Jude Wanniski's crackpot crusade to launder the reputation of Louis Farrakhan proceeds apace. Wanniski, once an influential publicist for supply- side economics and a top adviser to Jack Kemp as recently as last fall, apparently devotes an increasing amount of his time to advising Farrakhan on his TV talk-show appearances. Here are excerpts from a "memo to Tim Russert" that Wanniski posted last week on his Internet home page, after Farrakhan appeared on Meet the Press:
I thought the interview went very well, displaying a lot of information about Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam that your broad audience had not been aware of. I told him after the show that it would cause a lot of confusion to the conventional wisdom. Leonard Muhammad [a Farrakhan deputy] called from London and said there had been an agreement not to use old film clips, but I told him the clip you used was useful, in that it cast Min. Farrakhan in the light I have come to know him, as a populist. When he was asked if he believed there had been a holocaust, he looked startled at the question, especially after your film clips showed him in '95 tearing into the Wall Street Jews for having financed Nazi Germany and the extermination of the Little Jews. . . . I've told Farrakhan that at the moment he is the only Truthteller in our country.
To paraphrase a famous humor columnist: We're not making this up.