Dumbing down in America.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Reaction to book, 'The Bell Curve' - Pundit Watch - Column

Things haven't been all bad this past month. In fact, there have been a few deeply gratifying moments. Take, for example, the well-deserved trashing Charles Murray has taken for his racist throwback tome, The Bell Curve. (Murray, of Losing Ground fame, co-authored the book with Richard Herrnstein, who died before the book was published.)

In case you've missed the media blitz on this book (which was possible, given the hoopla over Faye Resnick's Nicole Brown Simpson as "the most eagerly anticipated book of all time!"), The Bell Curve argues that blacks are inherently less intelligent than whites, so wasting educational programs on blacks is worse than pissing in the wind. A lot of fancy charts and graphs are included to persuade you, in case you're one of those who finds "biology-is-destiny" arguments a tad specious.

The New York Times gave the book great play ("Editor's Choice," mind you), with a huge, respectful, front-page review in the Sunday Book Review and a cover story about Murray and the book in the Magazine. (The only other recent writer of nonfiction to get this much attention from the Times was Katie Roiphe for The Morning After which, as you may recall, asserted that date rape is a figment of feminists' imaginations. There was a happy ending, however: No one bought the book.)

Elsewhere, though, Murray has not fared so well. On the op-ed pages of the Times, Murray has been shot through with curare darts. (Exception: a bizarre piece by William Safire who suggested that Asians are inherently smarter than whites. Argument? I.M. Pei is a great success, therefore....)

But E.D. Hirsch, hardly a flaming liberal, criticized The Bell Curve's "worrisome ... tone of social inevitability" and the authors' complete failure to account for the role of quality education in promoting intellectual achievement. More to my liking was Bob Herbert's withering attack, in which he referred to the book as "racial pornography" and an attempt "to drape the cloak of respectability over the obscene and long-discredited views of the world's most rabid racists." The Bell Curve, wrote Herbert, "is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger."

But here's the big surprise: All the boys on The McLaughlin Group - and by "all," I mean Pat Buchanan, too - trashed the book. John McLaughlin dismissed it as "pseudo-science" and "a failure in scholarship." Buchanan insisted that "character and courage drive our destiny, not IQ," and Morton Kondracke - get this -...