Editorials/Tip, a Rapprochement/Parson Anderson, Refurbished
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS TIP, A RAPPROCHEMENT by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Falstaff I was with you. Admittedly I have at times been critical of, possibly even impolite to, that large rumpled basso continuo of...
...He has been a liberal for years, and the only sure difference between a liberal today and, say, six months ago or six minutes ago is that now he is more liberal...
...It is particularly critical of our refusal to resist Cubans in Angola...
...I shall offer him some campaign advice free of charge...
...Apparently the massacre of our Marines in Beirut did not impose upon the colleagues' minds the seriousness of war, but Tip O'Neill understood and while he held out against the opportunists and defeatists I for one was grateful...
...During the administration of Jimmy Carter the Europeans scowled at us for his dithering...
...in times of relaxing tension, they dreaded a U.S.-Soviet condominium...
...I would have told them that when U.S...
...In the New Age Democratic party where Christopher Dodd has replaced Henry Jackson, Tip's toughness took courage...
...It is worth trying...
...PARSON ANDERSON, REFURBISHED There is abundant proof that American politics is in a very frowzy condition...
...All these tin-pot despots abominate us and our way of life...
...Now Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has joined this band of popinjays, and last month all luxuriated in the kind of petty fault-finding whose aim is to allow them to look righteous whatever the outcome of events...
...Apparently Parson Anderson will now try again...
...Drugged by the pessimism of the era, many now automatically anticipate American defeat and hope to profit from it...
...Now there is the presidential candidacy of John Anderson, the unctuous independent whose presidential bid in 1980 left him far in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter...
...More interestingly, whatwould the electorate of Lincoln's day have made of candidate Anderson...
...All it has is a self-styled presidential candidate whose unscotchable agitations have rendered his visage, with its black-rimmed glasses and shock of white hair, a thing to be copyrighted...
...I believe they would have viewed him as weird...
...Yet candidates like Parson Anderson are blind to experience...
...Why not make the great leap in the liberals' evolutionary process and declare himself a revolutionary Socialist...
...Certainly the New Age Capitol Hill giants do not see the world this way...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Conditions in Cuba, Poland, or M. Mitterrand's France do not smarten them up...
...Is there any way to stop the liberals' procession leftward...
...He ships huge stores of weaponry and armies of soldiers to once serene little lands, and they see only technicians and construction workers...
...Liberalism has moved steadily leftward since its fetal stage...
...It is an old story, summed up by Henry Kissinger in the first volume of his memoirs: "In times of rising tension, they feared American rigidity...
...How American politics has fallen into a pathetic condition...
...Finally there were those of my colleagues who apparently did not have enough to keep them busy, so during a secret assault on secret Cuban installations they began complaining of our government's secrecy...
...How could Tip hold out...
...His is a breakaway movement for political Pecksniffs too sanctimonious to work within one of the major parties...
...Then Mon-dale and the terminally cynical fell on the President...
...Do American construction workers carry Russian AK-47s...
...You can be sure that Lech Walesa was glad and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and all those who yearn for freedom in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, the aforementioned Third World despotisms, and, of course, Nicaragua: where the only independent newspaper is censored and subjected to brutal harassment, where the Church is under police surveillance, where there are no elections, where the thug Somoza begins to appear as a kind of liberal...
...today they scowl at Ronald Reagan's decisiveness...
...Phew...
...Moreover this time he will be chief cook and bottlewasher of a new political party...
...The fault-finding that issued from Capitol Hill last month and from our press was more disturbing...
...While our anonymous American soldiers who never will be able to exploit this moment were defending American interests, the candidates were awaiting their opportunities...
...Possibly, if Ronald Reagan were to rename the Republican party the American Communist Party and declare himself and all his tax cutters to be Marxist-Leninists intent on liberation of the proletariat, the American liberal would be sufficiently horrified to head back toward the political center...
...Relentlessly it has moved from thumping for equal opportunity to thumping for equality of condition, from thumping for welfare to thumping for income redistribution, from thumping for an anti-Communist foreign policy to thumping for a policy of appeasement...
...For principles his party will have a few banalities and incantations, for instance that laconic 1980 incantation: "the Anderson difference...
...There are the bromides, the love poems from the candidates to each and every one of us, the promises of action this day...
...At the United Nations Moynihan used to take on all the world's despots...
...He is also much more liberal than in 1980...
...Actually there is nothing surprising about his gallop to the left...
...He's become a classic Kennedy-type liberal," one of Parson Anderson's former aides reported to the Wall Street Journal...
...The party will have no support from any other elected political leaders...
...Does it really not matter if Central America and the Caribbean bristle with hostile military installations, or that "little" Grenada be turned into a giant aircraft carrier for Cubans and the Soviets...
...From Europe we hear the usual disapprobation...
...Friends of freedom throughout the world should have been rejoicing...
...Such party names are used in the Third World, and Parson Anderson's vision of America is not so very different from that of many a Third World potentate pontificating to the dozing citizenry of his turnip-patch principality...
...He wrote a memoir that is a sustained assault on the alleged softness of Henry Kissinger...
...No longer is he the pert budget cutter of yore...
...What would the American electorate make of candidate A. Lincoln...
...Possibly he recognized that since the early 1970s we have been living through an era of illusory peace, attained solely by allowing large parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and now Central America to be taken over by Moscow's surrogates...
...Admittedly I have at times been critical of, possibly even impolite to, that large rumpled basso continuo of welfarism who serves as Speaker of the House, but last month as American soldiers were struggling against a Marxist-Leninist power grab in the Caribbean he was quick to oppose "any type of dialogue critical of my government at this time...
...Dreamers that they are, they hear Fidel Castro tirelessly haranguing the United States, a nation that by any humane standard is as superior to Fidel's island hoosegow as heaven is to hell, and they suggest negotiations...
...Experience clearly demonstrates that to follow this route is to impoverish one's country and to leave it increasingly unstable and defenseless...
...Increasingly public life emulates the cheap melodrama of television land and the gimmickry of Madison Avenue...
...How about the National Salvation Party...
...So here we have candidate Anderson, markedly further to the left than four years ago...
...Something dramatic will have to be done to restrain their drift...
...He is weird...
...He now favors "a global Marshall Plan," a nuclear freeze, defense cuts, and increases in aid to education...
...It could be his boast in campaign '84 that he arrived first at the liberals' historic destination...
...Then there are the facts: the obvious double-talk, the empty gestures, and very little action-the federal bureaucracy and judiciary having already arrogated so much of democracy's business, much to the satisfaction of our posturing pols...
...Noting that our military was engaged in a dangerous mission, Speaker O'Neill warned against being critical, and all the presidential candidates who would be tomorrow's heroes were today's ostriches...
...The further radicalization of American liberalism makes no sense...
...soldiers are under fire protecting our interests I do not want them distracted by souvenir peddlers, life insurance salesmen, or even journalists...
...Norman Thomas ran for the presidency six times on the Socialist ticket, and when he died it was with the utmost satisfaction that liberal pundits pointed out how many of Thomas's quack policies were now the law of the land...
...Now there is bathos...
...What do you expect from a people whose major daily meal comes at midday...
...When CBS News called for my reaction to this temporary state of affairs I am sorry I was out of the office...
...His resolution lasted all of three days...
...There are those on Capitol Hill and in the media who are perfectly comfortable with American failure, for it fortifies their belief that to exercise power is futile...
...He is supposedly going to name his party the National Unity Party...
...The name that Parson Anderson has chosen is ridiculous in other ways too, for "unity" is just the opposite of what he is offering...
...Yet, those who still have their freedoms have been slow to rejoice...
...Maybe Speaker O'Neill appreciates the enduring wisdom of Lorenzo de Medici's fifteenth-century admonition to his son Pope Leo: "those who speak ill of us do not love us...
...Now, like so many other members of the club, Moynihan has retired from the fray for the comforts of the United States Senate...
...It has no defined constituents...
...Last month for just about the first time since 1917 a country taken over by Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries was reclaimed for freedom...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
