The Worst Half Hour In The History Of Television

You may have already heard something about the contents of the Dec. 8 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country. It's hard really to know where to begin. How about this way: The last time there was so much overt anti-Semitism in a broadcast with national reach, Father Coughlin was still on the air.

The full transcript is here, and I recommend reading through it. I'll try to reconstruct what went on between the bookends of the show's opening sequence and the vaguely absurd spectacle of (guest host) Patrick Buchanan interviewing Leann Rimes. Buchanan assembled a panel to discuss the Oscars, and that's normally light-hearted bullshitting filler on a slow news day, but not when the entire panel is somewhere to the right of Buchanan and has an axe to grind. The guests were Govindi Murty, the co-founder of an anti-Cannes conservative film festival (who, incidentally, is both a Yalie and a hottie), Jennifer Giroux, the intrepid founder of Seethepassion.com (nuff said), Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League a man who died about fifteen years ago but whose body and vital functions are kept intact but the force of his own lingering paranoia and hatred (imagine Patrick Buchanan on PCP, and here's what you get), and lastly, the moral hero of this tableau, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who in real life is actually a moral pygmy.

Things were supposed to go the way you might have expected, a basic (rhetorical) circle-jerk on the (filmographic) carcass of Michael Moore. (I hate Moore, incidentally.) But the good rabbi quickly dashed any hope of having a satisfying agreement session when he described The Passion as "an abomination":

It really is like Mohammed al-Zarqawi‘s movies on the Internet where a guy gets his head chopped off. It's gory. It's ugly and it's not inspiring.

Well you can imagine that didn't go over well. Buchanan rushed to play the "how dare you be insensitive to our beliefs" card of the pedestrian right-wing post-modernism I touched on here. Perhaps you too can hear the mournful notes of the world's tiniest fiddle while Buchanan says:

Well, since about tens of millions of Americans saw it, loved it, appreciated it, and honored it, that tells us, Rabbi, I think, what you think of the intelligence and sensitivity of millions of Americans.

OR: "Since tens of millions of Germans read it, loved it, appreciated it, and honored it, that tells us, Rabbi, I think, what you think of the intelligence and sensitivity of millions of Germans." But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Nothing Buchanan has said (well, recently anyway, and, er, in public, at least as far as I know) could top the uncharacterizable mess that came out of Donohue's mouth as soon as Buchanan prompted him to speak about The Passion's Oscar prospects:

Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It‘s not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it. That‘s why they hate this movie. It‘s about Jesus Christ, and it‘s about truth. It‘s about the messiah.

Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost.

You have got secular Jews. You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group, and these people are in the margins.

I don't have the faintest idea how to get a purchase on this. As one of my professors said, there are two forms of moral persuasion. One is to appeal to shared intuitions. The other is to use a sword. I try to be careful not to make hyperbolic statements, and I don't think it's a hyperbole to say that if Bill Donohue's views ruled the country, Gene Vilensky and I would both have been burnt at a stake. I'll just leave the following as an open question: Although Donohue clearly hates Jews most of all, he didn't forget to let us know that he hates Protestants and ex-Catholics as well. Whom do you think he hates more, the heretics or the traitors?

I'm re-reading the transcript, and it looks like something very interesting happens at this point. After Donohue's "Kikes! Kikes!" outburst, Buchanan decided that the master can still teach the pupil a lesson or two in couching one's anti-Semitism so that it's plausibly deniable. Doing the only logical thing in response to that sort of rant, Buchanan asked Jennifer Giroux, who as the founder of Seethepassion.com obviously has a great deal of expertise in the cultural sentiments of the Jewish community, to explain why it is that Jews didn't like The Passion. He set the question up this way:

[H]e [Boteach] shares a view that's not only of the secular Jewish community about "The Passion of the Christ." But also neoconservatives, who often align themselves with conservatives, were vicious on this movie.

What is your explanation for why the almost among—in the Jewish community, it is almost universal, except for folks like Michael Medved, the contempt and hatred and revulsion at what we consider a beautiful movie?

If your curious about that last remark, I mentioned in a comment here that Shorter Medved on The Passion is: "We kikes had better own up to our Christ-killing, or else a rising wave of global anti-Kikism is no one's fault but our own." I wasn't joking then or now. Nor is it a joke that "neoconservatives who often align themselves with conservatives" is Buchanan-speak for "bloodsucking Jewish cabal." That, friends, is the slick way to hate Jews. Has Donohue got no class at all (don't answer)?

Rather than answer Buchanan's question (she's laboring under the impression that "way more Jewish people saw the value in this film, the artistic value, the historical value, than is let on in the national media, OK"), Giroux made a startling admission:

No matter what you think about “The Passion of the Christ,” Rabbi, the acting was so inspiring, so unforgettable. The scenes that he did, including the blessed mother running towards Jesus, the flashbacks, the circular camera that he used at the crucifixion that made you feel like the blood was hitting you in the face, artistic genius.

Something there bears repeating: "the circular camera that he used at the crucifixion that made you feel like the blood was hitting you in the face, artistic genius"!!! So much for the notion that Mel Gibson and Quentin Tarantino aren't bizzaro-world twins. How else can one describe Giroux's faith except as blood-worship? And what is the probability that her sentiment isn't shared among Gibson's fans? Between Donohue and Giroux, we have everything that motivated Eric Cartman to found a Gibson fan club.

Govindi Murty, as you might expect of a Yale graduate, has a considerably more sophisticated analysis:

Now, in terms of business vs. art or art vs. politics, I think art should be paramount. And the conflict between “The Passion” and between “Fahrenheit 9/11” is a conflict between art and between political propaganda. “The Passion” is a movie that ennobles and inspires the human spirit. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is a work of political propaganda that incites hatred against Americans and hatred of our own country and of our president.

It would be beating a dead horse to explain (yet again) what's wrong with characterizing The Passion as "a movie that ennobles and inspires the human spirit." Murty's original contribution to the crimes-against-reason genre of the Gibson apologists is to attack F9/11 for "inciting hatred" as a means of drawing a contrast with The Passion. As if there were any clearer form of incitement to hatred than a cinematic passion play that just about tops Oberammergau for reliance on anti-Semitic iconography as a plot device. But Murty, unlike her co-panelists, has something of a conscience:

Let‘s remember, secular Jews built up our film industry and founded most of our Hollywood movie studios and were very patriotic Americans for a long period of time. So I‘m a little—I feel some concern about the comments about secular Jews.

It's charitable of her to say so, even if a very plausible way to interpret that statement is as a suggestion that secular Jews are no longer patriotic Americans.

What Murty ambiguously implies, Buchanan readily endorses:

The movies, the war movies, the Western movies—I saw somewhere where seven out of the top 20 movies of the 20th century, according to artists themselves, were made in the 1950s.

They were made by secular Jewish folks. And they transmitted values of honesty and faith and courage. What has happened to Hollywood in 40 years?

Patrick my old boy, you should have known better than to trust those people 40 years ago.

Around this point in the discussion, Bill Donohue probably got the feeling that, despite managing to soil himself on national television, he was beginning to get outdone by his comrades. Seizing on the opening created by Boteach trying to deflect the pressure off of secular Jews and onto secularism in general, Donohue got to the bottom of things once again:

DONAHUE: Yes.

Obviously, he‘s concerned about secularists. I‘m talking about secularists in Hollywood. They‘re not Rastafarians. They‘re Jews. Just pick up any copy of the Jewish...

(CROSSTALK)

DONAHUE: And you‘ll learn that.

BOTEACH: Those Jews.

DONAHUE: Now, the fact of the matter—I didn‘t say those Jews.

BOTEACH: Them Jews.

(CROSSTALK)

DONAHUE: No, no, no, hold on here. Don‘t try to play this game with me here. To say that Hollywood...

BOTEACH: What a ridiculous statement.

DONAHUE: Wait a minute. To say that Hollywood...

BOTEACH: In 2004 America, the Jews, still. Come on, Bill.

DONAHUE: You‘re going to tell...

(CROSSTALK)

BOTEACH: Come on, Bill. Come on. You‘re too smart for this.

(CROSSTALK)

DONAHUE: You‘re going to tell me that the Chinese don‘t live in Chinatown, right? To say that Hollywood is dominated by secular Jews...

MSNBC isn't Fox News, and its executives ought to be ashamed of themselves (but probably aren't) that they allowed a show to become so unbalanced that no one, not even the lone Jew present, is going to call Donohue exactly what he is. Instead, we get Giroux's phantasmagoria about the moral decline of Hollywood/America hopelessly tangled inside excuse-making for anti-Semitism in general and Donohue in particular:

I constantly hear that there is a very, very strong homosexual push on Hollywood. I think it‘s the result of the sexual revolution. The decency laws, they keep pushing the envelope on that. What really makes me sad, here we are 10 minutes later, is that the Rabbi continues to pull out the anti-Semitic card, when, in fact, the pope himself, Billy Graham, all the religious leaders that lead millions around the world, have all come out and said, a beautiful movie, true to the Gospels. We all look inward and see what our part was. Pontius Pilate was conflicted.

Economical, isn't she. In one paragraph, half a dozen empty labels Giroux doesn't even understand (stong homosexual push that's the result of the sexual revolution and the pushing of envelopes on decency laws indeed), an exculpation of Pontius Pilate, and the suggestion of Billy Graham---whom we actually know from his recorded statements on the Nixon tapes to be a fanatical anti-Jewish bigot---as an arbiter of what constitutes anti-Semitism. The lack of both moral and intellectual education is staggering.

Murty, on the other hand, is sort of an intellectual, which is why her whitewashing of The Passion's anti-semitism is less pathetic than Giroux's and more incriminating:

MURTY: But let me address the anti-Semitism, please.

Let‘s face it. Let‘s look at the empirical evidence. What anti-Semitic acts have there been after “The Passion” came out? There have been none. In fact, there‘s a beautiful movie by Tim Chey called “Impact: The Passion of the Christ” that we showed at our recent Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles.

This is excellent. The fact that the low low low church Protestant audience for The Passion in America hasn't had enough schooling in the iconography of 17th century Catholic anti-Semitism to know how to respond to such a movie is supposed to count as evidence against such images being anti-Semitic. Let's not say a word about the film's reception in parts of the Muslim world where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion seem to be gaining in popularity, because Murty's earned the right not to have her bubble burst.

I prefer to concentrate instead on the next act of this drama, in which the rabbi is asked more or less directly to account for the culpability of the Jews as Christ-killers. Buchanan, in his genteel way, suggests that at the least, the Jews around at the time of Jesus's death were Christ-killers:

BUCHANAN: Did not the Jewish establishment want this man who said he was the messiah, who said he was the son of God, who said he was coming to bring a new religion, did they not want him out of the way?

Donohue, now chest high in his own filth, pipes in:

DONAHUE: It was the Puerto Ricans that did it.

And then Giroux hammers the point home by telling Boteach that he as well as all Jews everywhere aren't helping themselves by trying to duck responsibility for being messiah-slayers:

GIROUX: Yes.

All I can say, Rabbi, is, you‘ve got to concede the fact—and it‘s difficult because we all at times in life have to say, I‘m sorry, I was wrong—we cannot go back and make it that the Hawaiians killed Christ. Mel Gibson and all Christians...

I've poked fun at Shmuley Boteach before, and will do so again, but his response to that remark has got to be his life's crowning achievement:

BOTEACH: What bothers me, Jennifer, is that you‘re an ignorant peasant who doesn‘t even know Christian text, for God‘s sake.

L'chaim, as they say. Murty, to her credit, isn't party to the Christ-killing strophe/antistrophe dynamic. But she does manage to pinpoint the root cause of her confusion:

MURTY: Rabbi, let‘s look at the actual—I‘d like to ask the Rabbi a question. This is an honest question...

BOTEACH: Sure.

MURTY: ... from someone who is neither Jewish, nor Christian.

Let me just ask you, who are the biggest supporters of Israel in America today? It is the Christian right. It is the Christian right.

The Christian right supports Israel, to paraphrase Lenin, the way that a rope supports a hanging man. Is there anyone at Yale today (as opposed, apparently, to Murty's day) who doesn't understand that the reason evangelicals are supportive of Israel is because they want all the Jews to go there in order to bring about apocalypse, in which all Jews will either be killed and damned or converted? With friends like those....

That's about all I got. By way of closing, I'll borrow one of Murty's throwaway comments:

MURTY: I would like to say something, which is, you know what? I‘m not Jewish and I‘m not Christian. I‘m Hindu. And I liked “The Passion.” So there are a lot of different ethnicities working in Hollywood today.

Please face that.

Consider it faced. The American Dream: That a Hindu Yalie, a Protestant yokel, and a pair of medieval Catholics who would subject each other to an auto-da-fe if they should ever run out of other people to persecute, can all get together, and in the spirit of brotherhood, tolerance, unity, and patriotism, heap blood-libels on an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who's made a living as an apologist for the ideology that informed The Passion of the Christ and continues to inform its defenders.

UPDATE: Tim Cavanaugh caught this edition of Scarborough Country, too.

His description of Donohue In the course of covering his now-standard set of "Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski; the bums lost" talking points, the great Bill Donohue fingers the shadowy group that is really responsible for the Kulturkampf

seems on the mark. Though this original appellation of mine might be unimprovable: Donohue is what you'd get if Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor somehow accidentally lobotomized himself. (Hey, how about this for a one-act play---Donohue runs PR for the Inquisition, and takes a courageous stand against the ongoing persecution of Catholics: "I'm just disgusted by the anti-Catholic bias we're being subjected to. Are Catholics responsible for having our kids abducted at passover and made into those funny Jew-crackers?")

UPDATE: Yes, my spelling, "Donohue," is correct, and MSNBC's, "Donahue," is incorrect.