Spoon-feeding Hilton Kramer
In the opening pages of the June issue of the New Criterion, edited by Hilton Kramer and funded by the Olin, Bradley, and Scaife Foundations, readers are treated to a startling display of the willingness of conservative intellectuals to be spoon-fed by the Bush administration (while they’re not spoon-feeding their own bizarre schemes to the Pentagon, that is). The editors write:

Of course, they don’t say that it was only a handful of low-lifes perpetrating the outrages. . . . If we are Seymour Hersh, we write a story for The New Yorker attempting to implicate the Secretary of Defense in the episode. . . . The New Yorker published Hersh’s essay under the rubric “Fact.” But is it factual? According to a Pentagon spokesman, Hersh’s claims are “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.” . . . Hersh’s piece was published about a week before U.S. forces rolled into Baghdad in one of the swiftest, least bloody, and most brilliantly coordinated military assaults in history. [Emphasis added.]

A strangely uncritical assessment from a journal that not only cribbed its name from T.S. Eliot but in the same “Notes & Comments” section in the very same issue refers to itself as “the best cultural review in English.”

527s
For everything you ever wanted to know about 527s, but were afraid to ask (Ray Bradbury, please call Norah Vincent, Norah Vincent, please call Hilton Kramer), see “Shadow Warriors,” by Michael Crowley in New York magazine.

Put Up or Shut Up
Act for Change has launched a campaign calling on Vice President Dick Cheney to “Prove It or Resign.” According to the activist group: “Vice President Dick Cheney is at it again. From the earliest moments after the tragedy of 9/11, Mr. Cheney has sought to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was linked to Al Qaida. So far, all the evidence demonstrates otherwise, yet Mr. Cheney keeps pushing his tall tale. And now he indicates that he has evidence not previously revealed to the 9/11 Commission. If he does, he should reveal it immediately and let the experts and the public judge it. Frankly, in other times, withholding such evidence would be grounds for impeachment. If he does not have such evidence, he should stop making it up and resign.”

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