Editorial / GOP Saps / Advice to My Friends
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
country to a decaying husk of tyranny How strange that so many of the founders of the modern state of Israel were themselves socialists, many of them from Russia. They, like Lenin, wanted to...
...There is no economic evidence to support this conclusion...
...And while on the subject of jobs I urge the Democrats to come out for a truly tough affirmative action policy plus more government regulation...
...The book teems with interesting anecdotes (such as how John Calvin became so incensed with Michaet Servetus that he turned him over to their mutual enemies in the Inquisition), and gory depictions of torture and execution...
...George Fox, the Quaker founder, was prosecuted (rightly, Levy implies) for disrupting the religious ceremonies of competing denominations...
...To begin with, I urge my DemoTHE AMERICAN SPt'CTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 3o cratic friends to...
...These are the Democratic p o l i c i e s that have bestirred the Republic...
...What has happened to the Ronald Reagan who last December insisted that such taxation amounted to"robbing the people" ? Apparently he has handed himself over to Baker & Darman...
...He would doubtless advise that they levy a thumping tax on fishermen...
...But if Revelation is true, are its claims not prior...
...Some weeks ago they insisted that a budget resolution was a matter of utmost urgency if Wall Street was to lower interest rates...
...Russian Jews in large numbers took their government's support of the Jewish state " a s a license to express their emotions, and as a glimmer of hope that they might be permitted to leave for the Promised Land," Nadav Safran writes in Israel...
...Senator Dole has convinced them that interest rates will drop if the federal deficit is narrowed by higher taxes...
...They are not looking toward the Near East...
...Fellow Democrats, charge...
...When he left office interest rates had jumped and so had the deficit...
...He raised taxes some $300 billion...
...Fourth, as I said at the end of my review, the American role in Iran was onlypart of the story, and the onus for the revolution, at least in my mind, lies squarely with Iranians...
...I say thunder out for it now...
...The resolution passed on a Thursday...
...Since the revolution, Iranians have focused on American deficiencies, but there were more fundamental and drastic choices to make and opportunities missed for Iranians--after all, it is their country...
...But what if that truth is accessible only through faith--as indeed Christianity claims...
...But Levy almost implies that the persecutions were planned: that Christianity was set up largely in order to make persecution possible...
...I am glad for them...
...It is also calm...
...For the remainder, we may be sure, Communism became an empty husk...
...The next day they would be in with the fish...
...One day they would be casting mightily...
...he selects his facts heavy-handedly, and neglects to mention opposing opinions...
...Our recent deficits have come from economic decline, and one major cause of that decline is the burdensome taxation weighing down upon productive Americans to pay for Tip O'Neill's Good Fairy Politique...
...I n a word, Americans are overtaxed...
...The Embattled Ally...
...What do they know about the fabled bottom line...
...It is a group of people who wish to destroy Israel, as in fact the organization quite frankly admitted at the Fatah Revolutionary Congress in Damascus in 1980 Their goal, they said, was " t h e extermination of the Zionist entity, economically, politically, militarily, culturally and ideologically...
...In fact, of course, this was a house of cards on the verge of collapse anyway...
...Although its advocates would in many cases share such similar dreams, Communism and Zion would move further and further apart...
...Is that blasphemy...
...they are looking to the future...
...and, if I have judged aright the vaporous policies averred by the Democrats, even at their mid-term conference, they now stand for nothing plus tax increases...
...They are the political tacticians, the bright boys who convince politicians that they know how to keep their man in office...
...They won' t succeed, but if perchance they did, Communism and the Soviet Union would be the winners, and history would have no meaning [] E D I T O R I A L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ ' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G.O.P...
...Any nation that can send a man to the moon can bring everyone up to the median income no matter how reckless or stupid it sounds...
...I f this analysis is correct, then, it follows that the destruction of the Israeli state is an urgent priority for the Soviet Union and for satellite Communists everywhere...
...Whereas religious leaders can (and, thank God, now do) plead for freedom of conscience out of respect for the dignity of the individual and the need for free acts of worship, the secular advocate can see his argument unravel if the defendant he supports is in error...
...The Democrats see roses through the gloom...
...In the 1970s this was one of the Democrats' favorite sacks of camip...
...It is no doubt already too late and too risky for the Soviets to try this directly...
...The secular argument has no response to that possibility...
...Some State Department officials feared the same thing...
...SAPS K i t t y Hawk, North Carolina--The water here is luminously clear...
...Also let us move forward with one of Speaker O ' N e i l l ' s own favored policies, a well-financed public works program...
...Well, it convinced many of the assistant presidents around Ronald Reagan...
...And then, when the surrounding Arab countries attacked the newborn state in 1948, Gromyko again came to the rescue, maneuvering for truces while the Soviet Union funneled arms to Israel via Czechoslovakia...
...So there you are...
...And second, to what extent does the public order require the protection of religious beliefs ? On the first question, Levy adheres strictly to the claims of the secular order, as exemplified today by the First Amendment...
...But they were prepared to support Israel as a way of helping to disrupt the supposedly powerful "colonialism" of Britain in the Middle East...
...ADVICE TO MY FRIENDS Right now the politicos of the Republic, Democrats and Republicans alike, are applying their makeup and preparing for the fall elections...
...They now guard the palace with the same steely vigilance that characterized the stupendous performances of their predecessors Powell & Jordan, Haldeman & Ehrlichman...
...White spoke too soon...
...Levy is similarly subjective in selecting the cases he wants to explore...
...They control what the President reads and whom he sees...
...What has happened to the Ronald Reagan who told us on April 1 that ".you don't raise taxes in a recession...
...I suggest the Democrats demand income supplemeets that will bring every family to the median income...
...They have won the battle for the President's ear...
...Gromyko's mistake was to subordinate ideology to pragmatism...
...Is that why the early Church sought to glorify the religion ? In exhaustive, scholarly detail, Levy recounts the heresy and blasphemy trials of history, concentrating especially on Christian recurrences...
...Their economic knowledge at THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 5 best consists of hunches, and the hunches are usually wrong...
...Diplomadc Dissent Though I was f l a t t e r e d to see "Rustam," the reviewer of my book Inside the Iranian Revolution (TAS, July 1982), refer to me as one of "two top American diplomats in I r a n " (I was not), the review is disappointingly shallow and reads like a hastilydone graduate school book r e p o r t . For example, the reviewer cites an alleged memorandum of mine published recently by the Khomeini government as clues to my thoughts, when there is better, clearer evidence easily available in the final chapters of the book...
...Ever since their discovery of that alchemizing maxim--tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect--they have expected to maintain usufruct of the government unto eternity or until the U.S...
...But until we completely socialize American medicine our government will not fully realize its potential for fouling up American medicine, making it still more expensive, time-consuming, and idiotic...
...Until the Reformation, Christian authorities regarded heresy and blasphemy as inextricably linked...
...I should like to have been in the Oval Office to hear how they sold this particular piece of idiocy to Ronald Reagan, whose earlier tax cuts represented Washington's only serious attempt to control government spending, to revive American prosperity, and to make Republicans" the majority party...
...At the famed Kitty Hawk Pier, the assembled sages have been in prolonged confabulation for months, speculating on how they might activate the fishing...
...It is not a land of producers...
...Regarding the first, I have reread his final chapters and am still at a loss as to his thoughts, and note that he does not deny the cited memorandum...
...Soviet Jews are rebuilding their socialist motherland together with all the Soviet people...
...S t e m p e l ' s letter, I can in reply only quote Iran's great thirteenth-century poet Sadi, 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982...
...Does "Heretics blaspheme against God by anyone care...
...Some of them were permitted to leave...
...Most of his criticism of the U.S...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Does Senator Dole's reasoning sound implausible...
...median wage...
...John D. Stempel Bethesda, Maryland Rustam replies: Mr...
...This has been on their minds since the late 1940s...
...But Levy's argument is too polemical to be truly scholarly...
...following a false faith...
...Treasury files under Chapter Eleven, whichever comes first...
...And to those of us who would deny life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the fish along North Carolina's outer banks this is bad news...
...In Pravda he wrote that the solution to the Jewish question "did not ultimately depend on Palestine and military victories, but on the triumph everywhere in the world of socialism over capitalism...
...Some Israeli pilots were even trained by the Soviets, and 20 years later they would destroy the Sovietprovided Egyptian air force...
...spending Democrat was being discarded like an old toothbrush...
...The Soviet rulers understood that Zionism was potentially dangerous to their cause, as any rival system of belief or ideas must be dangerous--especially to something as nihilistic as egalitarian Communism...
...Today Ronald Reagan is under the professional care of Baker & Darman who believe that they can remain in power even longer than Haldeman & Ehrlichman or Powell & Jordan...
...F o r all its weaknesses, and despite its dry academic tone, this book does raise interesting questions of two sorts...
...Perhaps they should call in Senator Robert Dole, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee...
...Finally, to deal with high interest r a t e s let the Democrats call for government allocated credit and that old favorite, wage and price controls - - s p i k e inflation before it begins...
...The PLO, in short, is not a group of people with "legitimate aspirations," looking for somewhere to live...
...They, like Lenin, wanted to build a new society, a socialist society--with the important proviso that it also be Jewish How strange that Arab rulers such as King Ibn Saud feared that the new state of Israel would introduce Bolshevism into the region...
...Admittedly with Medicare and Medicaid we are already close to socialized medicine...
...If the Democrats will not come forward with t h e i r alternative to Reaganomics, I will...
...Even more misleading is the reviewer's failure to distinguish between American diplomats and American politicians...
...But Levy, who by trade is a constitutional scholar, is presumably more interested in the second sort of question...
...They have apparently overwhelmed him and muzzled all his embarrassing talk about lower taxes and lower spending...
...might more properly be aimed at decision-makers than at America's diplomats in the field...
...come out swinging for socialized medicine...
...But the birth of Christendom brought a new definition of the crime, so that heresy and blasphemy trials became both common and gruesome...
...while stationed in Iran, and so I am puzzled why he now conveniently washes his hands of America's "debacle" by his remark, "After all, it is their country...
...Levy rejects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . that argument implicitly, without ever explaining where it is internally inconsistent...
...The stock market swooned...
...Blasphemy," he points out, "is a litmus test of the standards a society feels it must enforce to preserve its unity, its peace, its morality, and above all its salvation...
...The more productive the fisherman, the heavier Senator Dole would tax him: Surely that would activate the fishing...
...So he has the best of both worlds: He criticizes Christians incessantly for failing to distinguish between the two sins, and yet he cites all prosecutions--for either offense-as evidence that blasphemy was suppressed repeatedly...
...The only man in the White House who has ideas, ideas about the purpose and worth of government, is Ronaid Reagan, and apparently he who once counseled with men like Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Put a uniform on every doctor in the land...
...Any country that can patrol a 55 mph limit can patrol the wages and prices of every man, woman, and child...
...Socialized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . medicine could cost as much as $30 billion annually, but a country that can spend $5.5 billion annually on sending men into outer space can surely spend $30 billion to send fat people to hospital or at least to a waiting line out in front...
...Then i n t e r e s t e d Americans would have a better basis for assessing the results of their own decisions...
...Still the pols plod on...
...Coyness gets one nowhere in modern American politics...
...The Republicans are feeling somewhat queasy...
...L a s t December a very shrewd Republican declared that "the only proper way to balance the budget is through control of government spending and increasing prosperity and productivity for a l l . " That is shrewd politics and also sound economics...
...The election of 1980 marked the rejection of a whole system of ideas that dominated American life ever since early 1960," Theodore H. White recently asserted...
...On Monday Citibank raised its prime interest rate...
...Washington is the land of spenders and taxers...
...While the latter did participate in the decision-making process, my own b r o a d e r point is that the most important issues became what choices were made and how, not how much was known (a great deal, as the review itself suggests...
...Stempel makes four points in his letter...
...In fact, President Carter followed this policy during the last futile presidential by R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r. administration...
...What if, in a word, Bruno was wrong...
...Others have insisted that no Ameri can family receive less than half the seem to realize how truly fluid the Iranian situation was from September to December 1978--perhaps because he was not there...
...What a boost that would give to consumer spending...
...This message, however, does not get to Washington where high taxes always mean flush times for bureaucrats and pols alike...
...Republican congressional leaders aided and abetted by the White House Machiavels induced House Republicans to vote for that budget resolution by telling them it was the only way to pry spending cuts from their opponents in the Party of the Good Fairy...
...The reviewer's understanding of both Iranian and American options in the later stages of the revolution is also one-dimensional...
...The basis of all those ideas was high promises (continued on page 39) 0 THE A,",IEF:ICAN SPF.CTATOR SEPTEMI:~ER 1982 TREASON AGAINST GOD: A HISTORY OF THE OFFENSE OF BLASPHEMY Leonard W. Levy / Schocken Books / $24.95 Philip F. Lawler I s Christianity a threat to the First Amendment...
...I should like to see these bright fellows in action on the Kitty Hawk Pier...
...Philip F. Lawler is Director of Studies at the Heritage Foundation...
...The citizen of a socialist society . . . looks upon the people of any bourgeois country, including the people of the state of Israel, as upon wayfarers who have not made their way out of a dark forest...
...Once again the saps of the GOP are becoming willing tax collectors for Democratic spending programs, and even out of power the Democrats are successfully managing to spend still more...
...from the point of view of civic order, society must prevent some expressions of belief...
...Thus, in describing the development of early Church doctrine, he mentions: "Still another step, however, had to be taken to elevate the Christian religion to such sacrosanctity that criticism of it could be thought of as blasphemy...
...Now many weeks later the spending cuts amount to less than one third of the cuts promised, and the tax increase to be slammed down on us during these recessionary times grows daily...
...Stempel appreciated the interests of the U.S...
...Thus I have scrutinized recent Democratic policies and come up with a list guaranteed to set men's hearts aflame...
...Wouldn't it be interesting to hear from a knowledgeable Iranian about what his countrymen perceive their .choices to have been...
...In recent years they have been in an unanticipated state of bewildered indignation...
...Second, as the books reviewed were written by American diplomats, I concentrated on t h e i r role and comments r a t h e r than on those of American politicians who obviously bear overall responsibility...
...but give us jobs with dignity, for instance in aerospace and medical research--WPA astronauts and brain surgeons, it has a ring to it...
...Not surprisingly, Levy espouses the cause of Giordano Bruno, who "found all denominations mean and narrow . . . . His business was to get at the truth of the cosmos...
...The Democratic party takes pride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . in the fact that it has goaded us a long way toward socialized medicine, but C 0 R R E S P 0 N D E N C E until all doctors and nurses have been turned into bureaucrats the g r e a t work remains unfinished...
...He is critical of Ambassador Sullivan's recommendations to strike an accord between the military and the moderate opposition, believing that the religious groups were already too strong to be restrained or diverted...
...Surely the history of religious persecution under ostensibly Christian regimes" is a great scandal against the faith...
...They have no constancy because they have no ideas...
...First, when revealed religion is concerned, how does society judge competing claims to truth...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 6) to everybody--promises to save the cities, promises to take care of the sick, the old, the universities...
...The existence of Israel, and all that it promised, vitiated the promise of Communism for the Soviet Jew...
...The Democrats are going to have to come out and enunciate a substantial policy alternative to Reaganomics besides a tax increase, which, truth to tell, is not as popular with taxpayers as the Democrats seem to think...
...Would such prosecution be possible in America today...
...The Albanians do it...
...Are there any limits to the extent to which unbelievers can revile religion ? A case in point: In his execrable Mass, Leonard Bernstein used the most sacred of all Catholic rites as an instrument to ridicule orthodox CathAs Thomas Aquinas explained, olic beliefs...
...In the pivotal case--the trial of Jesus--Levy not only shucks off the Gospel versions of that event, but raises the bizarre interpretation that perhaps Jesus and Barabbas were one and the same man...
...They have moved in a matter of months from being champions of the largest tax cut in American history to being champions of the largest peacetime tax increase in history...
...Nonetheless, he himself treats the two offenses as identical when it serves his expository purpose...
...Alas, the record of this species of Machiavel over the past three presidential administrations has not been aweinspiring...
...In this idiosyncratic history, Leonard Levy seems to be implying that it is...
...But a look at the PLO's weapons, and the countries from which its recruits come, shows that the Soviets h]ave not given up on the idea of achieving this destruction through surrogates...
...Why not us...
...Well, I respectfully counsel caution...
...But by the end of the 1970s the free...
...The offense of blasphemy, Levy argues, was very narrowly construed under ancient Judaic laws, so that an offender could be found guilty only under the most strictly defined circumstances...
...Yet, he does not Another policy sure to set the Reaganites on their heels is the guaranteed annual income...
...American liberals, many of them Jewish, have until recently likewise fancied that Israel would establish at last that decent, true, legitimate socialism that intellectuals had dreamed of for so long...
...In 1972 their presidential candidate, the sainted George McGovern of South Dakota, suggested that the government give every American $1,000 annually...
...It is always difficult to beat something with nothing...
...This was summarized recently by Ronald Steel as " t h e Zionist dream of everyone tilling the fields together, eating in communal kitchens, sharing the wealth, and playing together in string orchestras at n i g h t . " How similar this is to the vision of the Soviet Union entertained by the Communist shop steward in the British film I'm All Right, Jack: "All of them cornfields, and ballet in the evening" How strange, in retrospect, that the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, Stalin's aide at Yaita, should have played midwife at the UN birth of Israel, tile Communist bloc voting for the Partition of Palestine, and so providing the necessary two-thirds majority without a vote to spare...
...This fall they will watch proudly as the Republicans march off to battle beneath the banner "We Raised Your Taxes...
...is now allowing himself to be governed by the successors to Haldeman & Ehrlichman, Powell & Jordan...
...If they do not, I predict they will lose, and the humanist in me rebels at the thought of my Democratic friends being again denied their rightful place at the public trough...
...Today a reviving Tip O'Neill believes Mr...
...Not so...
...Now really...
...But surely Mr...
...Fair enough...
...Few of our noble political leaders have ever produced anything, aside from hot air and paperwork...
...The pols plodded on...
...The speaker was Ronald Reagan...
...By 1980 we had promised ourselves almost to the point of national bankruptcy...
...As for the tone of Mr...
...The Soviet (and Jewish) writer Ilya Ehrenburg saw the danger as early as September 1948...
...Such philosophes of course have no conception of what affairs of state might be...
...Merely He thinks the American people are going to a-eturn to his politics of fairy godmotherism this fall...
...Third, my criticism of the Sullivan solution rests not on the strength of the clergy but on my perceptions of the weaknesses of both the Iranian military and the moderate opposition, not to mention the very lateness of the whole idea...
Vol. 15 • September 1982 • No. 9
