Editorials/Have Mercy/Good Feelings
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L...
...None...
...From Seoul we re-traced our steps to Tokyo, thence to Beijing (formerly Peking), then south to Manila with a stopover in Hong Kong, and finally to Taipei (capital of the Republic of China on Taiwan) be-fore returning to New York...
...We live in a country where a psychic, having charged that a CAT scan destroyed her miraculous powers, . successfully sued for a million dollars...
...Arnold Schwarzenegger...
...It did him no good...
...Notwithstanding years of disagreement—sometimes quite heated—conservatives and liberals are now earnestly declaiming their noble and apparently identical goals...
...Ordinary colonists suspected of trading with the Crown found their names published in colonial newspapers...
...Bo Hi Pak himself), and many others too diverse to mention...
...You had the impression of a gigantic, unified middle class moving forward in unison, without the terrible divisiveness that is now so characteristic of American life...
...When political leaders have stood by such appointees as Kenneth Adelman, head of our Arms Control Make of it what you will, but on a growing list of political issues it is almost impossible to discern any difference whatsoever between the conservatives and the liberals...
...Most of the tempests it has perpetrated have receded rapidly into the vapors of uncertain memory as Americans forgive and forget...
...Berke-ley, William Rusher of National Re-view, not to mention the redoubtable Col...
...Are conservatives out to curb terrorism...
...Do conservatives prescribe work rather than the narcotic welfare...
...But note too how poor Bennett is depicted as an oaf for actually suggesting action against drug use...
...SEOUL SEARCHING by Tom Bethell There were about forty of us on the tour of northeast Asia, arranged and paid for by the World Media Association...
...Given Judge Scalia's lively cast of mind, his hostility to our press is understandable and perhaps inescapable...
...Whatever the reason, ours is a very forgiving society, or at least a neglectful society...
...So rarely does one en-counter a journalist with anything daring or even original to say that our First Amendment is really quite unnecessary...
...An exceptionally efficient and courteous tour staff of much maligned "Moonies" did so much to make our trip a happy one...
...Are conservatives in favor of a strong foreign policy...
...In truth, it is no more critical to the health of American journalism than a gall bladder is to the health of Mr...
...Peking divided our group into optimists (supply-skiers), who believe that China will continue to liberalize, and pessimists (hardliners), who argue that Leninist parties never surrender power voluntarily...
...Now that they're kicked out, what do we do...
...Troops must be in good health if they are to fight at all—"health" in this metaphor being a sound economy...
...He is the liberal, and the wretch whom he vilifies for suggesting forceful action is the conservative...
...It is said that he is a witty, literate intellectual but so hostile to the press that he is itching to make it easier to sue for libel...
...Later we would visit the demilitarized zone between the two countries, which is only twenty-five miles from Seoul...
...Look around you, Judge Scalia...
...The Hon...
...This is a problem already...
...There disport before us notables whose past deeds would in more discriminating times have placed them beyond the pale...
...The promise of conservatives such as Judge Scalia is not more restrictions on personal freedom but an end to what Nathan Glazer has called the Imperial Judiciary and a return to the original intent of the Founding Fathers...
...They are at pains to ask only the approved questions, to affect the proper pieties, to express themselves in the same asphyxiating middle-brow argot...
...It should be on our minds now...
...Then, too, whenever a reporter or commentator sets out to wreck a reputation, sensible readers usually know what he is up to and discount his heroics...
...They approach practically every issue from the same direction, like a herd in mindless motion...
...Period...
...Note the righteous indignation...
...The unfortunate Bennett has been a frequent victim of liberal high-mindedness...
...On every one of these issues there will be a fellow who after a heroic oath to straight thinking will invariably bootleg in the high-minded caveat, that is to say, a suave qualification absolving him from taking any forceful action whatsoever...
...Surely it would end drug use in schools, and the Secretary offered numerous examples where such a policy had been effective...
...E D I T O R I A L S...
...This summer he urged university presidents to send students a letter reading, "Welcome back to your studies in September, but no drugs on campus...
...For one thing, standards of public conduct are far from Victorian...
...Note the honorable gentleman's unanimity with the conservative in opposing drugs...
...The capital of (South) Korea, Seoul turned out to be a huge, booming metropolis, where everyone seemed to be working at about double the American pace...
...History is on the side of the pessimists, but I found myself among the optimists and was roundly scolded by Beichman for my gullibility...
...Yet what is a conservative to make of the Administration's most recent Supreme Court nominee, Judge Antonin Scalia...
...And the impression of a united phalanx was even stronger in Japan...
...Still, the dynamism of Korea came as a shock...
...Now there is a policy suggestion for you...
...The Philippines, by contrast, had "Third World" written all over it: U.S...
...Of course one had read all about the booming economies of the Pacific Rim...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S...
...Forsooth, so are the liberals...
...Can you imagine as we sit here," Beichman said one day at the Little Angels School in Seoul, where children were dazzlingly practicing Chopin and Bach on Steinways, "that thirty miles to the north is that madman Kim Il Sung...
...After all, easier libel actions will most likely affect only private citizens and that stalwart band of independent journalists who write in the Republic's intellectual journals...
...We may well have entered America's second Era of Good Feelings...
...Andto increase our security they advocate a suit of armor apiece...
...Charles Rangel, the very intellectual and liberal chairman of the House committee, replied that "to kick them out is an easy thing to do...
...America is already an unpleasantly litigious place...
...But it is not easy for the press to destroy reputations...
...Supply-siders believe that a nation whose domestic policies encourage economic growth will by the same token be strong enough to repel external assault...
...Such journals are a rare source of diversity and originality in the other-wise bleak realm of American media...
...No sooner were we through customs than Jude Wanniski was on the phone to Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm that keeps track of tax rates around the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 11...
...Admittedly, in politics the press has set back some political ambitions—for instance, those of Richard Allen, the former national security adviser...
...The press is not the revered institution that its heroes assume...
...It was steaming hot everywhere we went, but this did not prevent us from Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Rather, independent citizens who might complain publicly about shady business or governmental practices will be the victims of libel actions...
...The medical director of the University of Virginia's drug treatment facility en-visaged "the Gestapo in the dormitories...
...Communism is not just an external threat that must be fended off with shields, but a potentially internal, "indigenous" growth that can devour a society from within...
...Hope," the Rev...
...As a consequence of this confusion GOOD FEELINGS to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 very little can be done to relieve many of our public problems...
...Where's the education, I mean, kicking them out is easy, I could do that...
...and Disarmament Agency, and Attorney General Edwin Meese, these de-cent men have triumphed...
...To force them to confront any added terrors would be cruel and futile...
...Already, our journalists live in dire fright of offending the reigning orthodoxy...
...The journalists of the herd usually work for vast communications organizations rich with lawyers capable of sustaining lawsuits for years...
...This editorial originally appeared in somewhat different form in the New York Times...
...The extent of drug use in America is a national disaster," the Rev...
...The Soviet Buildup we studied at military briefings en route: all very worrying because the Soviets always seem to come out ahead in these blackboard contests, involving (it seems) the transportation of strategic minerals and materiel down sea lanes past "chokepoints...
...Conservatives have been trying to remove the police power of the state from private lives...
...Our press is the most monotonous in the free world...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washing-ton Post column syndicated by King Features...
...How then are we to tell them apart...
...By contrast supply-siders are like doctors who recognize that suits of armor can do nothing for such internal disorders as cancer or influenza...
...That seemingly mild suggestion somehow evoked enormous alarm on campus...
...Today when Ronald Reagan and the conservative faithful call for rigor against drugs, which have become so prevalent in our schools, the liberals join in with all their legendary eloquence...
...Secretary Bennett has demonstrated that he does have the appetite to govern and even to brave the abuse of those who find comfort in the old bromides...
...It was the same in Taiwan...
...I'm not an educator, but I know how to kick out bums...
...Small journals have no such resources, nor do private citizens...
...The liberal is the person who divides his time between stupendous hand-wringing and anxious denunciation of the conservative, whom he often finds "simplistic...
...and the American press will become, if the thing be possible, even more timorous and tedious...
...Easing the restraintson libel will do precisely the opposite...
...finding facts as planned...
...Gone are the days when the enlightened liberal spoke of drugs as a sacred American freedom...
...As he in-formed the House Select Committee on Narcotics, he would expel students caught using or merchanting drugs...
...Ultimately the sources of the Asian resurgence remain a mystery in my view...
...Yet easing libel law will not improve the press or in-crease freedom or preserve the values of the Founding Fathers...
...To do so would be a grave mistake...
...Jesse Jackson notified Congress recently, whereupon he promptly fell on Secretary of Education William Bennett for advocating the expulsion and arrest of student users and pushers...
...Facts are facts: today conservatives and liberals stand together foursquare for balby R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...It has 9.5 million people, and this year Korea is growing at a ten-percent rate...
...What separates Bennett from liberalsis that he is actually simplistic enough to have dreamed up a policy for dealing with drugs in our schools...
...The conservative is then the person who is actually willing to do something about a problem that all Americans, conservative and liberal alike, wring their hands over...
...HAVE MERCY As the Reagan Revolution encroaches even onto the staid regions of the judiciary, conservatives are joyous...
...It was like being on a well-organized school trip for three weeks, with nothing to worry about and the bus waiting outside the hotel, ready to take us to our next briefing or banquet...
...Judge Scalia's challenge is not to tame the press but to enliven it and to expose it to intellect...
...You can guess it didn't take our group long to figure out the tax rates wherever we went...
...Irving Kristol, the editor of the in-dispensable journal of social analysis, the Public Interest, observed over a decade ago that liberals had lost the appetite to govern, that is: to make difficult choices and to enforce them...
...Growing evidence indicates that easing the grounds for libel will not affect CBS or Time-Life...
...Royal governors found themselves being vilified as "criminals...
...foreign aid, socialism unleashed, privilege and poverty, indigenous Communism, military storm clouds on the horizon...
...But since this is something that is difficult to observe directly on such a tour, I found myself worrying less about it than about the extraordinary economic growth that is taking place in this part of the world, which of course we could see with our own eyes...
...Jackson sang, is "the great antidote to dope," and he advocated still more drug education programs...
...Strategy" enthusiasts understand that we live in a dangerous world...
...In the Founders' time, political expression was bold and varied...
...anced budgets, lower taxes, the family...
...We were on a "fact-finding tour," but Larry Moffitt suggested in Beijing that this might have to be changed to fat-finding...
...Judge Scalia has expressed his fear that many journalists have no regard for the truth and "often destroy private reputations at will...
...Door to door Washington to Seoul took 24 hours, with a change of planes in Tokyo...
...The liberals are with them...
...Surely, when the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment, this tradition of free speech was on their minds...
...And the university's president purred: "The message to convey is a little more complex than Secretary Ben-nett said...
...Larry Moffitt was once again our good shepherd...
...So do liberals...
...This is a new development...
...That is one of the reasons that he and his boss are today so popular with the electorate...
...The Soviet Buildup was very much the preoccupation of the hardliners...
...He was referring to the Communist dictator of North Korea...
...No more do we hear vegetarians and nudists extolling the harmless recreational assets of marijuana...
...Yet the press's success in damaging the careers of innocents has usually depended on the pusillanimity of political leaders...
...Our group included different factions, among them supply-siders (Jude Wanniski of Polyconomics, Bruce Bartlett of the Heritage Foundation, Alvin Rabushka of the Hoover Institution), hardliners (Arnold Beichman of Hoover, James Gregor of U.C...
...Drug abuse is a timely example of how policy initiatives are flummoxed in this Era of Good Feelings...
...Consider some issues...
...Oh, I know about the tax-rate argument...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
