Editorials/Windy Moralizers/With the First Bartender
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S WINDY MORALIZERS L a s t month, when the Democrats' great hope addressed the issue of religion in politics and bragged that the United States is "the most religious...
...The religion-and-government tempest was interesting because it was unsought: not on anyone's agenda...
...The last time we were together you shook my hand rather excessively and spoke vaguely of making me ambassador to Monaco, or was it Malibu...
...I think it was an invasion of your privacy, so dress anyway you like when we meet...
...Pretty soon you had Walter Mondale on the screen saying I do not want religion to be the issue in this campaign, and you had Geraldine Ferraro saying I do not want abortion to be the issue in this c a m p a i g n . . , and the within-the-beltway types were beginning to get very uncomfortable indeed...
...Elections somehow force the wrong issues to surface...
...Here is a debate in which hardly an accurate statement has been heard, including the President's August 23 claim that "morality's foundation is religion...
...As far as I have been able to judge, the news is what the press barons and the wizards of broadcast news say it is...
...This is insensitivity to the point of intolerance...
...Suddenly I was accused of being anti-Catholic and of denying the reverend clergy their First Amendment rights...
...The next minute his ribald jokes are being reported on page one, and he is undone...
...it is my responsibility to ascertain the truth and to ferret out the news...
...They fear that by schmoozing with us in this way you endanger our virtue to the point that we may be enchanted into becoming 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 little more than disguised press secretaries...
...I am expected at dinner in New York at 9:00, and you know how often planes are delayed along that flight route, what with all the lobbyists, lawyers, and other such modern-day prestidigitators flying to and from the site of the U.S...
...Under his old boss it was adjusting your thermostat...
...E D I T O R I A L S WINDY MORALIZERS L a s t month, when the Democrats' great hope addressed the issue of religion in politics and bragged that the United States is "the most religious nation on earth," I hope none of the venerable mullahs in faraway Iran got wind of it...
...Rather it has been the political zealots, particularly those who are happy to call themselves progressives...
...Not only have these so-called progressives disregarded the scruples of others, but on private matters such as abortion and sex education they have also insisted that those in opposition pick up some of the bills...
...Not welcome in Washington, I can assure you...
...Look at the religion-and-politics flap...
...Then the press began to play up this internal mini-conflict ("frankly, the President's own people are not comfortable with the s p e e c h . . . " ) , and this in turn signaled" to Mondale's Praetorian Guard: Weakness...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 9...
...What you really think is much less important than what you are doing with the government...
...The attitude here is: By all means, keep prayer out of public school, keep abortion legal, put Jerry Falwell in his place, provide family planning money for the Third World so that the darkies don't overrun us in the 1990s...
...So then, it will be drinks and palaver at 4:45...
...They believe that off-therecord meetings limit our opportunities to report "the news...
...and with gongs going off all over, calling every wretch in their theocracy to his prayer rug, these holy men can make a very good case that theirs is the most religious nation of all...
...It is they who have gone into areas of settled morality and slammed down their innovations with no consideration for the sincerely held religious scruples of millions of traditional Christians and Jews, not to mention non-religious types by R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . who liked things as they were...
...For those who were forced to watch their laws being turned against them, usually through decidedly undemocratic methods, surely some accommodations could have been made, say, by allowing mandatory waiting periods for abortion and by having sex education segregated from curriculums and made optional...
...Walter never complained when his old boss, Jimmy Carter, addressed this same Christian crowd...
...But in the end that was a mistake because he came across as being a tiny bit anti-religion, while Reagan was left comfortably holding the pro-religion banner...
...Personally Opposed) Ferraro had personally misrepresented church teaching...
...Nonetheless, I shall be there...
...I shall enter the Oval Office unafraid, and leave pretty much the same as when I arrived, for my career is not beholden to leaks...
...Your predecessors, particularly the alphabet presidents, FDR, JFK and LBJ, were legendary seducers of the press, but it is really up to us to maintai~ our integrity, is it not...
...They are better thought of as settled and beyond debate...
...At any rate, this time I shall have my guard up...
...It will not b e easy...
...Walter spoke admiringly last month of "the wall our founders placed between government and religion," yet for two decades it has rarely been the religious who have encroached on that wall...
...been nothing else...
...It is my obligation to remain clear-headed...
...Recently some of the colleagues thought the fact that you wear sweat pants on Air Force One was a capital news story, and despite your staff's objections one of the press services carried a photograph of you in this incongruous ensemble...
...Certainly the media had no desire to make an issue of it...
...Many want to advance their careers by exploiting intimate contact with the pols...
...To be sure, many Americans are very religious, but is this really "the most religious nation...
...He spoke out, as they say...
...by all means do all these things--but please, do not encourage or even permit explicit debate on these issues...
...Meanwhile, bishops and priests ably abetted by ministers and rabbis hummed along, insisting on the superiority of their insights into the arms race, a superiority denied those of us not versed in theological matters and moral conundrums...
...Treasury...
...Some among the colleagues argue that this penchant for off-the-record meetings hinders us in our sacred duty to goad public officials into colossal botches or into blurting out what "they really think...
...TM) But presidential campaigns can establish a different, outside-the-beltway agenda...
...Journalists ought not to aspire to being psychoanalysts...
...Well, they raise a tricky issue here, so when we meet, no funny business...
...Soon enough there were mitres and crowers all over your TV screen, with the Archbishops of New York and Boston weighing in with (long overdue) criticisms of Geraldine Ferraro, who says she is a Roman Catholic, but who is also personally~opposed-toabortion-but...
...The colleagues have plenty of cause to fear your charms...
...Once again we see the baneful influence of old Freud...
...Returning to my earlier point, I doubt Ronald Reagan has committed the infamy Walter suggests...
...Things are turned over to the hoi polloi for a say in the grand enterprise of government, although many here wish there were some way around that irritating constitutional requirement...
...As for today, religion may be the moral foundation for many but not for those honorable atheists and agnostics for whom religion, as commonly defined, has no usefulness whatsoever...
...The Archbishop of Boston declared that abortion is a "primordial evil," and the Archbishop of New York declared that Mrs...
...That would be news to Plato...
...President: Drinks at 4:45 at your place...
...One minute the pol is being reported as having a small sense of humor...
...Though they do not want to be used, they want to be free to use others...
...Let the First Bartender prepare for me the most ingratiating cocktail ever imagined...
...Nor did Walter object when the Catholic bishops, claiming to answer religion's call, got into the disarmament debate...
...The relationship lacks a clear set of ethics...
...He is one of the windiest moralizers of all...
...Next to barbers, bartenders are my favorite public servants, and as a taxpayer I have a keen interest in the artistry of the White House bartender, or, as we in the press might say, the First Bartender...
...One expects hypocrisy and cant on the campaign trail, but on this question of religion in politics there has Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Of course they entered on Waiter's side...
...Come, come...
...Appeasers among the clergy exploited the prestige of their holy orders strenuously, and when a poor columnist such as myself questioned their judgment and knowledge of national security matters he was given the bum's rush...
...or that there is an "immigration crisis...
...tion that "those who are attacking religion" do so in "the name of tolerance" when they are really "intolerant of religion"), and the next thing that happened was that we began to hear the usual ventriloquized muttering and murmuring from the West Wing of the White House...
...Your thoughts may be very pretty jewels or grim hunks of coal, but until they are uttered as statements of policy or principle they are private matters, interesting only to eavesdroppers...
...Nor did the White House...
...What makes the matter of the journalists' proximity to the pols so tricky is that the journalists want it both ways: They want to be friends with the pols and they want to be adversaries too...
...That way it won't be necessary to defend policy terrain that has been captured by stealth...
...I think what happened was that President Reagan gave his Dallas ecumenical prayer breakfast speech (unexceptionable enough, but including the feisty and correct observaTom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Peregrine Worsthorne, the seasoned deputy editor of London's Sunday Telegraph, frequently derides the American press's chumminess with the pols, and with very good reason...
...The pols are to be congratulated...
...Just you, me, and a few of the colleagues from the Washington press corps...
...If they decide that Congresswoman Ferraro's tax returns are news that is what the public will be presented...
...It is very amusing to see Walter inflamed over political moralizers...
...The plight of the throwaway bottle is a moral matter to him as was energy policy during the Carter Administration...
...You may tantalize me with promises and honors...
...Here we come to the trickiest matter of all, what is "the news...
...The Bishop of Scranton popped up next, saying that Mrs...
...For that matter, throughout the Islamic crescent and in such exotic parts as black Africa and the Indian subcontinent, there are thousands of mullahs, swamis, and other such notables presiding over lands full of piety and numinous things...
...The White House is divided...
...Of all the debates fevering this political campaign not even the fairness debate is more awash in balderdash...
...If they decide that her husband's contacts with unsavory men of enterprise are not news, the public will remain in the dark...
...WITH THE FIRST BARTENDER Dear Mr...
...You must be aware that my acceptance is very "controversial...
...Normally the bow-tied and the pointy-headed and their running media lapdogs do a brilliant job of setting the policy course and holding firmly to it no matter how the populace might toss and storm...
...So Mondale turned up the volume on the issue...
...PO's position on a b o r t i o n was "ridiculous...
...In 1976 Jimmy Carter introduced evangelical Christians to politics after noting their growing concern over the progressives' encroachments on their values...
...Walter objects to Ron's bringing religion into politics, though it is not clear to me that Ron committed any such infamy...
...Of those of us who were on the other side and who wore no clerical collar it was a no-win debate...
...As long as your dress does not affect public business it is none of the public's concern...
...Decreeing, for example, with only a few fake "polls" as evidence, that the people are in a state of deficit panic...
...In faraway Iran you will find the moralizers more consistent...
...No journalist has ever given me a satisfactory definition...
...Maybe we can force them into an embarrassing retreat-cumapology...
...Many of the colleagues worry that you and even your Democratic opponent are denying the press access, frequent "off-therecord" soirees being only one of your strategems...
...T r u t h be known, what passes for news nowadays is increasingly only gossip and bizarrerie...
...Now Walter tells us he is worried about the government's "looking over your shoulder...
...They can be very touchy...
...They have taken a serious matter and rendered it almost wholly nonsensical...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
