Editorials/Fritz, My Fritz/Morality Lessons
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
FRITZ, MY FRITZ I t is with unexpected melancholy that I have witnessed Walter Mondale's democratic ordeal. I have attempted to stifle it, but the gloom is relentless. After all, Mondale is...
...8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 Overnight the head of the National Security Council, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secretary of the Navy, and all manner of smaller fish are turned from their governmental tasks and obliged to provide us with thrills on the evening news and opportunities for Pulitzer Prizes...
...He is a'iife-long Democrat, and Democrats are politically savvy enough to know intuitively whom to invite to represent them...
...All those hellish Tammanyite ornaments of democracy are gone now thanks to the reformers, but with them went the organizational framework that gave the party an effective relationship with the voters...
...Hart adjudged the Administration's ethics as unparalleled throughout the long, sordid history of the Republic...
...One of the key points about the Hive is~:that its members communicate (openly) with one another in a slowly shifting language, the purpose of which is to erode definition, blur meanings, and above all to advocate its [~rogram (neo-socialism) in the guise of responding pragmatically to one alTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 9...
...Hart was a student at the Yale Divinity School...
...In the Carter Administration Tim Kraft, _9 Ham Jordan, and Bert Lance dutifully served this high purpose...
...If he cannot prove his ignorance, back to New York he, his wife, and two children will be sent and under a very dark cloud...
...President Reagan will have learned the right lesson if henceforth he avoids appointing people to top posts because they were once next door neighbors, old friends of Nancy, or golfing partners well known to good old J.B...
...Today's Democratic party is dominated by a congeries of special inAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...This is unjust, but the Republican party could be the beneficiary if in the future Washington appears to be too much of a minefield for those inept senior corporate types who have routinely held key posts in Republican administrations...
...Think of their promises to labor, the blacks, the old, the young, the fat, the bald...
...Meese is a rare instance...
...They were fine campaigners and failed leaders...
...Lenkowsky's is merely a question of whether he knew about the infamous list (now reported to be a bureaucratic record of the 95 or so speakers rejected by political appointees out of the 5000 accepted over two-and-a-half years...
...The creativity and diversity of their promises have been a source of pride with them, not to say vanity...
...The liberals' promises are what convince them that they are Ronald Reagan's moral superiors...
...A further ascension is now problematic, yet he has only himself to blame...
...Even the President is expected to serve, as President Carter learned when the reporters called him onto the carpet to explain the dark intricacies of the sale of his fabulous peanut warehouse...
...Since Ronald Reagan took office," an inflamed New York Times reporter revealed last month, "more than a dozen high-level officials have resigned, been investigated or been forced to explain their actions after charges of impropriety...
...and his pals toot-tooting their way around the golf course have not yet been informed of the fact and are unlikely to find out for themselves...
...Appoint the really rich who can afford to lose money in their moves to Washington, and fire those in the White House who allow such puny scandals to grow vast and bloodcurdling...
...The past wizards of this act are such palpable failures as Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter, both of whom stressed their braininess, their capacity for engorging upon both liberalism and conservatism, their outside persona...
...The Enigma is a political prodigy of the 1970s, which, for those of us with the capacity to recollect those faraway days of 1976, is distressing...
...Reagan instead should look for people who are in philosophical agreement with himself...
...The first is for the White House...
...Republicans are comparatively quite ignorant...
...It is true that there are differences, but mainly in style...
...The neoliberal is one who has always been a liberal but now replaces the sentimental pieties with brusque slogans ("High-Tech...
...Now it is the Reagan Administration's appointees who are learning their roles in our national morality pageants, and for three years various ill-starred eminentoes have been duly responding to the lurid charges lodged by suspicious journalists and congressional investigating committees...
...This creation of melodrama where theretofore only dull government toil was spied is a fascinating process...
...Well, for the credulous it is a scandal to curl the hair...
...The interesting thing is that the charges have been ad hoc, unforeseeable from day to day as to their specifics, but in the aggregate completely predictable...
...The second lesson is for those who create these melodramas...
...If it wishes to avoid future imbroglios such as the Meese grilling, do not appoint middle-class salary-earners...
...But they were nevertheless foreseeable, because Meese was known to be an ideological enemy of the apostate communion known as the Hive, and he was threatening to take over one of its key cells, the Justice Department...
...In fact Meese (as everyone in the news media knows perfectly well) has made personal sacrifices to work for the government...
...In sum, they cultivated a kind of weirdness that conferred a fantastic allure upon their campaigns...
...The by R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r . Moralist has replaced the machine pol and the Southern orator as the traditional Democrat...
...The good thing about disaffected Democrats is that they know how to fight the ideological war in progress and they are greatly helped by knowing that there is such a war...
...Mondale's act involves his roaming the country spouting such flumdiddle as 'Where's the heart...
...Fasten your seat belts...
...Yet neither illustrious names nor money has been able to scotch the neoteric aura about Gary Hart...
...I suggest that former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon be brought in...
...senator, Vice President...
...Can you imagine how the liberals would have reacted if Joe McCarthy had said, "Whether or not my charges are true, there is a perception that they are, and so the performance of State Department officials has been significantly impaired...
...All else stays the same...
...personal "complexity" as a dispensation from apparent contradictions, and a sudden weird meanness when what appeared to be petty hypocrisy peeped out from behind the curtain...
...Moreover what kind of ethical issue is it...
...By law each administration should have to appoint a few certifiable grafters to positions of public trust...
...Consider what they squabbled about in early March: their comparative ardor for the freeze and for feminism, Consider the groups they court: the National Education Association, NOW...
...Did Lenkowsky know about this Procrustean tool of Reaganite totalitarianism...
...Without effective party leaders and conventional political apparatuses to bring in the vote the Democratic nominating process has become an existential beauty contest revolving around "the message" and "the personality...
...Then too it is a sad irony to see the hard-pressed Mondale attacked for his promises to "special interests...
...Not only that, he is Reaganite to the core...
...Their leaders have overwhelmingly endorsed Mondale and have given him a vast campaign chest...
...Only one Reagan appointee has been convicted of any crime whatsoever...
...His message is his mystical affinity for the suffering masses...
...Lenkowsky says he abolished the list when he heard of it, which is perfectly plausible...
...Hart is the Enigma...
...Call me oldfashioned, but I find it all weird and, in a nice man like Mondale, sad...
...These are most likely to be found among Democrats, as some of Reagan's best appointees (e.g., Jeane Kirkpatrick) attest...
...and unpronounceable programs...
...and forget not that before he lost all recollection of his age and the circumstances of his namechange the Hon...
...Where's the soul...
...J.B...
...They are the sinister Edwin Meese, President Reagan's nominee for attorney general, and Leslie Lenkowsky, a Democrat whose appointment as deputy director to the United States Information Agency was a shoo-in until it was discovered that someone somewhere at the USIA had compiled a list of speakers to be barred from USIA trips...
...In fine, these scandals are an embarrassment to America...
...MORALITY LESSONS Apparently the first obligation of every White House appointee and nominee is to serve as raw material for the American soap opera industry, particularly that annex of the industry that has arrogated the term journalism...
...His imbroglio involves money, cuff links, and the mysterious Carter briefing papers...
...At that time the editorial writer can have had no idea what specific form the Meese accusations would take...
...Forced to explain their actions," what pale representation of scandal is this...
...He is genial, easily amused, and gregarious...
...and for the Democrats whose policies and presidential contenders are so thunderously unfetching it is an issue on the order of "fifty-four forty or fight...
...He is as rich as Croesus, and he makes it all himself...
...There are two lessons to be learned here...
...They need lists...
...Moreover, he is a pol who has paid his dues...
...C u r r e n t l y in our nation's capital we have two more appointees jumping through the journalists' hoops and otherwise being sweated by the news industry at taxpayers' expense...
...Yes, we are told, neoliberals like Gary Hart...
...Hart's is his mystical affinity for.' the future...
...The Democratic party today is not so much a political party as a milling herd, and the herd is easily stampeded...
...Of these two scoundrels Meese is providing greater melodrama...
...Actually, there is little new about neoliberalism, save the prefix and jargon...
...Martin Agronsky of "Agronsky & Co.," the slow-paced syndicated talk show, recently observed that whether or not the various charges against Meese have substance, there is a "perception" that they do, and therefore his performance as attorney general would be impaired...
...T r u t h be known, Hart and Mondale are two liberals in a pod...
...Coming from liberals this is a low blow...
...Yet the Democrats now speak portentously of the Republicans' "moral character," and recently in Iowa the Hon...
...Mondale has been in the reform wing of the Democratic party all his political life, which is to say he has scowled at the bosses, the conventions, the smoke-filled rooms...
...A barrage of inquiries from the journalists falls~upon the fated appointee...
...Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Ominous stories appear in the press...
...Joe McCarthy, ~,ou should be with us in this hour...
...For the most part neoconservatives are people who were once liberals but sobered up...
...Substitute the word "accusation" every time you hear the word "perception" in the media, and you will readily see that we now live in an age of vilification by "perception...
...He has been at it all his adult life, beginning as a greenhorn with the menial stuff that our wouldbe Messiahs must dispatch during their incunabular stage, but moving ever upward: Minnesota's attorney general, U.S...
...Unfortunately in the party that Mondale has reformed weirdness on the campaign trail appears to be inescapable...
...It is simply inaccurate to think of neoliberals as the Left's equivalent of neoconservatives...
...terests, but they are erratic at getting out the vote...
...from the Palisades Country Club...
...Anyone familiar with urban politics knows where to find likely candidates...
...and, alas, it has been liberal reformers like Mondale who have made this idiotic value of "newness" a political value...
...It was in January that the" Washington Post editorialized: "Nothing about this transfer is likely to be tranquil...
...We should have scandals as great as America is great...
...Mondale is the Moralist...
...There are now so many goodgovernment laws on the books, designed precisely to trip up unwary stalwarts like Meese, that he could predictably be shown to have left one or two t's uncrossed and i's undotted: enough for the Hive to come swarming in .filling the airwaves with their hypocritical indignation about "sleaze" and influence peddling...
...Are there any in their pious hordes who can with clear conscience fault Mondale for his promises...
...That is a fact...
...Even the National Organization for Women thumps for him...
...After all, Mondale is what we Americans call a nice man...
...THE HIVE PERCEIVES W e l l , don't say I didn't give you plenty of warning about the vilification of Ed Meese...
...The attack on Meese demonstrates, if we needed any further demonstration, that we live in a new McCarthy by Tom Bethell eramcall it the time of MediaMcCarthyism...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
