Editorials/Congressional Minesweepers/Death Threat Democrats
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
a rule Orientals are not "low-income" people. Moreover in political terms what do the growing number of professionals who are Hispanic, black, or Oriental have in common with lowincome...
...Moreover, it is easy to demonstrate why in principle it cannot succeed in mobilizing production...
...Moreover in political terms what do the growing number of professionals who are Hispanic, black, or Oriental have in common with lowincome Hispanics, blacks, and Orientals, aside from blood...
...God now is making us the judge...
...greater will be the impoverishment...
...This is pretty incendiary stuff...
...To the black reporter responsible for passing on the report that Jackson applied ethnic slurs to Jews, Farrakhan warned in a March 11 radio broadcast, "One day soon we will punish you with death...
...Poverty is the problem, not Communism...
...This has been explained in detail by an Austrian economist named Von Mises and I won't bore you with the details...
...For example, they would say that poverty was caused by "oppression," or by "U.S...
...He makes threats against them and against reporters who report stories that he does not approve of, notwithstanding the fact that the reports are true...
...He views those who do not approve of Jesse Jackson's candidacy as people bent on Jackson's "destruction...
...imperialism," or by "multinational corporations...
...Among other things the democratic process demands that we live peacefully with our disappointments, and Farrakhan appears to be decidedly unpeaceful...
...By bringing Farrakhan along in his political entourage Jesse Jackson has introduced two new elements into presidential politics, open racialism and the death threat...
...In the ensuing conversation with the other blacks, one of whom was Andy Young, it was explained that Jackson was performing a valuable service by bringing Farrakhan into the political process and that the black reporter responsible for exposing Jackson's ethnic slurs acted improperly for the slurs were off the record...
...All of which is to say that when race becomes a political value democratic process is threatened...
...To find its equivalent issuing from a white politician you would have to go quite beyond the early George Wallace to some Ku Kluxian on the march in the 1920s...
...It is time our liberals see this campaign for what it is, to wit: one that has lowered our democratic standards to a dangerous level...
...If for instance he hears someone at the other end of the table THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 9...
...Time magazine, April 23, 1984 We had better learn how to respond to this latest specimen of cant because we are going to hear it repeated a few thousand times before the November election...
...The answer is very little, and to say that they do have much in common is to insist on racial politics--that is to say deciding political issues on the basis of race...
...More recently he harangued' 'white America," saying in a 90-minute diatribe, "Everything we have we have offered it to you, and the reward we get is the destruction of our h e r o e s . . . You no longer are our judge...
...I understand that President Reagan's butler, called Deaver, is also sometimes called a conservative...
...Does poverty have a cause, then...
...Of course, liberals don't think along these lines at all...
...If, on the other hand, decision-making is decentralized, then you no longer have Communism...
...Wherever such a primitive political value exists there is violence, and, as the liberals so often tell us, injustice...
...All Communist countries are impoverished, and the more strictly the edicts of the central planners are enforced, the Tom Betheil is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Last month on the "CBS Morning News," Jackson and three distinguished blacks discussed the whole imbroglio with Diane Sawyer...
...To the extent that they do think about the matter, they probably think of Communism as a response to poverty--a kind of retribution...
...He is not in sympathy with the spirit of the democratic proccess...
...IGary Hart, presidential campaign 1984 "'Many liberals and conservatives argue that the real enemy in Central America is poverty, not Communism...
...Ask former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz...
...That is the system of production that America opted for in the late eighteenth century...
...Furthermore, there are enormities that areporter is duty-bound to put on the record, for instance: ethnic slurs...
...I am talking about liberals, now, not leftists, who indeed would have an answer albeit a wrong one...
...Communism causes poverty--let us get that straight at the outset...
...Fully decentralized decision-making, with the government confining itself to the neutral role of umpire, merely enforcing the agreements between decisionmakers, is another way of describing private property...
...All four displayed an insouciance that was quite appalling...
...I think not...
...That is the true meaning of the phrase "social justice," by the way-revenge...
...At a dinner party he doesn't want to say the wrong thing, any more than he wants to use the wrong fork or arrive wearing the wrong clothes...
...If you were to ask your average college or garden liberal this, he most likely would be perplexed, because for him "poverty" is not so much a state to be explained as it is a stimulus to which he is expected to respond appropriately--perhaps with some phrase including the word "compassionate...
...By the way, Time's evidence that "conservatives" think such pusillanimous thoughts appears to be nothing more than the next sentence in the Time article, reading: "The bipartisan Kissinger commission recommended an economic aid program along the lines of the Marshall P l a n . . . " Well I suppose some people might say that Kissinger is a conservative...
...Communism fails an empirical test, whatever one thinks of the theory underlying it...
...Is that good...
...The truth is that Jackson is endangering the democratic process by bringing into it a man who utters death threats...
...A liberal, in fact, may be defined as someone whose mental state is one of deference to the unwritten rules of sociopolitical etiquette...
...That is the deepest problem with the arrival of Black Muslim Louis Farrakhan upon the American political scene...
...Moreover I do not believe that any presidential contender in this century has had a man so close to him who speaks as violently as Farrakhan...
...Jackson refused to disavow Farrakhan's support and spoke sanctimoniously about Farrakhan's "redemption...
...It has never been known to succeed anywhere except in small communities with voluntary membership...
...The basic problem is that organizing production from a central post is too complicated and posits a form of human nature that does not correspond to reality...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
