Personal Aside: “Shelley’s Heart” is a Novel That Pictures Today’s Liberal Left…Liberal TV Hosts Drop the Façade of Humor and Go for the Jugular.

“Shelley’s Heart.”

Only fiction can best describe the fix we’re in today with a liberal left media that works in tandem with liberal-left pols. I have found no true-life book that quite explains what’s going on with the linkage between media and anti-patriotic liberal politics as “Shelley’s Heart” does. I seldom read novels…and have scored spy stories as a time-consuming diversion… but after I read its review in “Commentary,” which to me is the finest monthly published on international and domestic politics, I went out and bought it. Not content with just savoring one novel by the author Charles McCarry, I have started to devour many more.

McCarry, age 78 (maybe that age similarity is what has intrigued me), is a former CIA clandestine agent who served for a decade in Europe, Asia and South America. He has also been editor-at-large of “National Geographic” and a biographer of Ralph Nader. Why I prefer him to a host of other mystery novelist is that McCarry’s hero, Paul Christopher, unashamedly strives to have the U. S. win its engagements with its foreign and domestic enemies. “Shelley’s Heart” seems to be his best because for the first time, McCarry delves into the insidious near-treason that has begun to permeate the activist Left and changed it from a mere liberal counter to conservatism.

Believe it or not, McCarry wrote “Shelley’s Heart” in 1996, two years before the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The book has just been re-issued by Overlook Press. In reading it you have to overlook the fact that it was written before Clinton’s impeachment. It is a political thriller but far more significant than the thriller of other genres. Ian Fleming’s James Bond is fun but not instructive since Bond is a svelte and sophisticated man-about-town who has been outfitted with bizarre secret devices to foil foreign conspiracies and engages in notoriously provocative romances with gorgeous women. Ok as chewing gum for the mind but not in the least realistic. Robert Ludlum’s hero, Jason Bourne, smashes the nation’s enemies but there is little mention of the ideological Left in them: so they’re just good tales.

Likewise John LeCarre (aka John Moore Cornwell)’s stories have always bothered me—starting with his most successful, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” LeCarre is cynical, believing that basically the USSR and U. S. pursued the same methods and hence there is very little to differentiate the two systems. His thesis seems to be that by employing clandestine methods in intelligence we signify that our system is no better than theirs—which seems to presume that there is nothing for us to do against our enemies but hope for the best. That theory doesn’t impress me—because I want our country to win. And I want the Left to be defeated. McCarry comes closest to my philosophy.

McCarry however is a patriot who has had far more intelligence experience than LeCarre and who believes America must utilize foreign intelligence for its very survival—but his stories are far more realistic and skewers the Left as having moved from liberalism to a state of non-patriotism.

While I think “Shelley’s Heart” can’t be improved upon, I am reading McCarry straight through—having finished “The Tears of Autumn” about the Kennedy assassination and now starting “Old Boys.”

If you have read McCarry and have opinions about him, let me know by dropping me a line here.

TV Hosts Drop the Façade.

Time was when TV hosts were cynically witty, sometimes sardonic and often clever. Some still are—but David Letterman is one who panders to evil insinuations to get his youngish, leftish, hooting, jeering, near-demonic sacrilegious audience to chortle. Last night’s presentation was the worst I ever heard. He is a vicious character assassin and does not mind going after more than politicians—but their children, including minor-age children. He is a disgusting guttersnipe.

Last night he began his monologue by saying that Sarah Palin was in New York. He rambled on for a few minutes and then with tongue-not-far-in-cheek implied that her daughter—not Bristol by the way—but 14-year-old Willow…was impregnated by Alex Rodriguez and that Eliot Spitzer was interested in contacting Willow. A flurry of insults which left the raucous crowd screaming with the obscene implications: Willow was raped and is also a prostitute.

The reason for this degrading muck-huckster’s disgusting slur is clear: Because Palin decided to have a Down Syndrome baby rather than abort it…which has caused some liberal females to hate her out of clenched-fist guilt…which this despicable twisted offender-monster tries to capitalize on in order to hype his ratings. He is truly the symbol of this decadent age, a disgusting, 62-year-old with a perverted, child-molester bent who should be scooped up in a net by CBS and tossed in the garbage (which he would taint) for insulting and mocking a child. A few nights earlier he said that Palin herself is a slut because she dresses like a seductive airline stewardess.

What ought to happen is that someone should join the studio audience and toss a bag of excrement at him to match his perverted non-humor.