It
beats me why such a disgusting character is still received in polite
circles, except that now at least he's back doing the sort of task to
which he is best-suited. He has found an unscrupulous and uncultured
political neophyte who will happily act as a megaphone for any kind of
libel and insinuation—Obama's "palling around with terrorists"
was, I suppose, the money shot of the last campaign—and then later
revise and extend her remarks. Nasty work if you can get it. Malek, now
so near old age, must be pinching himself at his good fortune. Christopher Hitchens has an article at Slate on Sarah Palin’s increasingly open extremism and points out that one of Palin’s new advisers is, conveniently, an old extremist. Fred Malek is the Nixon administration goon who infamously compiled a list of Jews to be fired from the Labor Department. That notoriety hasn't kept him from introducing Palin to some of the Capital's exalted social circles. The relationship is a reminder that while Palin may impress the paranoid, empty-headed echo chamber with anti-Washington rhetoric (while also weirdly suggesting the president is a Kenyan communist), she nonetheless thirsts for membership into the Beltway's clubbish high society:
I am surprised that so many people have allowed themselves to forget
this—and that Palin has never been asked a single question about it. In
the early 1970s, Nixon, whose White House tapes show consistent evidence of anti-Semitic paranoia,
gave orders that the Bureau of Labor Statistics be purged of what he
called a "Jewish cabal." The job of drawing up the list was given to
Malek, whose information led to what was called the "reassignment" of
some officials within the Labor Department. Malek later tried to give a
weaselly excuse for his conduct, but was caught by my Slate colleague Timothy Noah.
