Fred Malek on CNBC
One of the enduring mysteries of American life is how it is, exactly, that so many people guilty of serious breaches of the public trust manage to maintain respectability in virtue of having committed this breaches while working for Republican presidents. Here’s Fred Malek guest-hosting on CNBC and loading Rep Paul Ryan’s “give more money to rich people” alternative budget. Who’s Fred Malek? Read this Colbert King article for the full details. But to make a long story short, though Malek is most infamous for the fact that on Richard Nixon’s behest he compiled a list of Jews working at the Bureau of Justice Statistics so that the paranoid and anti-semitic president could keep tabs on alleged conspiracies against him. But there’s really much more! He helped politicize the administration of justice all up and down the land, bailing out racist universities and corrupt unions and everything in between.
29 Responses to “Fred Malek on CNBC”
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March 25th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
So he is was to Nixon what Bill Moyers was to Johnson. Got it.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Why the surprise?
The US government is not any more prone to justice or fairness than other governments –just look at our Gini index. What it does do is conceal its predatory nature behind a cloud of bullshit.
Plus Americans are some of the most moronic fucking people on the planet–by design. We let our own tax dollars and airwaves be used to support a News Media and educational system devoted to brainwashing us into stupidity.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Seconding the Bill Moyers comment.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
So he is was to Nixon what Bill Moyers was to Johnson. Got it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is no stupid anywhere on earth like right-wing stupid.
It hurts just watching them try to think. It’s no wonder they fuck up literally everything they touch.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I spent decades in the Cold War –in my small way. But looking back , I have to wonder if it was worth it. IF the Soviets had wonder, would the common citizen be any worst off?
Why do we have a $Trillion dollar /year military budget? Could any of our foreign enemies fuck us any worse than what our own elites are doing?
March 25th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Yglesias, you have to govern the population you have–and, therefore, make deals with the elites of subpopulations therein–not the population you wish you had. It’s fine to rail against Malek. But who are the alternate elites on the other side(s) with whom you’re comfortable dealing? You’re going to have to pick at some point. That’s something that I would have thought would be mother’s milk to an institutionalist like yourself.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
It was kind of difficult watching CNBC this morning with Malek as the guest host. asshole Joe Kernan, who looked totally discomitted by Howard Dean the other morning looked like the cat who ate the canary with one of his own on today though…
March 25th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
As far as I know, the extent of Moyers’ hatchet-man activities includes 2 occasions of Johnson giving him a list of names to be given to the FBI for investigations that should not have been done.
Malek acted independently to perform all sorts of perversions of the governmental process.
I guess they’re the same much as the common cold is the same as the ebola virus.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Njorl,
I’m sure Moyers had good intentions, right?
March 25th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
What deranged leap of logic brought that response?
Nothing I said implied that Moyers had good intentions. I’m sure he either had partisan political intentions, or craven keeping-his-job intentions. However, his actions were not even remotely as disgusting as Malek’s.
I await your deranged reply.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
To be fair, any kind of meaningful service to Republican presidents requires consistent and serious breaches of the public trust, so barring those who commit such breaches from enjoying the aura of respectability would mean, in practices, restricting respectability to (some) Democrats and only to those Republicans with no record of participation in government.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Njorl,
I’m sure Moyers had good intentions, right?
Ow Ow Ow
So. Fucking. Stupid.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
How did Moyers become the topic? Does this mean that we can all pretend that Malek’s anti-Semetic campaign on behalf of Nixon never happened now?
March 25th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Huh. Dude has a blog.
March 25th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
C’mon, Matt, you know that this kind of ADL-type stuff you’re pulling here is exactly how the American Likudists keep power over people like you. Stop validating their use of their tactics by using them yourself.
You should be encouraging public interest in the publication of facts about the extent of Jewish influence and power.
March 25th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
You should be encouraging public interest in the publication of facts about the extent of Jewish influence and power.
Sailer–and I say this as an occasional nominal defender of your ability to provide interesting insights–you do know how genuinely creepy that sounds, right? I cannot, for the life of me, think why, even if you believe the above to be true, you couldn’t take five minutes to write it in a way that is less troubling. Except that perhaps you don’t realize how creepy the current version sounds. Which is itself creepy.
March 25th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Fred Maleks’ antisemitic activities during the Nixon Administration came back to bite him during the negotiations over the ownership of the Washington Nationals baseball team. He was part of one of the ownership groups bidding for the franchise and I am quite sure that his presence did not endear that group to Jewish commissioner Bud Selig.
March 25th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Re Steve Sailer at 15: “C’mon, Matt, you know that this kind of ADL-type stuff you’re pulling here is exactly how the American Likudists keep power over people like you. Stop validating their use of their tactics by using them yourself. ”
——————-
Too late, Steve. The International Zionist Conspiracy has let Matthew know that he better pull up his socks –or else be declared poshea Yisrael.
See Caroline Glick at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0309/glick031309.php3?printer_friendly
An excerpt:
“his [Chas Freeman's] defenders — both non-Jewish and Jewish — have highlighted his hatred of Israel and its American supporters as the primary reason for defending them. The likes of Steven Walt, M.J. Rosenberg and Matthew Iglesias didn’t try to explain why Freeman was right to support the suppression of freedom in China.”
March 25th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
When Matt was younger and had more independence, he posted on his blog the following paragraph, which he likely got from me, from the 1995 book “Jews and the New American Scene” by the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp 26-27]
March 25th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
My guesstimate would be that Obama’s attitude toward Jewish power and influence is about the same as Nixon’s: there is so much Jewish power in modern America that you want at least some of them in the tent with you pissing outward. Thus, Nixon worked hard to assure the more ethnocentric Jews such as Norman Podhoretz and the other neocons that Israel’s fortunes in its struggles with Arabs were part and parcel of America’s fortunes in its struggles with Communists.
Similarly, for Obama, I recently ran a word finder utility over all 150,000 words in “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” and found one clause of one sentence that was sympathetic to Jews. (I didn’t find anything hostile, either.) In contrast, vast chunks of the book deal with Obama’s complex and emotionally fraught relationship with Muslims, real and self-proclaimed (such as the Black Muslims).
Clearly, Obama’s sympathies once laid more with the Arabs than with the Israelis. He comes out of a network with pervasive ties to the Black Muslims — for example, Tony Rezko was the Nation of Islam’s business manager from 1983 onward, even managing the career of their prize convert, Muhammad Ali.
But, Obama’s playing in the Big Leagues now, and the pals of the Pals, like all those old intellectual Arab friends from Hyde Park he’s shed in recent years, can’t swing enough weight. So, Obama has made sure to have well-connected Big Leaguers like Rahm Emmanuel and Larry Summers inside the tent pissing out.
There’s nothing wrong with this. What is wrong is that we’re not supposed to notice it, much less mention it.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Re Steve Sailer’s comment “There’s nothing wrong with this. ”
—————
Well, just so long as you don’t conclude that our elites sent 4500+ US soldiers –sons, husbands, fathers — to their deaths in order to take out a foreign leader who was an enemy of Israel’s –but who was not a significant threat to the USA.
And that they did so in order to raise tens of Millions of dollars in campaign donations from billionaire supporters of the Israel Lobby.
As I’ve noted before, That would not be quite the same as drinking the blood of Christian babies but it would be getting in the ballpark.
If the American people reach that conclusion, then the reaction will make the Warsaw Ghetto look like a weinie roast.
So the Israel Lobby’s disloyalty is not only a betrayal of America’s Gentiles, it’s a betrayal of the America’s Jewish Community as well. The worst Anti-Semitic slur I can think of is the Lobby’s claims that America’s 6 million Jews are knowledgable of and support the Lobby’s acts.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
The REAL problem, of course, is not just egotists like Haim Saban who evade the “registered agent of a foreign power” law via dual citizenship.
The REAL problem is that the Israel Lobby is just one example of the malign political corruption supported by our billionaires — regardless of whatever religion they give lip service to. Big Oil probably influenced Bush and CHeney more than did the Israel Lobby — the Lobby was just a way to kneecap any opposition from the Democrats.
85 percent marginal income tax rates on incomes over $250,000 plus a ban on any campaign funding other than public funding — and nationalization of the TV networks — would be required to fix this , however.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
The Cuban Lobby pushes around U.S. foreign policy in reference to Cuba. That’s unfortunate, but it’s not really that important because any one country isn’t all that important to America. The Jewish lobby pushes around U.S. foreign policy in reference to Israel. We can live with that, just as we can live with the Cuban Lobby’s influence.
What is truly deleterious to American life, however, is the constant demands of “Pay no attention to that Lobby behind the curtain!” This badly distorts American intellectual discourse in general. There is this giant missing piece of the puzzle that we aren’t supposed to talk about. In contrast, while the Cuban Lobby has done major damage to free expression in Miami, at least they haven’t hurt it across the rest of the country. They want you to talk about how powerful they are.
March 26th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I enjoy conservative horror over gay persecution in the 1960s. I’d call that a victory for liberalism.
I predict that 50 years from now, Republicans will look back at Obama and claim that he was, at heart, a conservative.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:57 am
It’s the same for all of these telegenic degenerates, across party lines. Eliot Spitzer anyone? Slate now wants me to buy him as a respectable pundit.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
No, you posted it on his blog in the comments section.
http://tiny.cc/oldmattlink
Here is a google of part of that quote and “Yglesias” showing only 2 instances of you posting it on his site (same thread, different archives) and postings to your own site.
http://tiny.cc/googledquote
Matt didn’t post it.
March 26th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Minor correction, Matt: it was the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not Justice, where Fred Malek was counting the jews. I don’t think BJS was even around back then.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
No, Matt posted the Lipset-Raab set of HateStats on his pre-Atlantic blog, as I mentioned in the comments on his Atlantic blog.
April 9th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Not that I’m totally impressed, but this is a lot more than I expected when I found a link on SU telling that the info here is awesome. Thanks.