Red State Story

How a murder fed conspiracy theories about the liberal media.

• By THOMAS FRANK

Two weeks ago, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline sent out a fund-raising letter asking for help paying down legal bills he incurred during one of his fights with that state's abortion providers. After recounting his battles with Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller and others, Mr. Kline moaned that "They must silence the truth by silencing the messenger."

The depiction of the state's abortion providers as a malign power capable of "silencing" whoever opposes them might seem absurd, but it is unremarkable for Kansas conservatives, who once routinely accused Dr. Tiller and his colleagues of pulling the strings controlling the state's politics.

What makes this particular fund-raising missive supremely awkward is that it arrived in people's mailboxes after Tiller himself had been silenced forever, gunned down in a Wichita church, allegedly by a man from the fringes of the antiabortion movement.

An interesting situation this, when persecution fantasy collides with the real thing. But I suspect Mr. Kline will be back to fund raise again, once the culture war's inevitable cycles of accusation and counter-accusation have played themselves out.

It began with the chorus of outrage directed at elements of the antiabortion movement after Tiller's murder on Sunday May 31. The crime, some suggested, was the logical culmination of certain pro-lifers' apocalyptic rhetoric and their penchant for singling out particular individuals to calumniate.

Pro-life leaders declared themselves shocked and surprised. How could this happen? And how could anyone associate them with this crime? After all, as far as we know, the man accused of the murder wasn't acting on anyone's instructions; he didn't go to movement meetings; he wasn't a member of the main groups dedicated to making Tiller's life difficult. He was, by all reports, an extreme outlier, a wingnut's wingnut.

A larger reason for the shock and surprise -- and this is true for the right generally -- is this: The culture wars are not meant to be taken seriously. Yes, right-wing invective dabbles in nightmare visions of treason and conspiracy and rampant paganism and a homegrown holocaust right here on Main Street, U.S.A. Yes, it ritually denounces liberals as members of a class fundamentally alien to the American way of life. But these are the ingredients of entertainment, not politics.

Culture war makes you feel noble and heroic. It sells books, it drives up the ratings of "The O'Reilly Factor," it brings in millions in direct-mail contributions -- but everybody knows you can't make Hollywood change its ways by walking the streets of Wichita carrying a sign deploring the "culture of death."

According to the unwritten rules of the culture wars, the "base" isn't supposed to act on it when the performers describe a world gone crazy. They're an audience; they're supposed to hiss, applaud, donate, vote and go home.

The people who are empowered to act are the usual suspects in Washington, where the only Armageddon is the one facing the steak some lobbyist just bought for your congressman.

Public memory is short, however, and it won't be long before this incident, too, has been carved and sanded and fitted neatly into the grand narrative of the culture wars, in which true-believing patriots are eternally disrespected by all-powerful liberals. And that will bring us to Act II in our red-state story, in which certain pro-lifers discover that they are the real victims of the Tiller tragedy, unfairly slandered by the left for their views.

We know this will happen because this is what some seem to recall most vividly about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing -- not so much the act itself, but the clumsy way then-president Bill Clinton tried to blame conservative talk radio for the crime.

We also know it because this part of the cycle has already begun. Fox News star Bill O'Reilly, who adopted the "baby killer" rhetoric of the Kansas right in his many attacks on Tiller, seemed uncomfortable to find himself on the receiving end of public outrage after the doctor's slaying. He also had an explanation for it: "the far left is exploiting this," he said last week, "trying to shut guys like me up by saying O'Reilly's responsible for this murder."

Others have tried to force the story into the familiar narrative of liberal media bias. After all, there were other murders in America, they pointed out, and to the extent that newspapers chose to focus on this one, their liberalness could be measured most precisely.

You and I will forget about Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, but I suspect that certain pro-lifers never will. They will cherish their memories of those awful days when the bloggers and the pundits suggested that maybe they deserved some of the blame for his murder. They will memorize the unjust accusations, exaggerate the sting of the insults, shed a tear for their own suffering -- and get back to imagining themselves as modern-day John Browns.

Russia's ailing economy

Red square blues

Russia’s failure to diversify away from oil should worry the Kremlin

NOT long ago, Russia proudly counted itself as one of the BRICs—with Brazil, India and China, the four emerging-market giants that were outgrowing the rich world. Yet it now makes more sense to talk of the BICs. With GDP shrinking by almost 10% in the year to the first quarter, Russia is in deep recession.

This is upsetting and worrying for the country’s political masters in the Kremlin. Upsetting because, as late as last autumn, they dismissed the economic crisis as a Western problem that would leave Russia unscathed. But the collapse in the oil markets has shown just how much Russia still depends on getting a good price for its natural resources. Neither President Vladimir Putin in 2000-08 nor (since last May) President Dmitry Medvedev has done anything like enough to diversify the economy—indeed, it depends more on oil and gas now than it did. The government has utterly failed to create a legal and political infrastructure to support business and enterprise.

The Kremlin may not care much about either of these shortcomings, especially now that oil once again costs $70 a barrel. Yet even at this price it must worry, for it can no longer honour its side of Mr Putin’s original bargain: that, in return for a guaranteed rise in living standards, ordinary Russians would accept curbs on the media, rigged elections and a slide into autocracy. The Russians are now lumbered with the second part of this deal without gaining the benefits of the first. Not since Mr Putin came to power have high inflation and shrinking GDP caused such a fall in real incomes (see article).

Why has this not led to more protests? Partly because the Kremlin is firmly in charge and partly because many Russians built up savings in the boom years and have yet to feel the full impact of recession. Besides, faith in the “good tsar” and low expectations of government mean that few blame Mr Putin, now Mr Medvedev’s prime minister.

In the past few months the Kremlin has also tried to show a friendlier face. Mr Medvedev gave his first full Russian interview to Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, on the grounds that its journalists “did not suck up to anyone”. He has acknowledged critics among non-governmental organisations. He hailed Barack Obama in their first meeting in London in April, inviting the American president to Moscow in July.

The trouble is that this has yet to produce any change. The second sham trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former boss of the Yukos oil company, makes a mockery of judicial independence. Better relations with America are portrayed in Russia as a belated American recognition of past errors and a vindication of the Kremlin’s assertiveness, notably over Georgia.

Nor is there any sign of the promised falling-out between a hardline Mr Putin and a liberal Mr Medvedev. In fact, the differences between the two men are largely of style. After a year of Mr Medvedev’s presidency, only 12% of Russians feel that he is in charge, whereas over 30% believe that power remains with Mr Putin. And Mr Putin has hinted once again that he may resume the presidency for two more six-year terms in 2012.

Bear markets

The risk for the Kremlin is not that it will lose control or collapse into internecine fighting—Mr Putin’s grip is too firm. Nor is it that Russia will go bust, as the Soviet Union almost did in the late 1980s and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia did in 1998. Foreign reserves of $380 billion mean there is enough money to pull through. But without legal, political and economic reform, Russia could well lapse into stagnation. It has squandered one oil-price boom. The price of doing nothing again would be to condemn Russia to the vagaries of the oil market. Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev must not make the same mistake twice.