The Right and Gibson III

Hugh Hewitt, it appears, cannot take responsibility just like the man he idolizes, George W. Bush. Check out this piece of artless subject-changing. Hewitt vouched for the good intentions of Mel Gibson in making "The Passion of the Christ," denied its rank anti-Semitism, and is one of those trying to fuse the primal zeal of Christianist fundamentalism with the Republican party. And his ploy in writing about Gibson is to accuse others of losing perspective and not focusing on the evils of Hezbollah, or Castro, or a violent anti-Semite in Seattle. We all have our priorities, and Hewitt has every right to his. But you learn something about someone unable or unwilling to confess a serious error of judgment in the past. I'm not surprised. The man is a partisan fanatic. Like his beloved president, any admission of error sends his Manichean worldview careening. And so he changes the subject. He has to.

Among the theocons, Cal Thomas manages to turn the Gibson incident into a column decrying Hollywood's bigotry against ...

"Catholics and conservative Protestants, political conservatives, Republicans and pro-lifers."

Yes, that was what this was about, wasn't it? David Horowitz, a man who has sadly capitulated to the logic of "no enemies to the right" also sees the Gibson episode as revealing of bigotry towards ... conservatives:

"[A] lot of the people who are jumping all over Mel Gibson see him as some kind of a conservative or as a Christian. There's a lot of hatred of Christians in this country."

The fanatical attachment to ideology regardless of the facts at hand is something Horowitz once learned on the extreme left. It didn't take much for him to take it with him to the extreme right.