Editorials/Grumbles on the Right/Death in Obscurity
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS GRUMBLES ON THE RIGHT by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The historically inclined will recall that it was at about this time in Ronald Reagan's first term when conservatives began complaining...
...The credulous role of media in Beirut is but one of the reasons that the Reagan Administration did about as well as it could...
...It was George Will...
...Most are the bodies of presidential nominees...
...Like Britain's forlorn right-wing MP from Northern Ireland, Helms is given to standing alone, reproaching governments whether they are of his party or not...
...Soon the pundits will, like a restless herd, pass on to newer calamities, infamies, and heartwarmers (note how the Bitburg furor dissipated...
...Our government was unable to prevent the terrorists from achieving their goal because of our media's innocence...
...They doubt he will labor very diligently for true tax reform...
...Inasmuch as our government is constituted to protect our interests and inasmuch as our media frustrate our government's lawful purposes, legislation probably ought to be passed allowing our government to declare the scenes of such incidents as the Beirut kidnapping war zones, off-limits to American media personnel...
...And through the farce they assume that they are presenting facts, unadulterated by political purpose...
...They are allowed to film just what their government's enemies allow them to film...
...This may not affect the President's plans, but as 1988 approaches it may influence the hopes and dreams of his loyal friend George Bush...
...Americans over the years have too often been given to noisy dramatics...
...and now in the White House there is no James A. Baker III to take the rap...
...Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had wanted a 9-percent real growth in Pentagon spending...
...To begin with, the Administration was in no position to prevent the terrorists from realizing their major goal: to wit, attracting attention...
...But wherever they gather-in Capitol Hill offices, in their think tanks, in their proliferating Washington lobbying offices-they repine...
...If they were, the American media's representatives on the ground in Beirut might be dead today...
...Both of us were repulsed by Beirut's media spectacle...
...He is their dream President, though those with a long memory still esteem the martyred McKinley as numero uno...
...Other complaints include the Administration's capitulation on aid for the contras...
...The government can close off airports to American commercial airlines, why should it not close off war zones to the American news industry...
...Then the Administration settled for a 5.9-percent increase...
...They dutifully convey their enemies' propaganda...
...Curiously enough, their grumbling has broken out anew...
...The ingenues with the cameras and the microphones rushed in where diplomats and soldiers are not welcome...
...All in all they have compiled a long list of anxieties and complaints in a very short period of time...
...Then it dropped its request to 3 percent...
...Anyone mindful of the fruitlessness of John Ashbrook's challenge to Richard Nixon's renomination recognized the futility of the conservatives' first round of complaints against the Reagan Administration in 1981...
...Vicious terrorists and their collaborators were not willing to welcome our diplomats or our Delta Force, but delighted in welcoming our media...
...The conservatives disapproved of the Administration's recent decision to abide by that unratified SALT II agreement that candidate Reagan once abominated...
...DEATH IN OBSCURITY Now that the kidnapped Americans have been returned, learned assessments are resounding throughout the land...
...Another difference is that, whereas in 1981 the grumbling conservatives were overt, today they are covert-at least for the most part...
...Today's conservative critics have brighter prospects...
...Many members of the media see themselves as standing somewhere between the government of the United States and the enemies of the United States...
...The historically inclined will recall that it was at about this time in Ronald Reagan's first term when conservatives began complaining of his ideological waywardness...
...The other reason for approving of the Administration's policy is that the conservative critics overlook the capacity of America's appeasers to frustrate a resolute policy of force...
...Last month I actually heard a distinguished conservative writer speak nostalgically of the Wonderboy from Plains, Georgia...
...Even assuming some military geniuses could have gotten our citizens out of Beirut, our appeasers would be hissing with indignation and recriminations for years to come, encouraging more terrorism and vitiating the usefulness of American force...
...Carter at least was learning...
...The terrorists were always free to increase pressure on our diplomats by massaging our media...
...They are also critical of it for failing to fight for the military budget...
...Had the Reagan Administration taken more forceful action these dreadful pests would be reinforcing the terrorists' opposition to our policy...
...And now what is needed is not presidential heroics, but a very low-key statement from an anonymous diplomat to the effect that death in obscurity awaits those who have killed innocent Americans.illed innocent Americans...
...At this very hour in the Senate he is holding up the appointments of twenty-eight State Department nominees because of Secretary of State George Shultz's alleged discourtesies towards six conservatives formerly in his employment...
...Did the journalists ever get the feeling that they were being used...
...Now it is settling for "humanitarian" aid, as though the contras were victims of a natural disaster rather than soldiers engaged in turning back our mutual enemies...
...Helms is equally critical of the State Department...
...Originally it wanted military aid...
...Conservatives doubt that the Administration will hold out even for that...
...We joked a bit, he comparing his exertions to those of a celebrated advocate and practitioner of the jog, I noting that the poor fellow had expired in the midst of those ill-advised exertions...
...From the liberal consensus comes that appalling mixture of sentimentality, impudence, and rodomontade...
...Then we got down to brass tacks...
...Nor after the plane's last landing in Beirut was a rescue mission plausible or useful...
...The conservatives dominate grassroots Republicanism, and if their complaints against the White House continue to grow they will not be very friendly toward the White House's candidate next presidential year...
...They criticized his ardor for a summit meeting with the dashing Gorbachev, and they grouse about his feeble response to the murders of American servicemen abroad...
...What is more the conservatives know that they will have to make do with Ron for three more years, and they are still willing to give him benefit of the doubt...
...In American politics he is our Enoch Powell...
...The conservatives blame the Reagan Administration for failing to defend its own...
...The political and religious violence issuing from the Middle East today represents a new threat to the modern order much as new viruses represent a new threat to modern society...
...Does thar tell us anything...
...This dangerous business should end...
...They point to the growing number of corpses piled outside the august Senate...
...In May it settled for zero real growth...
...Meanwhile, like-minded conservatives merely murmur...
...I first got wind of the conservatives' response to the Reagan Administration's behavior when I encountered a heaving jogger suffering horribly in front of New York's Carlyle Hotel...
...This is the way we mark history in the modern age...
...On larger issues, the Hon...
...Never before has the Senate rejected so many...
...The Administration was wise to have remained as reticent as it did...
...In the early days of the kidnapping these appeasers were already at one with the terrorists in warning against American action and in disdaining those who like George Will were calling for resolute action...
...In their grandiosity, they see themselves as fulfilling vague and noble purposes...
...Yet today's criticisms may be more fateful than those of 1981, for if today's conservative critics mutiny they can render the President impotent to influence the choice of a successor...
...Their complaints remain underground for now because since the 1960s Ronald Reagan has been kin...
...The sounds of American warcraft off Lebanon's shores were sufficiently eloquent...
...Frustration moves some to the outer limits of despair...
...Neither bombastic threats from the right nor conciliatory cooing from the left will discourage the violence that befell TWA Flight 847...
...In sum they fear the President has become complacent and passive...
...The media's presence rewarded the terrorists' brutality...
...What the conservatives fear Ronald Reagan has forgotten is that in politics one must fight for one's supporters and friends...
...It never seems to dawn on them that they are furthering the purposes of their country's enemies...
...I have now had sufficient time to reflect on my criticisms, however, and though the conservatives' criticism grows I doubt the Administration deserves it...
...They may see themselves as the intelligence-gathering organization of the universe, but in reality they are the assets of terrorists...
...This may not worry our debonair President, but think of his friend George...
...For now, the only outspoken grumbler against the Reagan Administration is the senior senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms...
...From conservatives come condemnations...
...Both shared an antipathy for the Administration's diplomacy and for some of the hostages' utterances...
...New procedures are obviously required...
...They will most likely decide the Republican party's future...
...Reagan seems to be forgetting," said the fellow whom Christian charity prevents me from identifying...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
