Presswatch/Brighter Sides
Barnes, Fred
BRIGHTER SIDES by Fred Barnes F o r all its adversarial passion in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, the press lovingly and reliably protects a herd of sacred cows. And a large herd at...
...Grenier and Harper's are not alone...
...The economic policies pursued by the first Thatcher government (1979-1983) did notch up some successes...
...First, there is the Euromissile victory," the magazine said...
...Si,~ce January, when Richard Grenier's devastating critique of the UN appeared in Harper's, man's great hope for peace has been on the run...
...Already, Mr...
...How many newspaper stories have you read about the inflationary or job-reducing impact of this controversial legislation...
...Things happen to him for the good at just the right time, like the opportunity of the Grenada invasion arising right after the explosion that killed 241 Marines in Lebanon...
...The rebuilding of American defenses...
...Is there enough iron left in the "Iron Lady...
...This is exactly what Senator Henry Jackson of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 23 Washington, who died last summer, promoted for years and years...
...The magazine has enormous influence in the Democratic party, though you would never know it from listening to the Democratic presidential candidates...
...Human rights violations in Communist countries, for example, have never been placed on the agenda of the General Assembly or any of its committees...
...Reagan was lucky in the case of Grenada, for instance, not because the opportunity to invade arose but because he ordered the invasion...
...In doing so, Mr...
...As such, they are not supposed to receive instructions from their home governments: "There is a large accumulation of evidence that Soviet, and, in most cases, East European practices conflict with this provision of the charter," Bernstein wrote...
...There can be no doubt that, over the years, the United Nations has come to be dominated by what might be called a third-world ideology," Bernstein wrote in the New York Times Magazine last January...
...Mrs...
...Andropov's part, rather than a calculated Soviet response to Mr...
...The Grenier fusillade was also significant for its line of attack...
...If UNESCO, whose ills are many, hadn't pushed for government control o# the press and the flow of information, the press probably would have upbraided the Reagan crowd...
...The British budget deficit, as a 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APR|L 1984...
...The Japanese also tend to admire Mrs...
...Reagan's arms control policies...
...And a large herd at that...
...Her success seemed to reinforce widespread American admiration of "Maggie" for her perceived qualities of firmness and her much-stated attachment to the ideas of a free society and personal responsibility...
...Yet it is hard to think of a single Democratic candidate for President who would have toughed it out the way Mr...
...it opened up political opportunities so astute a politician won't be slow in seizing...
...The monetary targeting strategy eventually brought down inflation--though some economists argue that it was more a matter of luck than of good judgment by the Bank of England-from a high of 22.5 percent per annum in 1980 to around 5 percent last year...
...But a piece like this in Harper's means that elite opinion on the subject of the UN is changing--and not in the UN's favor...
...Anyway, if one wants to step forward, he can gather up an ideology just by reading the last six months of the magazine--a pretty appealing ideology...
...Instead, the press waited for the Reagan Administration to propose cutting off this subsidy and then suggested that the very idea of such a cut--the cut, now, not the subsidy--was cruel and harmful to the fabric of American society...
...Recent developments, however, suggest to many that something is amiss...
...Now, remember that the political and journalistic environment in which the New Republic and its editors circulate is not friendly to President Reagan...
...The magazine is the New Republic, and its articles, except for an errant piece or two that, say, likens Gary Hart to Plato's idea of a philosopher-king, argue forcefully for a strong military and assertive foreign policy and a liberal, compassionate domestic policy...
...In short, the Soviets are in a hole," he said...
...Simply put, the New Republic is giving liberal anti-Communism a good name again...
...Bernstein has matched the brilliance of the magazine piece with solid daily coverage...
...One of the reigning cliches about Ronald Reagan is that he is lucky in the political sense...
...Let me cite one unsigned editorial on foreign policy in the February 20 issue...
...Who could...
...Andropov's death not only obscured "the embarrassing news of the President's ill-disguised retreat from Lebanon...
...at the same time, several of Washington's strategic allies are annually condemned for human-rights abuses by large majorities that include dictatorships whose own records in that sphere are abysmal by any criteria...
...Its unyielding support of Israel--and a pro-Israel policy by the United States--may not be fashionable, but it is certainly an antidote to much of the reporting from the Middle East in the Washington Post and other papers...
...The power of the Third World and Soviet blocs--Grenier dubbed the UN a "third world Soviet lynching mob"--is reflected in how it treats human rights violations, Bernstein wrote...
...The old sports adage fits here, namely that the good teams make their own luck...
...Army was able to overcome a platoon of Cuban teamsters, but that an American President could gain the support of the country for intervention against a particularly obnoxious regime aligned with the Soviet Union," the editorial said...
...There has been her fumbling of the Grenada affair, and more important, the thrust of her economic policies has begun to drift, so much so that commentators are starting to question her commitment to her own program...
...Or take the school lunch program...
...To which the New Republic responded, "Sounds good...
...Surely it would have made compelling reading to explain how middle-class kids were getting free food in the federal program...
...That's the bad news: Selective adversarial zeal persists...
...In December, he asserted in a front-page story that the Soviets are the dominant influence at the UN and explained why...
...Reagan refuted the widely held assumption that such a thing was no longer possible...
...And where else were the self-serving autobiographies of Wilfred Burchett and Pete Seeger criticized correctly as the work of Soviet apologists...
...There have been isolated pieces exposing it as the most banal of liberal organizations, but the convention in most of American journalism is to treat it as a non-ideological "citizens lobby...
...The success was not that the U.S...
...They read the New Republic, but somehow this is not enough to spur a presidential candidacy by some Jackson heir...
...Grenier's piece was particularly significant for where it was published...
...The Spectator of London, meanwhile, notes that "though she speaks the rhetoric of the free market, it is less obvious that she sincerely wants us to be free...
...The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by best-selling historian Barbara Tuchman defending the Reagan Administration's decision to withdraw from UNESCO...
...Reagan and his emissary to the Andropov funeral, George Bush, are claiming that now's the time to get nuclear arms control talks going again, thus suggesting that their collapse was some mere quirk on Mr...
...The Reagan administration was carrying out a policy devised by its Democratic predecessor...
...The problem is all the evil and mischievous things the organization does, like declaring Zionism to be racism and pumping money (some of it from American taxFred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...Indeed, the question is not so much whether the Communist staff members are impartial...
...He'd have sought a resolution from the OAS, not an invasion...
...T. It is a common observation in Japan that Britain always achieves greatness under a woman, as during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria...
...The wounded beast is the United Nations...
...Not only the UN is taking its lumps, but so is its branch, UNESCO...
...Richard Bernstein of the New York Times began covering the UN beat some months ago, and he has taken a refreshingly and courageously skeptical approach in his reporting...
...payers) into totalitarian-minded revolutionary groups...
...But don't read too much into press acceptance of the pullout...
...It is whether the concept of civil service held by most Communist countries is compatible with the idea of independence and impartiality in the world organization...
...The editorial took to task an attack on Reagan's foreign policy by Columbia political scientist Seweryn Bialer in the New York Review of Books, who f had complained that "the international correlation of forces" had been altered by Reagan...
...Many Japanese businessmen John Burton is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London...
...She had demonstrated that a forceful conservative leader could win a second race...
...Selective indignation in the press hasn't vanished altogether, after all...
...Wicker doesn't really understand about luck, though...
...Bernstein has dared to write the obvious, which no one outside Grenier has done in mainstream journalism...
...Thatcher herself has never by John Burton made any ~gcret of her view that it would take her two full terms of ofrice (around ten years) to rescue the British economy from the malaise induced by decades of uninhibited government intervention, subsidization of state industry, bureaucratic growth, and Keynesian macro-management...
...Jimmy Carter, had he been faced with the same opportunity, wouldn't have been lucky...
...In January, he exposed the fiction about Soviet citizens serving as international civil servants at the UN...
...see in Mrs...
...One of the sadder aspects of the fading of the Jackson wing of the Democratic party is that the faction has a magazine that champions its political ideology...
...Thatcher's economic policies the cure for the "British disease" of stagflation, and they believe her measures are causing the structural changes necessary to restore Britain's international competitiveness as a major economic power...
...The Economist now writes that it has "always doubted" whether Margaret Thatcher was a "fully paid-up Thatcherite...
...there is a general consensus among diplomats and officials here that they are not...
...If Conservative Digest or the Washington Times ran the same sort of criticism, it wouldn't mean much...
...Or take Common Cause...
...EMINENTOES Reaganites were greatly heartened by Margaret Thatcher's phenomenally large victory in the British general election last June...
...Just when he is pinned down and vulnerable to a thrashing, he slips away...
...Maddest of all is Tom Wicker, who wrote in his column that Reagan's luck "is not to be discounted...
...Not a one, I bet...
...Nonetheless, the editorial said Reagan has achieved "three significant and obvious achievements" in foreign affairs, despite the"clich~" of the Democratic presidential contenders that he has scored a goose egg...
...Take the Clean Air Act...
...The targets for reducing government borrowing were also, broadly speaking, adequately secured over 19791983...
...The problem isn't so much that the UN is ineffective in preserving peace, which it manifestly is...
...Party activists can't get by in the real world, you know, just by reading Mother Jones or the Nation...
...The main tendencies of this outlook are sympathy for authoritarian government, deep suspicion of the West, a disavowal of free enterprise, and--in an organization whose charter repudiates the use or the threat of force--a belief in the legitimacy of 'armed struggle' when carried out by the world's generally Marxist 'national liberation movements,' particularly the Palestine Liberation Organization and SWAPO, the South-West Africa People's Organization...
...Andropov's passing took the focus off Lebanon, he noted...
...The Soviet Union by all accounts enjoys enormous strength here," he wrote...
...The demonstration that it is possible has already had salutary effect in places like Surinam, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union...
...The guy is lucky, and it drives the press crazy because it makes Reagan such elusive quarry...
...Its main accomplishment, delegates say, has been to help shape an agenda that by and large is unfriendly to Western values and interests...
...This thing about Reagan's luck happens to be a clich~ that is true...
...Reagan did...
...But there is also a bit of good news: After decades of affectionate massaging by the press, one sacred cow is now under attack...
...The second success was Grenada...
...In the General Assembly last year, a vigorous effort, led by Iranian exile groups, to place a resolution condemning Iran for human-rights violations failed to gain a single sponsor, even though there was persuasive evidence that thousands of political executions have taken place in that country since 1981 . . . . The human rights debate focused, instead, on three right-wing Latin American states, El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile, that did not belong to any powerful bloc and thus seemed good targets...
...So when Yuri Andropov died in February, Steven R. Weisman of the New York Times wrote that "for the third time in recent months, President Reagan has found himself facing a foreign policy crisis, only to have public attention diverted--at least momentarily--by sudden developments elsewhere...
...The third success...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
