Capitol Ideas

...As a letter-writer to a Washington newspaper pointed out recently, Young is turning out to be Carter's MacArthur—with one big difference: Carter will never dare fire Young...

...as though it were even remotely reasonable to suggest that one group can withdraw from the democratic proceedings of a country and then attack those proceedings on the grounds that this group could gain more power for itself by force of arms...

...It is not too hard to foresee that Andrew Young, his ambassador to the United Nations (whom the British tabloids now call "Andy Pandy"), will prove to be a millstone around Carter's neck—a millstone that he will not be able to remove...

...Notice how beautifully this works to the Soviet advantage...

...Notice, first of all, the use of "internal...

...Not that there is any great difference, with any country, between an embassy staffer and an intelligence agent...

...Rhodesia has a less than ideal civil service system...

...Internal settlement" is one bit of deceptive rhetoric in use by the administration...

...similar enough for the remaining differences to stick out a mile and offend such self-styled "liberals" as Anthony Lewis because they flout our regnant wisdom...

...A bad thing, say the Soviets and the State Department...

...now we find more and more of it in the news columns...

...Therefore, cease and desist...

...This might be the place to say that at a party in Washington recently I met a Soviet Embassy attache who was reliably reported to me to be in the KGB...

...And the Washington Post asked: "Does the United States gain respect for itself and a hearing for its policies—among internal or external Rhodesians, in Nigeria or elsewhere in Africa—by conveying an impression that it will do practically anything to win liberationist credentials...

...Can one imagine the Times taking this position vis-a-vis, say, Mozambique—one of its favorite countries right now...

...Jimmy Carter's attitude toward Rhodesia has clearly been strongly influenced by guilt...

...In how many other countries in Africa do we get artists' renditions of courtrooms...

...no doubt also a very low regard for America—not an uncommon attitude in Upper Media...

...I am sure that if Mr...

...This strikes me as being among the most hypocritical and tendentious comments I have ever seen in a newspaper...

...Another is "illegal"—a favorite word of Pravda which has now been appropriated by our President to scorn what he disapproves of...

...From his lofty vantage point in Boston, Lewis has discerned what is wrong with the "internal settlement...

...As for the Times' editorial page, one had read a year or so ago that the appointment of Max Frankel as its editor was supposed to halt the leftward drift...

...Who knows what horrors remain to be uncovered in Salisbury...

...The detail that sticks in my mind is this: Shown on our television screens were artists' drawings of the courtroom where these proceedings were held...

...In sum, all those little steps are contrary to our interest...

...This is especially true in America, where a spy would be hard put to glean more "intelligence" in the course of a day than is thrown onto his doorstep every morning...

...Whoever wrote that editorial has a very low regard for democracy and decency...

...The Rhodesian "internal settlement" has, of course, thrown a lot of people into a tailspin...

...How, therefore, to come up with a renewed rationalization of Rhodesia's wickedness, and thus whip up sentiment against the country, while appearing to speak with the reasonable tongue of the constitutionalist...

...The only issue they care about—the only one—is whether blacks and whites are treated differently...

...Anyway, this fellow, who for some reason struck me as resembling a Polish soccer player, kept using the words "linkage" and "link," and variants of the verb...

...In case you have missed out on "linkage," it goes like this: If a country takes an unfriendly step in one corner of the world (e.g., the Soviets in Ethiopia), it is inappropriate to retaliate by making a response in an unrelated area (e.g., the SALT talks...

...It is of course hard to foresee the way things will turn out in Southern Africa, but let me make a prediction: Carter and his millstone are going to end up in serious trouble in this area...

...This time, someone in the White House wakes up and says, Stop...

...If in another country, 20 The American Spectator May 1978 such as Uganda, blacks murder blacks, the victims tied up to trees and their brains beaten out with sledgehammers, then this is nothing particularly to get upset about because it does not make "liberals" feel guilty...

...Where is Joe McCarthy now that we need him...

...but again, it is not challenging enough to provoke a response...

...We doubt it...

...Thus Rhodesia is "illegal"—an interesting description since it implies (as the Washington Star also pointed out) not the standard of "self-determination" by which all other countries are judged, but a ghostly British "sovereignty" over Rhodesia...

...The Times, of course, has long been a Hiss sympathizer and, as Reed Irvine of "Accuracy in Media" points out, has even been reluctant to mention that Hiss was convicted of perjury...

...were then to get involved too, we might come in on the Soviet side...

...Aha...

...It has within its ranks "some men regarded as cold-blooded racists...

...Then they take another small step in another theater...

...Another tack has been taken by Anthony Lewis, New York Times columnist and frequent apologist for the Left...

...Also "the judiciary" is imperfect, too...

...Similar thoughts crossed my mind when, a few months ago, there was a most unbelievable uproar in the news media about the death of Steven Biko in South Africa...

...What they had wanted—and I think we all know this to be true even though no one will come out and say it—was a wholesale and bloody eradication of whites in Rhodesia...

...You are going too far...

...Of course not...

...I am not aware that he has had the slightest success in this endeavor...

...Then a fifth...

...The continued opposition of the New York Times and like-minded fellow travellers to the settlement between Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith and the moderate black leaders of that country is intriguing because it so plainly exposes the lie that at any point they had really wanted or cared about "majority rule...

...So now—horrors!—it looks as though they're going to have majority rule...

...In so doing he is directing a profound and grievous change in our economic, social, and political arrangements...

...This is another Soviet coinage, unless I am much mistaken...

...Lewis will inquire further into the structure of the Rhodesian government, he will also find that they don't have affirmative action or busing, either...

...There is scant consolation in the fact that we still have the losses all to ourselves...

...For years this tendency has been manifest on the editorial page...

...he says triumphantly...

...In how many other countries in the world...

...the suggestion that a political settlement can in some sense be denigrated because it was merely arrived at "internally" would, if made of any other country in the world (with the exception of South Africa), be considered a diplomatic scandal of the highest order...

...I remember thinking: They don't let the photographers in—just as in America...

...a fourth (ditto...

...Rather than say that, people have chosen to shed crocodile tears over the absence of Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper' s and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...

...The point is that the alleged "outrage" of South Africa and Rhodesia stems from the fact not that they are so different from us, but that they are so similar...

...Oh, no, no, no, the man said, that was an interpretation based on "linkage," and false...

...The "internal" gambit has been one way...

...Let me ask, then, when is Mr...

...That's why the Soviets don't like the concept of linkage, and that, no doubt, is why the creepy-crawlies at State have been more than happy to oblige by interdicting it...

...You can rest assured that he will not...

...Another word much used of late in foreign-policy discussions is the verb "to link...

...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas More and more these days, the New York Times reads as though it is being edited by and for people who are fundamentally sympathetic to the far political left but who, for the sake of respectability, would prefer that no one quite saw it that way...

...The American Spectator May 1978 21...

...Lewis going to write about the shortcomings of the civil service system, and of the judiciary, in the Soviet Union, in China, in Libya, Angola, Mozambique, Uganda...in any other country in the world...

...I am glad to say that both Washington newspapers have been critical of the administration on this issue: "You may think it odd," the Washington Star wrote, "that the latest American call for a 'genuine transfer of power to the majority' in Rhodesia issued from Nigeria, a nation ruled by its army for the past dozen years...

...How's that for impudence...

...As someone remarked to me the other day—I won't name him although maybe he would like me to so that he could later say, "I said it first...

...but not grave enough for us to respond to...

...To do this is to link the two...

...Then a third (again, no response...

...There were, if you will recall, coroners' hearings in that country...

...Rhodesia, of course, "liberated" itself from colonial rule in 1965...

...I had opened up the discussion by congratulating him on Soviet successes in Africa—stating that, as I was originally from England, I understood that colonialism had a great deal more to recommend it than one might realize from reading the newspapers, and that it was commendable to see how well the USSR had shouldered the white man's burden in the dark continent—and more in that vein...

...Mitgang's recent article in the Times read, as usual, like a brief for Hiss, with quotations only from Victor Navasky, whose recent article in the Nation on the case represents one more attempt, and surely not the last by the Left, to undermine truth...

...For example, in a recent editorial (March 5, 1978) entitled "The Rhodesian Contrivance" the writer boldly suggested that if the Soviets were to intervene in Rhodesia, and the U.S...

...majority rule," which was presumed to be safely beyond Smith's attainment...

...Today's paper, for example, brings a real shocker by Herbert Mitgang on the "Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers dispute," in which he manages to equate (as "the immediate cause of the revived dispute") Allen Weinstein's recent massive volume, Perjury, with a book published two years ago, and already thoroughly discredited, Alger Hiss: The True Story, by John Chabot Smith...

...One must, I'm afraid, put the word liberal into quotation marks when talking about people who have taken such an unfair view of Southern Africa, because they are undoubtedly very illiberal people...

...They take one small unfriendly step in one theater...

...Perhaps no Medicaid-abortion funding...

...But no, we can't say that because adding together a series of independent steps—disapproving of the last step because of earlier, unrelated ones—precisely is...linkage...

...Using this principle, our government is expropriating nearly $14 billion a year from the owners of domestic crude oil...

...he admitted to being a "press attache" of some kind...

...As I write, it is plain that Carter's policy toward Southern Africa is a complete disaster—and I mean that in the end it will prove to be a disaster to Carter himself...

...he, the Georgia boy, trying to make up for it all and, incidentally, prove to us that his true address is not Tobacco Road...

...It is "almost all white now except in the bottom ranks...

...I notice that the State Department regards linkage as a bad thing, too—not the first time that they have seen eye to eye with the Kremlin, of course...

...Jimmy Carter is the first President of the United States openly to embrace this principle and to make it a central theme of an important domestic program...