Karl Zinsmeister, a former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and correspondent for the right-wing magazine National Review, was named head of President George W. Bush's Domestic Policy Council (DPC) in May 2006. Zinsmeister's appointment follows a Bush administration trend that has tapped the neoconservative AEI to fill some two dozen posts since Bush first took office as president. According to WhiteHouse.gov, the Domestic Policy Council "coordinates the domestic policy-making process in the White House and offers policy advice to the president. The DPC also works to ensure that domestic policy initiatives are coordinated and consistent throughout federal agencies. Finally, the DPC monitors the implementation of domestic policy and represents the president's priorities to other branches of government."
Known for his acerbic characterizations of liberals and rightist views on everything from domestic policy to the war in Iraq, Zinsmeister served as the editor-in-chief of AEI's American Enterprise for more than 10 years before moving to the White House. After reviewing his work at the AEI magazine, the Washington Post reported: "As Zinsmeister sees it, racial profiling by the police makes sense; the military, if anything, treats terrorist suspects too gently; and casual sex has led to wrecked cities, violence, and 'endless human misery.' In a 'soft, often amoral, and self-indulgent age,' he warned, some children 'will be ruined without a whip hand,' and he assured that 'things generally go better with God'" (Washington Post, June 13, 2006).
Zinsmeister's claims about his past experience at the magazine, however, came under scrutiny shortly after his appointment when the Horse's Mouth, a blog based at the American Prospect magazine, reported that, contrary to claims made on his bio page at the American Enterprise website and the White House announcement about his appointment, Zinsmeister was not the magazine's founder. Rather, he merely redesigned it when he took over as editor in 1994, four years after it was founded. Wrote Greg Sargent, author of the Horse's Mouth, about the incident: "Is saying you founded the mag when you merely revamped it the biggest whopper you've ever heard? Of course not. But in light of Zinsmeister's troubling tendency to doctor his own past quotes, it's noteworthy nonetheless" (June 5, 2006).
Earlier, several newspapers, including the New York Sun and the Washington Post, reported that Zinsmeister had once doctored a profile about himself that was originally produced by the Syracuse New Times, changing quotes and then posting the altered profile online without making note of the changes he had made. According to the Washington Post, the Syracuse New Times profile, which was based in part on an interview it had done with Zinsmeister, quoted him as saying, "People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings." On Zinsmeister's doctored profile, the quote was changed to read: "I learned in Washington that there is an 'overclass' in this country stocked with cheating, shifty human beings that's just as morally repugnant as our 'underclass'" (Washington Post, May 30, 2006).
Zinsmeister told the Washington Post that he changed this and other aspects of the profile because he thought they were inaccurate, a claim that came as a big surprise to the profile's author, Justin Park, who had received an admiring email from Zinsmeister after the original profile was published. Zinsmeister told the Post that he never raised the issue with Park or the Syracuse New Times because "I think I would have gotten Justin in worse trouble if I moaned about it."
Zinsmeister rarely minces words in pointing to what he views as the "deceptions" of others. He has accused President Bill Clinton of being a "virtuoso deceiver" and called Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) a "true chameleon" characterized by "self-serving behavior, comparative radicalism, and dubious personal morality." Other politicians and public figures he has targeted over the years include Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, Gerhard Schroeder, and Kofi Annan, all of whom he has called "feckless fools" (Washington Post, June 13, 2006).
Although his White House post involves domestic issues exclusively, Zinsmeister has been a vocal proponent of the Iraq War. He also argues that the war on terror is really a war "against a considerable part of Islam." Regarding the treatment of detainees in the war on terror, he wrote: "Would you believe that the number of formal U.S. investigations of how terror detainees are being treated recently reached 189? What mad self-doubt and softness!" (quoted in the Washington Post, June 13, 2006).
Zinsmeister reported from Iraq during the war, producing numerous articles, two books, and a PBS documentary. In a 2005 piece written upon his return from a trip to Iraq, Zinsmeister declared (obviously prematurely) via the title: "The War is Over, and We Won." He wrote: "Contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq. In 2004, our military fought fierce battles in Najaf, Fallujah, and Sadr City. Many thousands of terrorists were killed, with comparatively little collateral damage. As examples of the very hardest sorts of urban combat, these will go down in history as smashing U.S. victories. And our successes at urban combat (which, scandalously, are mostly untold stories in the United States) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that the insurgents simply cannot win against today's U.S. Army and Marines" (American Enterprise, June 20, 2005).
In November 2006, Zinsmeister gave an address at the annual convention of the conservative Federalist Society. William Kristol, Michael Chertoff, Edwin Meese, and Dick Cheney, among many others, were involved in panels or in presenting at the conference.
Zinsmeister's books include Boots on the Ground (2003), an account of his experience while embedded with the 82nd Airborne during the initial invasion of Iraq, and Dawn over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq (2004). In a review of Boots on the Ground, Publishers Weekly opined that the book was "conservative polemic and a vivid portrait of American infantrymen in action. Zinsmeister, who was embedded with the army as a correspondent for the National Review, makes no bones about his unabashed support for the war, and for the American military in general." The review quoted Zinsmeister as telling readers that he taught his children "to think of military jet noise as 'the sound of freedom.'"
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Affiliations
American Enterprise Institute: Former Fellow
The American Enterprise: Former Editor
National Review: Former Correspondent
Federalist Society: Presenter
Government Service
White House: Director, Domestic Policy Council (2006-)
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY): Former Assistant
Education
Yale University: BA
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