His Radical Son is full of ironies. As recently as this memoir's writing in the mid-'90s, Horowitz fondly recalls his use of marijuana in the late '60s while working at Ramparts, "I had tried marijuana with some of the office staff. The drug seemed fairly harmless, and the experience was seductive-but I remained skittish and did not pursue it." This is strangely accepting considering Horowitz's contribution to an Bush administration that practices "Zero Tolerance."

The Supreme Court's decision (Bush vs. Gore case no. 00-949) was what ultimately placed Bush in the White House, not a popular majority vote, or a recount of disputed swing state ballots. The dissenting Supreme Court opinion argued against granting a stay to the Florida Supreme Court's decision to halt the manual recount. Citing National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie, 434 U. S. 1327, 1328 (1977) the dissenting opinion stated "there is a danger that a stay may cause irreparable harm to the respondents-and, more importantly, the public at large-because of the risk that 'the entry of the stay would be tantamount to a decision on the merits in favor of the applicants.'" The majority opinion written by Bush family friend Antonin Scalia stated that a manual recount would risk "casting a cloud upon" what Bush "claims to be the legitimacy of his election." Allowing a manual recount would cloud "the public acceptance democratic stability requires."

Scalia should be reassured that this is not a strong concern for Bush's people in the first place. By David Horowitz's definition, the conservative agenda doesn't think too highly of democracy in the first place. "The healthiest thing is the thing Marx attacked: that things are in the saddle and ride mankind. You don't want people in control. It's just what the Founders said. You know we all get frustrated because...we don't have one man-one vote, we have a Senate that's undemocratic, one Senator can hold up legislation, we've got a Supreme Court they've got lifetime jobs they can fuck with anything, every Leftist wants a parliament, they want the general will to decide-that's the most dangerous thing you can have."

Asked for further clarification, he explained the need for, "a healthy distrust of public passion. Hitler was fucking elected."
Again, this shows that Horowitz's world since 1974 is painfully upside down. Hitler was not elected, he was handed the Chancellorship by von Papen, who asked Hitler to be chancellor of a coalition cabinet amid German political chaos in 1933. Horowitz will fabricate pseudo-historical facts to advance his argument.

But Horowitz had already jumped onto a new topic, "When Josef Stalin died! Now think of Stalin, every family in Russia had somebody that disappeared at some point, and when he died, a thousand people were trampled to death at his funeral, that's how loved he was. People have their heads up their assholes. I'm sorry, but this is what the Conservative view is. OK, you have a healthy disrespect for the popular will...It's a brilliant idea, that the people are sovereign, but their sovereignty is mediated through institutions that restrain or delay things that make it harder to make radical changes, so that they have time for their passions to cool and their reason to take over....When I look at poverty today, I personally think that the Left has done an unbelievable damage to poor people. I hold Frances Fox Piven responsible for the destruction of the black family. Before this stupid welfare system was put into place, seventy-five percent of black kids had two parents, now in the inner city, it's twenty percent. Eighty percent of kids are born out of wedlock. If you have a child that's brought up by a single-parent, female-headed household, it is six times more likely to be poor, regardless of race. So, that's why I'm a Republican, when the Republicans said the system isn't working, because that's the way they talk, 'it's not working' and they're idiots because that's the way they talk instead of it's a fucking racism that's destroying poor people, instead of talking that way they said, 'it's inefficient, it doesn't work,'...they were called Nazis for doing it. That's the political battle in America today, you have the Democratic Party which has set up incredibly destructive programs."

When pressed for an opinion on Bush's actual accomplishments and qualifications for President, Horowitz became flustered and angry:

"You're making me very nervous about talking to you. I appreciate your candor, but it doesn't make any sense for me to be on this line." And then upon further pressing Horowitz digressed, "Well, what did Camille Paglia say of Gore? That he's 'a weightless schizophrenic?' I believe that Gore and Clinton committed treason. Why the fuck should...I mean I think that Bush is saving the country. You're talking to the wrong guy. If you want to pursue this line...you're talking to the wrong guy. I can't talk to you. I mean, I don't want to talk to you."

After a short pause, "You need to read what I've written about China. I mean these guys have sold your future and your children's to the fucking Chinese...I'm talking about Clinton and Gore. They dealt with the agents of the...Bush is a decent human being...probably as good a President as we had since Reagan, I mean certainly."

Horowitz had been asked for a summation of Bush's qualifications. It was pointed out he was coming up short. Horowitz snapped, "I'll tell you something. As a guy who was obviously disordered, obviously an alcoholic, he turned his life around. There's not a lot of people...there are people you can point to, but there are not a lot. If you have ever been through a mid-life crisis, or had to deal with that level of disorder, you don't know how hard it is. Try losing an inch off your waistline."
I responded by slowly stating, "But we're talking, Sir, about the President of the United States."

"Yeah and what he did in Texas is raise the African-American kids' grade scores to the highest in the country. That to me, alone, is a qualification of being President. The guy really cares. With the Republican Party in Texas he got thirty percent of the black vote...."

Upon being challenged about this, Horowitz cited the official number of the Republican claim, "twenty-seven percent." He punctuated it with the question, "What do you want?"

Both numbers are fabrications. It's important to go into this, because the "Compassionate Conservatives" take a lot of mileage out of the myth of a mandate from minorities in Bush's 1998 Texas Governor re-election.

Karl Rove needed Governor Bush's re-election campaign in 1998 to launch Bush onto a White House trajectory. Democrat Gary Mauro was an easy target, and Rove needed a major landslide across race and class lines to create the appearance of popular approval. He and Bush campaigned hard to decimate their timid opponent and tried to win the support of minorities usually hostile to the Republican Party. When they didn't win big majorities, they bloated the numbers and hoped no one would notice. In Rove's own words, they needed to be able to claim they could "erase the gender gap, open the doors of the Republican Party to new faces and new voices, and win without sacrificing principles."

The Bush machine trumpeted that Bush had created "political history," with forty-nine percent of the Hispanic vote, and twenty-seven percent of the black vote, citing the exit poll conducted by Voter News Service of New York. A co-designer of the Voter News Service survey, political scientist Bob Stein, said that the actual data on Bush's Hispanic vote was somewhere between "the high thirties and low forties" not "forty-nine percent." He said Bush's percentage among black voters was probably in the low twenties, not "twenty-seven percent." The Willie Velasquez Institute in San Antonio's exit poll corroborated Bush got thirty-nine percent of the Latin vote, and a local El Paso poll, conducted by a professor at the University of Texas, showed Bush with thirty-seven percent of Hispanic voters there. When the Fort Worth Star-Telegram called the Bush campaign with questions about this discrepancy, they were referred to the governor's consultant, Karl Rove. The paper glumly stated, "Attempts to reach Rove were unsuccessful." [Root, Jay. "MINORITY VOTE FIGURES FOR BUSH RE-EXAMINED" Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Date and page # citation Tk.]

Horowitz dismissed this news, "The entire press corps missed this?"

This leading Republican claimed that if the media didn't report on this, then it couldn't be true. For both the Clinton White House and the Bush Campaign, threats of withdrawn access and heavy reprisal have stopped the media from reporting on a multitude of stories. U.S. citizens of all political views would agree: journalist Gary Webb's scoop on the CIA/Contra/crack connection was denounced and retracted from the San Jos? Mercury News despite a mountain of consistent research. Producer April OIiver was fired from CNN for exposing Army Intelligence's Vietnam era Operation Tailwind, the plan to kill defectors with sarin nerve gas. J. H. Hatfield was excoriated for exposing G. W. Bush's drug history in Fortunate Son despite his excellent research. The media was reluctant to go beyond the guilty and stonefaced Timothy McVeigh to look into ugly larger truths about the Oklahoma City bombing.

When Horowitz was pressed about whether "fuzzy math" or a real mandate from minorities was behind the Republican exit polls in 1998, Horowitz indignantly snapped, "I really don't have time for all this, if you don't like Bush, you don't like Bush...I don't think we have much to talk about...You just wasted my time."

The line went dead.



The Big Picture

Under the Bush administration, David Horowitz is in a major position of ideological, political leadership. In his columns on Salon.com he argues for rational debate and civility. Yet our interview proved he was incapable of having a conversation without using the word "FUCK" as if it was punctuation. It ended when he slammed down the phone.

Time Magazine recently called him "a real, live bigot." His experience with the Black Panthers made him an extremist, and his fierce opposition to reparations for American blacks is oddly impassioned. In conversation, he made a strange distinction in the definition of poverty: "It doesn't really matter because as you and I know, not only if you fall below the poverty line do you get a lot of subsidies, but people in the inner city do not pay the same for televisions or anything else that other people pay for....There's a whole hidden economy. If you know ANYBODY who lives in the inner city you know that...it costs twenty-five bucks or a hundred bucks or whatever."

What a remote, uninformed generalization to hear from one so influential. Horowitz has visited and advised President Bush in both the White House and Austin Governor's mansion. When Horowitz came to Austin, and interviewed Bush for Salon.com, Bush's first question was "What's Salon?" Perhaps Bush didn't invent the internet, but it would now seem that Bush lacks basic familiarity with its top news sites. Horowitz declined his opportunity to comment on this when he ran the interview under the fawning title, "'W' In His Game" on Salon, May 4, 1999.

Horowitz was Bush advisor Douglas Wead's first choice to write Bush's autobiography for him. [Minutaglio, p. 314] This honor is the product of a relationship cultivated when Horowitz curried favor by producing a major speaking event for Bush in front of key Hollywood producers (including the left-leaning Oliver Stone) on "personal responsibility." Bush's lip service to decency standards in Hollywood is ironic when one considers that one of his top Pioneer funders, and former employers, is Roland Betts, founder of SilverScreen Management Services, Inc., a company that has raised over $1 billion by co-releasing over twenty-one R-rated films.

According to the late Bush biographer columnist Jim Hatfield, "Dubya has decreed that 'naughty bits' (sex and violence) be sliced and diced from movies shown aboard Air Force One...[and] publicly stated that a 'society that has romanticized violence' with its movies was largely to blame for the tragedy that left over a dozen students dead [at Columbine High School]...Dubya reminds me of a South American drug kingpin who supplies half of North America in cocaine, but gets all uppity about his daughter using the stuff."

But Horowitz has no problem reconciling opposite positions. His book Hating Whitey floats inflammatory and debatable statistics about black men and rape. Yet The Art of Political War argues that the GOP must leave behind its own dead racist stereotype and build bridges to blacks and Hispanics. When asked about this contradiction, Horowitz just shrugged and told reporter Scott Sherman, "Sometimes my tactical agendas conflict."

Horowitz is a battered, feisty, garrulous, inconsistent intellectual. No surprise then, that his ideas form part of the justification for the presidency of one of the most anti-intellectual, dyslexic, heartless U.S. Presidents of this great country's history. David Horowitz was mad scientist to the chemical only a salesman like Karl Rove could sell.