeles Times and now a vice president at the newspaper. Nor did it hurt that he hung out with pals like Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty and knew some of the finest restaurateurs in town on a first-name basis.

Scheer's journalistic fronting for the Clinton White House even earned him a spot on Sidney Blumenthal's e-mail list of media friends, which was recently exposed by the Weekly Standard. Among his many perks, Scheer was appointed to a visiting professorship on the faculty of the prestigious Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California by its dean, a former Clinton official.

Along with an entire generation of New Left intellectuals, Scheer was burrowing into the institutions they had tried to burn down, and busily infiltrating the '60s into the mainstream culture. And throughout, he continued his sanctimonious attacks against the ruling class in his columns for the Times.

A recent Scheer column on the power crisis in California -- a story in his journalistic backyard -- affords a glimpse of his current style. By general consensus, the California crisis was triggered by the unexpected convergence of at least four significant factors: A) a 30 percent increase in the demand for electricity in one of the nation's fastest-growing states, B) a shortage of power sources resulting from environmental attitudes that had prevented the state from bringing on line a single new power plant in 15 years, C) an increased dependence on power from other states in which demand was also rising and D) a misguided legislative decision to half-deregulate the industry, allowing utility companies to purchase power at market rates on the supply side of the equation, but maintaining regulatory controls on consumer prices on the demand side. By 2001, the cost of power to California's utilities was more than 10 times what they were allowed to charge consumers, who -- because their price was fixed -- lacked incentive to restrict demand. This put the utility companies on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to purchase additional power.

But to Scheer, such complexity was only a distraction from ideological clarity. This is how Scheer distilled the situation in a Dec. 26 column mixing metaphors of Santa, Mickey and Frank Baum, in a hallmark style that might be described as Beverly Hills kitsch:

Capitalism is falling apart. Yes, Virginia, we do need government regulation ... because the market mechanism left to its own devices inevitably spirals out of control. Recognition of that reality has guided this country to prosperity ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt pulled us out of the Great Depression. But in recent decades, conservative economists and their fat-cat corporate sponsors have led us down the yellow brick road of deregulation. Getting government out of the market would free creativity and investment, leading us to the magic kingdom of Oz, where all would prosper. If anything went wrong, the wizard of Oz -- a.k.a. Alan Greenspan -- would make it all better.

Like the inscrutable reference to Federal Reserve head Greenspan, Scheer's column never actually got around to the facts of the case. (Nor did Roosevelt's New Deal pull us out of the Depression.) Instead his column provided a cook's tour of the author's anti-corporate prejudices along with many arcane irrelevancies off the top of the author's head, including the AOL Time Warner merger and Europe's mad cow epidemic. Scheer's column concluded with a plea for "passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform" and "the revival of the consumer movement" to achieve "more, not less, regulation," which was Scheer's ideological solution to the problem.

But nothing represents Scheer's intellectual laziness better than his reckless and continuing defense of Wen Ho Lee.

The immediate context of the Lee case had been set by a report released in May 1999 by the so-called Cox Committee on the theft of nuclear secrets. The report, approved by a bipartisan committee led by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., concluded: "The espionage inquiry found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles and guidance systems."

On May 11, Scheer answered the findings of the bipartisan committee on the theft of nuclear secrets with the following ludicrous dismissals: "Let's as those Apple Computer ads implore, think different. There are no nuclear weapons secrets or, indeed, nuclear 'weapons' for China to have stolen," he wrote.

Scheer did not actually try to substantiate the absurd claim that the United States has no nuclear weapons secrets. (He just left it floating in the ether.) But he did take a stab at the idea that there are no nuclear weapons: "Nuclear bombs are not actually weapons because, in today's world, they cannot be employed to win battles but can serve only as instruments of mass terror." The statement -- and the entire column -- showed an ignorance of deterrence theory astounding for a man whose personal Web site boasts that "from 1976 to 1993, he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where he wrote articles on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military."

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