Oh, the horror! When did Wes Craven start producing the Sunday political chat shows?

First, it's your DWT Sunday News Quiz. There are two questions, both multiple-choice. In both cases, you're asked to identify the speaker describing his or her "expectations" for President Bush's new strategy for Iraq.

1. "I'm hopeful. There's a genuine quagmire there now. I'm not particularly delighted with more troops going into a difficult stuation, but I'm not going to condemn it. But I do say you cannot continue business as usual."

(a) New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton

(b) former New York Sen. Jacob K. Javits [right]

(c) former New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy

(d) former New York Sen. Alfonse P. D'Amato

2. "I'm not hopeful, and I believe that what we have to say to our allies is, 'If you don't come in and help us, we're gettin' out, and then you'll have to come in on your own, particularly the regional allies--Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Turkey--because there will be a mass exodus when you have an upsurge in the civil war, and their borders will be overrun."

(a) New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg

(b) former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [right]

(c) former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani

(d) former New York City Mayor Ed Koch


THE ANSWERS

1. This is not as difficult as it first seems. Senators Javits and Kennedy, after all, were unlikely to have had occasion to comment on a "quagmire" in Iraq before their deaths some years back, while Senator Clinton seems unlikely to use the word as long as it calls to mind the arguments of people who warned of just such an outcome when the invasion of Iraq was being plotted by the administration. So, by process of elimination, the answer must be (d) Al "Senator Pothole" D'Amato.

2. This one's trickier. While Mayor La Guardia can be eliminated in much the same way as Senators Javits and Kennedy above, and Mayor Giuliani in much the same way as Senator Clinton, you might think that Mayor Koch could also be ruled out on one ground or the other. But in fact he's actually not dead, and for all that the onetime Democratic reformer and firebrand seemed to have taken to endorsing mostly Republicans before his barely noticed demise . . . oops, sorry, force of habit. Must remember, he's not dead, he's not dead. Anyway, the answer is indeed (d) former New York City Mayor Ed Koch.


LET ME PREFACE THIS BY SAYING . . .

that I normally don't watch the Sunday political gabfests. In fact, I have a pretty strict rule about it. I figure if any actual news emerges from them, it'll catch up to me eventually. If I want to savor the spectacle of mass spinning, I can always watch the stationary-bike classes at the gym.

I can't even explain how the TV came to be on WABC-TV, channel 7, our local ABC owned station, this morning. I have a theory, though. It's an offshoot of my larger theory--that, in some perverse escalation of the precedented cross-divisional stragegy by which the late Roone Arledge once ran the News as well as the Sports division of ABC, just as Sean McManus does now at CBS, Hollywood master of horror Wes Craven has branched into the news biz.

How else to explain the horror of that moment when I finished watching some program from earlier in the week that I'd recorded and I glanced up at the TV screen and saw those two alien life forms? Beady eyes, monstrous jowels, and in one case unresting head-bobbing and eye-popping. Gadzooks!

But no, on closer examination it was apparently the aforementioned former Senator D'Amato and former Mayor Koch, being interviewed together on Eyewitness News Close Up with Diana Williams. Our Al and Ed are becoming something of an item. Just last month they were linked with none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton when the New York Times caught them in a lunch menage at the Four Seasons. (I don't know about you, but I don't even want to think about that.)
I couldn't quite shake the idea that at least one of the codgers was being impersonated by that Frank guy who does the crude caricatures on Fox NFL Sunday. (Why, just today, before the dreadful Giants-Eagles game, he did a pretty daffy Chimpy the Prez.) Only, in that case, who would the other guy have been? Well, Frank Whatshisname has done multiple characters appearing on-screen together, hasn't he? So maybe it was just special effects.

Which would certainly fit my theory that Wes Craven produced the show. His people would know how to do that, wouldn't they? And maybe his people have also figured out--and this would be that "offshoot" of my theory I mentioned--how to make your TV tune itself to their show. This would also explain how it happened that even after I reflexively switched the channel, the TV somehow wound up back on channel 7!

But you know the scariest and more incredible part? Neither the Kochlike life form nor the D'Amatolike one sounded all that outrageous.

In fact, they often made sense. Like when they both recalled that during their political heydays they worked with pols of both parties. Moderator Williams pressed them to explain the subsequent transformation in our political culture, leading to the following discussion:

ED KOCH: It's hard to say what caused that slide where people no longer respect an opposing point of view, but the fact is, they don't.

Moderator DIANA WILLIAMS: Well, there are some who blame it on Newt Gingrich, actually . . .

AL D'AMATO: The partisanship . . .

DIANA WILLIAMS: That the Contract with America changed all that.

AL D'AMATO: I don't think it's the Contract with America, but I do think some of the right-wing ideologues--and some of the left-wing ideologues--are to blame for this, because you are either with us or we're going to destroy you, and you get that kind of . . .

ED KOCH: There's no respect for an opposing point of view.

AL D'AMATO: Yeah, no tolerance. And it exists within the Democratic Party, not as much--there's feuding between the left and the right--and it ceratinly exists within my party, within the Republican Party, even to a greater extent. There is no tolerance.


Now it seems to me that there's a difference between "feuding" within a party and "no tolerance" for an opposing point of view, and it also seems to me that there are wildly different degrees of respect that opposing points of view deserve. There is, for example, the extreme case that would be represented by the following strictly hypothetical exchange:

MR. OR MS. A: I heard Vice President Cheney speak last night.

MR. OR MS. B: Yeah? What wacko bullshit lies was he spewing?

On the surface, this might seem an obvious example of failure to allow respect for the veep's point of view. After all, Mr. or Ms. B doesn't even know what the lying thug was talking about. But it seems reasonable to argue that when Mr. or Ms. B hears that the creep opened his poisonous piehole and simply assumed that "wacko bullshit lies" came out, he/she was simply playing the historical percentages, which are hovering somewhere between 99 and 100 percent, allowing for the statistical margin of error and for roundoff error.

It's sort of the same as the so-called debate about evolution, where on the one side you have people with at least some familiarity with the vast field of scientific inquiry on the subject, and on the other hand you have people who don't give a fart 'bout no stinkin' facts when they's got perfectly good prejudices and mumbly-jumbly superstitions to trust.

Still, this too is an extreme case, and while there may be many others circulating in what has lately passed for public "discourse," when all viewpoints one disagrees with are to be dismissed automatically as Devil Talk--a strategy pioneered by the Modern (Ultra) Right, and enthusiastically promoted by operatives like Karl Rove--we no longer have discourse at all, or even the possibility of it. We just have a lot of people yammering, with nobody listening.

I have to say that this attitude disturbs me as much when it surfaces on the left as when it does on the right. Which is what I found so alarming in the unthinking abuse recently heaped on poor Jerry Ford in the matter of the Nixon pardon. It's one thing to disagree with the pardon, and even to disagree quite vociferously.

What shocked me on the part of so many of the pilers-on (who I don't recall hearing from with anything like such ferocity when the actual malefactor, Richard Nixon, died) was the total obliviousness to any possible legitimacy to President Ford's argument that the country would benefit from getting past the political and social upheaval of Watergate, and that there was, goodness knows, no shortage of pressing national problems to attempt to deal with, starting with the still-going-on Vietnam War and continuing with the signs of mounting economic crisis as the bills for the war came due.

Here on the progressive side, we still face a huge job of persuading. It would be great, of course, if we could persuade a majority of the country to come around to our way of thinking, and I think we should be trying to do so. But realistically, I just don't think that's ever going to happen, and so we face an even more urgent form of persuasion--persuading people with varying viewpoints to join us in mutual-interest coalitions on specific issues.

It's not very glamorous or exciting work. But I don't see any realistic alternative.

(Also, while I know this is a sign of weakness, I have to admit that I'm not always sure what the correct progressive position on particular issues is, or whether there even is one. Oh, often I know what we progressives are supposed to believe. I'm just not always sure that the progressive commissariat has really thought the thing through completely.)