Editorials/Liberal Denial/Requiem for a Bum

...What the term lacks in precision it makes up for in political usefulness, at least for those who would put Mr...

...For instance, when South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fell to North Vietnam they denied that the "dominoes" had fallen...

...Carpenter was an alcoholic...

...What is more, it has broken up into intolerant enthusiasms remote from the American mainstream...

...The plight of the so-called homeless worsens not because society does not care but because the activists among us have, in pursuit of their follies, made it controversial to assess the problem accurately and to address it as effectively as society once did...

...To take to the streets, leaving an infant son and a girl to face life accompanied solely by their mother is by my lights a life of cowardice...

...Norman Podhoretz has referred to this prudish reticence as a "conspiracy of silence," but I demur...

...Mondale was the young Liberal on whom the smart money was placed in the early Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...

...Some victims of the denial syndrome are stricken by fierce anxiety on bridges-even quaint covered bridges!-and thus, perforce, travel vast distances to avoid them...

...The Liberals are more sanguine, and since the fall debacle they have made a very brave show of it, examining their metaphysics in the public prints, holding conferences to sort out their present problems and new directions...

...Some blame their loss on Ronald Reagan's charm, making him perhaps the most effective Casanova of all time...

...Apparently they have forgotten that our democratic representatives over the years have voted themselves such ample perks as to make their removal from office a gigantic undertaking of genius and luck...

...We drinked together, pooled our money together [as a disabled veteran Mr...

...Some belong in asylums, as the American Psychiatric Association has confirmed...

...Rather it is the violence these activists commit against the truth...

...On that night the temperature dipped below freezing, and when this occurs derelicts with a sufficient amount of alcohol in their blood often turn up DOA or dead on arrival as any cop on the beat will tell you...

...From then on he did not lead a hero's life...

...The study, titled The Liberal Crack-Up, observes these unhappy people denying reality on a surprising range of issues...

...Carpenter's devotion to "the boys" on the street is nonsense...

...Here then is why I predict that the Liberals face worse times ahead...

...I predict worse times ahead...

...It is as though Richard Strauss's critics, rather than booing Electro, had crawled furtively from the concert hall to declare the next day in their reviews, "Vee heard missing...

...The quality of his relationships was vividly suggested by his last street companion, Mr...

...and the USSR are perceived...

...Yet there is more than a whiff of farce to their soul-searching...

...and do you know that when this book came out they, in their reviewing forums, even denied its existence...

...Back in the days when language was relatively unpoliticized and cherished for the truths it could' convey, Mr...

...And such formidable forums of book reviewing as the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time have yet to give it the good bashing that perhaps it deserves...

...As Thomas J. Main wrote in the Public Interest quarterly in the summer of 1983, homelessness is caused by a variety of misfortunes and pathologies...

...What is most objectionable about the news stories that the political activists at Washington's Community for Creative Non-Violence orchestrated into our living rooms is not that their proximate goal of more street shelters is a futile approach to the profound problems afflicting most of the so-called homeless...

...Carpenter received $400 to $500 monthly], but I didn't ask him anything and he didn't ask me," Mr...

...Still others, who break no laws and present no threat to society, ought to be left alone...

...REQUIEM FOR A BUM How closely did you follow the recent interment of Mr...

...Seasoned political observers tell me that the Liberals are merely keeping their fears to themselves, the better to rectify the situation...

...I would refer them and all who are stout-hearted enough to confront the Liberals' condition to Anna Freud's masterwork, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense...

...This fall the youth vote went Republican, and.for the first time in decades 50 percent of the electorate in House contests with two-party races went GOP...

...EDITORIALS LIBERAL DENIAL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...1970s and by 1984 he had a superb organization...

...The Republican party has in a decade risen from moribundity to near equality with the Democrats, whose popularity steadily declines...

...They regularly practice denial when disturbing differences between the U.S...

...Now they are denying that Liberalism and its gloomy agenda were thumpingly rejected this fall...

...To claim, as the political activists exploiting the homeless do, that there was nobility in Mr...

...The drift from left to right is apparent for all to see, yet the Liberals remain by and large oblivious...

...Having now watched these dubious re-examinations, I have come to believe that the psychological condition of the participants is at the heart of their problem...

...a EDITORIAL (continued from page 9) Mr...

...All that can save the Liberals and those unfortunate moderates in the Democratic party who are chained to them is economic catastrophe or some equally depressing act of nature...

...John Lamm...

...Considering the baleful outcome of this fall's election for my Liberal friends, and the outcome of every presidential election since 1968, save one, it is not going too far to say that they have fallen on particularly hard times...

...Lamm explained from his wheelchair...

...Every time one hears them complain of Ronald Reagan's style, or intone an urgent incantation to one of their many sacred cows, one senses it...

...Jesse Carpenter, a World War II Bronze Star recipient who died on the evening of December 5 in Lafayette Square across from the White House...

...Some of the Liberal brethren still argue that last fall's debacle was Walter Mondale's fault, though Mr...

...As for The Liberal Crack-Up itself, I believe its publication will eventually be viewed as a historic event, one of the rare moments in their gaudy saga when the Liberals were rendered utterly silent...

...They cannot even acknowledge the sources of their anxieties...

...Their problems are not only political but also profoundly psychological...

...Carpenter was a hero while under Nazi fire sometime in 1944...

...All believe that last fall's landslide had an ambiguous meaning because so few seats shifted in the House of Representatives...

...Miss Freud, now deceased, is the daughter of the esteemed Dr...

...Since October they have for the most part refused to mention the book or its thesis, which is that today's Liberalism is far more radical than the Liberalism of the New Deal...

...In her book she argues that normal people as well as neurotics when faced with anxiety-causing situations frequently practice denial...

...Of the major news sources, so far only the conservative Wall Street Journal has reviewed this common-sense study...

...Some become vagrants owing to temporary destitution...

...Now the politically tendentious have hornswoggled us into numbering him among "the homeless...

...What we have here is a class of people afflicted with mental disorder...

...Others are drug addicts, alcoholics, or the victims of mental disorders...

...Few can be treated as normal citizens...

...Sigmund Freud, so many of my Liberal friends will need no further introductions...

...Moreover, these spectacles of soul-searching rarely bring up matters of substance or the thought that Ronald Reagan's policies fetch votes...

...Vin Harwell declaimed during services at Arlington National Cemetery...

...Similarly, many liberals today are made profoundly uneasy by evidence of political or intellectual setbacks and so refuse to acknowledge the clearly observable...

...Here is...

...Carpenter would also have been called a vagrant or derelict...

...Others belong in the jug...

...Carpenter's lonely death to their political uses...

...Today significantly more Americans identify themselves as conservative than liberal...

...In its more extreme form psychotic denial amounts to seeing and hearing but refusing to acknowledge what is seen and heard...

...Miss Freud's findings conform with my own from researches I have conducted among the more extreme Liberals...

...Our society chose to treat Jesse as invisible," the Rev...