Response to "My Fellow Texan"

Commentary
Response to "My Fellow Texan"
By Rick Byrne
Director of Communications
BILL MOYERS JOURNAL

Aug 23, 2007, 01:07

In his comment on the blog, Mr. Deal Hudson has asked Bill Moyers to apologize for his piece about Karl Rove's departure (watch here), which aired last Friday, August 17. Hudson posted part of an email he says he received from Rove after Hudson sent him a copy of Moyers' comments. Rove replied to Hudson: "I am a believing Christian who attends his neighboring Episcopal parish church."

It is not surprising that Deal Hudson would take on the role of defending Karl Rove. They have been allies in implementing the very political strategy for religion of which Bill Moyers was critical. According to this published report, Mr. Hudson was an adviser to the Republican National Committee and a "regular White House visitor" where he helped implement Rove’s efforts to coordinate conservative Christian and Republican politics.

One conservative Catholic activist was quoted in the story as saying: "The White House has a Catholic strategy and its name is Deal Hudson." Mr. Hudson himself wrote in a November 2003 letter, also quoted in the report: "I continue to lead an informal Catholic advisory group to the White House, as well as communicate with various White House personnel almost every day regarding appointments, policy, and events. These efforts have helped to place faithful, informed Catholics in positions of influence."

Rove’s statement to Mr. Hudson was similar to what Rove said on Sunday, August 19, in an appearance on Fox News Sunday when he was shown a clip from Bill Moyers' comments by anchor Chris Wallace. Yesterday, Bill Moyers addressed the Chris Wallace interview and Rove's reaction to the clip in a letter to Fox News Sunday below:

August 21, 2007

Chris Wallace
Fox News Sunday

Dear Chris Wallace:

I just came upon your interview last Sunday with Karl Rove during which you asked him to respond to my comments on his departure from the White House. It appears that you only selected a one-sentence excerpt from what I said. The sentence you used reads: “You have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian Right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.” Without any challenge or follow-up from you, Rove said that he is a Christian, goes to church, and is an Episcopalian, and that “Mr. Moyers ought to do a little bit better research before he does another drive-by slander.”

Now, what I said, after discussing Rove’s documented appeals to religious prejudice for partisan purposes, was: “At his press conference this week he [Rove] asked God to bless the President and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism; he ‘wished he could believe, but he cannot.’ That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian Right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.”

If you had checked, you would have found that his agnosticism, or questioning of faith, has indeed been in the news specifically in connection to his political expediency in the manipulation of believers. There were several references to it online as well as in print journalism last week. The San Antonio Express News, which knows Rove well, wrote in an editorial (August 14): “The White House will miss his indubitable political acumen. What other agnostic could have mobilized hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians behind a political banner?” On TheAtlantic.com (“No One Like Karl Rove,” August 13) Marc Ambinder wrote: “I could be wrong here, but I distinctly recall conversations with Rove friends who’ve told me that his struggles with faith did not lead him to Jesus Christ. Yet he knew and understood how to interact with (and manipulate, at times) the standard-bearers of the evangelical Right and the Catholic conservative intellectual elite. . . . .” James Moore (“The Rove Goes on Forever”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com ) wrote that “[Rove] told his friend Bill Israel years ago that he was agnostic and that ‘he wished he could believe, but he cannot.’” In their book on Rove, Wayne Slater, former Austin bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News, and Moore, a veteran journalist write: “Rove once told a colleague that he had no religious affiliation and was ‘not a Christian.’” And so on and so on and so on. All of these sources were available to you as they were to me.

Obviously Rove wanted to blow smoke because his version of reality is undermined by his own previous statements and by the reporting and analysis of journalists who have done their homework and don't take his every word as gospel – no pun intended.

Sincerely,

Bill Moyers

Mr. Hudson says that he has written to the PBS Ombudsman to protest Mr. Moyers' comments about Karl Rove. He posts that letter on his own blog, where he mentions a previous column by the Ombudsman on another Bill Moyers Journal episode but fails to note Mr. Moyers' response, which you can read below to see the whole story.

July 24, 2007

Dear Mr. Getler: [PBS Ombudsman]

I respect your work and your role, but I disagree with you about “balance.” The journalist’s job is not to achieve some mythical state of equilibrium between two opposing opinions out of some misshapen respect -- sometimes, alas, reverence -- for the prevailing consensus among the powers-that-be. The journalist’s job is to seek out and offer the public the best thinking on an issue, event, or story. That’s what I did regarding the argument for impeachment. Official Washington may not want to hear the best arguments for impeachment -- or any at all -- but a lot of America does. More than four out of ten people indicated in that recent national poll that they favor impeaching President Bush and more than five out of ten, Vice President Cheney. They’re talking impeachment out there and that dynamic in public opinion is news. There’s a movement for impeachment, not one against impeachment, and to fail to explore the arguments driving that movement would be as foolish as when Washington journalists in the months before the invasion of Iraq dared not talk about “occupation” because official sources only wanted to talk about “liberation.” Letting the official consensus govern the conversation is also to let it decide the subject.

So to hear the best arguments driving public sentiment, I invited on my broadcast a conservative scholar who reveres the Constitution, Bruce Fein, and a liberal political journalist, John Nichols, who has written a fine book on the historical roots of impeachment. That two men of different philosophies come to the same conclusion on this issue is in itself newsworthy, and they made a valuable contribution to the public dialogue, as confirmed by the roughly 20:1 positive response to the broadcast. Of course I could have aired a Beltway-like “debate” between a Democrat and a Republican, or a conservative and a liberal, but that’s usually conventional wisdom and standard practice, and public broadcasting was meant to be an alternative, not an echo. If a debate about impeachment becomes the story, I’ll come back with different guests to explore it. Right now it’s the argument for impeachment that is shaping public opinion, and that’s why I chose to interview two informed thinkers who have arrived at the same destination from very different directions.

A personal note: Pinned to the bulletin board on the wall behind my computer -- I am looking at it now -- is the column you wrote in January calling on public broadcasting to “be more . . . aggressive,” including on the issue of, yes, impeachment. I took encouragement from that column over these months as I tracked grassroots activity and the growing public conversation on the subject across the country. I was cheered by your assertion in the same column that “‘on-the-one-hand/on-the-other hand’ type of journalism that is much more common can be less than enlightening at times such as these . . ." In thinking that you imagined public broadcasting as a service, not a sedative, I trust I wasn’t misreading your New Year’s resolution.

By the way, we did not remove any controversial postings from our Web site, as indicated in your critique. We welcome all points of view and responses to our programs on our blog.

Sincerely,

Bill Moyers