Editorials/Reagan Is Not Reagan/Violence in the Sheets
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS REAGAN IS NOT REAGAN In America to be corrupted by bad impulses is relatively commonplace. To be corrupted by good impulses is apparently presidential. Jimmy Carter was brought low by...
...Aspiring Iranian leaders owe us a sign of good faith, such as the freeing of all Western hostages...
...I am happy to report that in the Ageby R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The President should bring strategic thinking and principle back and rid himself of those sycophants who acquiesce when he follows sentimental impulse rather than principle...
...He would commit them anywhere, which explains the calamities that befell him practically everywhere...
...This sort of dissembling has been going on since the Daniloff exchange was not an exchange and the Reykjavik summit was not a summit and our most authoritative source on that meeting became the eminent Mr...
...Only in his recent dealings with the Soviet Union and Iran has Ronald Reagan abandoned himself to goodness, and so it is that only now has his corruption set in...
...Perhaps the war on poverty brought relief to an occasional American down on his luck, but the size of our poverty class had been diminishing for decades and the material condition of the poor had been improving pari passu with the condition of all Americans...
...It needs our arms and our good will...
...Washington's policy toward terrorists and its embargo of arms shipments to a nation whose piratical behavior places it beyond the conventions of civilized nations have been sound...
...and I hope it is only the rhetorical residue of those years of bellicosity that provoked our genial President to declare war on drugs...
...Admittedly this is not like the great days when the morally superior warred against whole classes of fat cats, but the campaign is also being waged against any other commentators who might make bold to challenge progressive orthodoxy, particularly those referred to as neoconservatives...
...There is insufficient strategic discipline in the White House and insufficient respect for reality...
...Despite thin boasts of personal saintliness the progressives, who have set much of the national agenda since the early 1960s, are a very violent bunch...
...Yet these emissaries took that path...
...This is undoubtedly a sensible conclusion...
...For nearly three decades they have been imperiously summoning us to War on Communism, War on poverty, War on illiteracy...
...President Reagan is more specific...
...Thus, the President's secret emissaries should have borne in mind that the United States is not obliged to give Iran a sign of good faith, not through armsshipments nor kisses blown from atop the Washington Monument...
...L et us face the music: our elites are unnecessarily warlike...
...A hostage exchange is not a hostage exchange...
...This conservative Administration's foreign policy has been based on assessing the world as it is rather than as some ideologue dreams it to be...
...This travesty has now gone too far...
...Whether most Americans recognize this they know that the progressives' wars cost a bundle and were paid for with catastrophic taxation and inflation...
...There is nothing we can do about it," he and his assistant presidents would intone...
...Their complaints are not very intelligent but the old violence remains...
...Furthermore, Iran, owing to its own excesses, is about to collapse...
...So now Will has had to suffer long assaults on his intellect and his income from progressives at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the learned "Doonesbury" comic strip...
...Doubtless a mullah or two would believe it, but I lay the present presidential ineptitude, disingenuousness, and appeasement to Reagan's artless trust in the goodness of a good impulse...
...They have grown wary of theserepeated summons to arms...
...VIOLENCE IN THE SHEETS As normalcy continues to refresh the land, leaving the vast majority of Americans free to live lives exempt from the gruesome melodramas that our progressives have imposed on us through the years, it becomes apparent that these progressives have a problem...
...What noble endeavor will absorb his prodigious energies...
...The rest look at the federal deficit, anxiously recall double-digit inflation, and want no part in further wars to eliminate some perceived social problem...
...of Reagan Normalcy citizens of progressive disposition have found activities that are only minimally harmful...
...Jimmy Carter's libido for pious deeds was promiscuous...
...To their credit, ideologues of the far left have been quick to note the fierceness of such progressive Americans as, say, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and that is why it has been so easy for them to spin yarns about the misdeeds that supposedly emanate from American circles of power...
...They must find an outlet for their moral passions that is neither injurious to them nor to the public as a whole...
...In the end, as his multitudinous calamities weighed down on him, Jimmy Carter simply denied that the world had meaning...
...Is the socialization of the progressive, or of the liberal, as some are still called, feasible...
...Jimmy Carter was brought low by an unscotchable impulse to do good when self-restraint would have been preferable and even morally unobjectionable...
...Today the condition of the very poor, particularly in our cities, is appalling, with socialpathologies such as crime and family dissolution making poverty more wretched than before the war on poverty commenced...
...Doubtless, in the privacy of their consciences, the Republic's Professor Schlesingers do indeed recognize their capacity for violence, which explains why they freVIOLENCE IN THE SHEETS 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 quently find left-wing theories of American imperialism and genocide so plausible...
...A shipment of weapons is not a shipment of weapons and a breach of our own arms embargo is not a breach of our own embargo...
...Are the powers and the principalities of the heavens at work here...
...They want peace and steady economic growth...
...Yet one element that separates the present Age of Normalcy from the 1960s and 1970s is the peacefulness of ordinary Americans...
...Blinded by a good impulse he has behaved arrogantly, deviously, and as the classic appeaser...
...Jimmy Carter, if I understood him correctly, summoned us to War on superfluous lightbulbs...
...But first fairness counsels that I explain how the noble deeds of the morally mobilized have created the present contentment with normalcy...
...The greater irony is that it should be the religious paradise of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that corrupted the foreign policy behavior of this conservative President...
...He now denies that certain words have meaning...
...The more astute among them believe that all these social engineering campaigns were quite futile and unnecessarily expensive...
...It seems so blameless...
...Some will consider it ironic that this President has come a cropper over a longing to reunite innocent victims of barbarism with their families...
...Jimmy Carter's troubles with Khomeini's madhouse were the proximate cause of Reagan's election, and now Reagan's troubles there have rendered him at one with the hapless Jimmy...
...Social scientists have shown beyond doubt that a subclass of poor Americans is now finding it impossible to break out of poverty...
...Its friends and perhaps its agents hold our citizens and under conditions that are as inhumane as they are unjust...
...American Presidents need to learn that good deeds are not enough, and good intentions never preempt prudence...
...They must occupy themselves in wholesome ways, avoiding desperate antics that nowadays could land them in a mental asylum or in some repressive house of detention even drearier than the great state universities that now rise up where once only harmless cow fields stood, or virgin forests...
...So how are our progressives going to redirect their moral passions...
...Now Ronald Reagan, swelled by his own good_ intentions, has suffered the same fate...
...Diversity of opinion is not a progressive cause, and one George F Will in medialand is one too many...
...Pursuing renewed diplomatic relations with post-Khomeini Iran is irreproachable, but the course followed by the Reagan White House was dreamy to the point of being preposterous and so perilous as to assure our failure and embarrassment...
...T he President's emissaries might also have borne in mind that Iran is now a vast asylum of enraged factions, frequently illiterate...
...Yet it conduced him toward an arrogant disregard for the truth reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson and toward an ineptitude matched only by Jimmy Carter...
...Iran has been the aggressor against us...
...Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Now the President of the United States again looks pathetic before the world and cheap...
...I have researched this question fully and can now report that they have mobilized their energies behind an extensive campaign against the bespectacled person of George F. Will, television's conservative...
...To expose oneself to the skittish mercies of any side was the path to certain betrayal...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
Vol. 20 • January 1987 • No. 1
