Editorials/Bad Characters/Who's to Blame'?
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS BAD CHARACTERS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. W hen the pundits and the politicos begin to conjure with what in 1987 they are pleased to call the character issue, tune them out. Once again...
...When ex-Senator Gary Hart and Senator Joseph Biden went down it was not because they had displayed bad character but because their candidacies had become ridiculous in light of their bizarre antics—a renowned skirt-chaser brags of his prosaic life and challenges thepress to prove otherwise, a legendary orator is caught lifting his oratory from other spellbinders...
...How, given all these recent accomplishments, has the Reagan regime allowed the Republic to collapse into such a dreadful state...
...I wish I could answer with a dramatic story that would thrill my colleagues in the press...
...That last point is particularly significant...
...In the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, Thomas Jefferson's colleagues declared that in a "free government" the people must adhere WHO'S TO BLAME...
...After all, the economy has experienced the longest peacetime expansion in American history...
...I know...
...There is, indeed, a question of character here, but few in American public life are going to subject themselves to derision from their peers by meditating on what that question might be...
...The problem is how much does it matter...
...All these middle-1980s horripilations followed the nuclear freeze and the Reagan budget cuts, remember...
...That will come as no surprise to the faithful who repose so uneasily at the far ends of the political spectrum...
...the scoffers are in the ascendancy when the topic is a "victimless crime," to resort to a 1970s misnomer...
...That he was not personally strong enough to resist the criminal folkways and mores of the Harvard Law School...
...Soon there were tremendousdemonstrations on campuses and at every South African consulate...
...In the tranquility of the middle 1980s America's constituency of conscience, as the Hon...
...and, though not many Americans were heaved into a debtors' hoosegow because of it or even suffered a loss of discretionary income, it has cast a shadow...
...Of course, most are misfortunes that any conscientious citizen might want to alleviate...
...And there is Attorney General Edwin Meese...
...America, then, in the last days of the Reagan tyranny is in a hell of a mess...
...Not since Ramsey Clark, I responded, which did not cheer them up...
...In American politics character has too frequently been an impediment to greatness...
...There were brief outbreaks of horror over hunger in Ethiopia, the decline of the American Midwest,various sorts of domestic abuse, and something about the feminization of poverty...
...Even international terrorism has now somewhat abated...
...In America for well over a century there has been a tension between moralism—or Puritanism, as it is known—and that peculiar brand of 100-percent American optimism that scoffs at the possibility of evil...
...Thus the constituency of conscience affixed its concern on our government's policy toward South Africa...
...So I undertook an analysis of the present malaise...
...It is unthinkable that they could be deeply concerned about character...
...In fact, few of them even want it...
...There has been the epic crash of the stock market...
...moral indignation—abetted by, of all people, the Senate bartender, Senator Edward Kennedy—a New York Times/CBS Poll revealed that a majority of Americans thought Ginsburg's past offense was an insufficient reason to disqualify him from the Supreme Court...
...Every day the headlines scream of new infamies...
...Having listened to the idiot babble surrounding the so-called character issue of 1987, I have come to the conclusion that the pundits and the politicos have not a clue...
...If character were at issue in Judge Douglas Ginsburg's recent fall, surely more indignation would have been shown toward those Harvard faculty members who smoked dope with colleague Ginsburg in the late 1970s and then ratted on him...
...Has the Justice Department ever seen the likes of him, I was asked...
...That, for trusting in the honor of his liberal colleagues, this conservative academic was a political simpleton...
...At this very hour the "misery index" (inflation plus unemployment) is down to 11 percent compared with 20.6 percent in the last days of the Carter Enlightenment...
...Last month I addressed nearly two hundred lawyers from a leading progressive law firm in this great city...
...It began with the dastardly Iran-contra business, foul play in Nicaragua that continues and gets worse, the Bork & Ginsburg atrocities...
...There was concern for the farmers...
...Our present woe is the result of the machinations of a foreign power...
...If what is called the "character issue" really were about character, not so many of the giants of our time would be pertly declaring marijuana use by a public figure "irrelevant...
...Ever since the mysterious revelations of the Iran-contra story South Africa has faded from the headlines, much to its own benefit and to the benefit of Amy Carter's academic record...
...Again, these are deficits that have been with us from time out of mind (which for most pundits means over a year) but they now loom large on the national anxiety index...
...A s even the most casual observer must have noticed, the Republic has emerged from the comparative tranquility of the middle 1980s into . . . ah . . . troubled times...
...There are the trade and budget deficits...
...Today the moralists are in the ascendancy when the topic is acquisitiveness...
...I have gathered extensive data...
...To be sure, Ginsburg's errancy manifests a flawed character, but what is the flaw...
...On the weekend that Judge Ginsburg's Supreme Court nomination went down in a volley of Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...He has allowed such nefarious deeds to be perpetrated at the Justice Department that all progressives of good conscience are agreed: for the good of the Republic he must be put to death or at least sent to Leavenworth...
...It is my conclusion that the eruption of 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 calamities afflicting us is no accident...
...Character does matter in choosing leaders...
...Those who think most carefully about free government have realized that it rests on a moral basis...
...Surely, its intelligence agents orchestrated the news stories that have diverted attention from Johannesburg to all the above-mentioned furors...
...How do I know this...
...That at a party of Harvard profs he immediately took refuge in a cannabis paradise...
...Thus with such proven libertarians as our guides we can all safely admit that private vices and virtues are indeed relevant to government...
...And what constitutes good character...
...There was their autumnal concern for the homeless...
...I take leave from the majority here...
...Were Judge Ginsburg a repentant bohemian of some sort, say an ex-jazz musician whose early years were spent in a drug subculture but who for decades has lived an irreproachable life, I would excuse him...
...Enemies abroad have ceased to stride and many have"to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue...
...Weigh the evidence for yourself...
...A beer or even a scotch and soda can provide refreshment...
...Nor would they be saying one's private life is irrelevant to one's public life...
...How does one explain it...
...Once again they are indulging in their favored pursuit: to wit, burning incense before their own enhaloed personas...
...Marijuana only provides escape and an acrid fragrance reminiscent of various incinerators I have known...
...been on tiptoes since misfortune befell their colleagues in Grenada, Libya, parts of Africa and Southwest Asia...
...The character issue should more accurately be addressed as the gossip issue...
...But they did not cause the requisite amount of disquiet that concerned Americans crave...
...I wish I could say Bill Casey told me while we played poker with Bob Woodward a few days after Casey's brain surgery at Georgetown Hospital and while his bodyguards were off bowling...
...They constitute gossip, that is to say: personal or sensational stories ferreted from behind the scenes...
...But the right might be surprised to hear that the foreign power of which I speak is none other than South Africa, working through its National Intelligence Service (NIS...
...Few of them have it...
...George McGovern used to refer to all forward-lookers, had very little on its agenda of disquietudes...
...They did not threaten the legitimacy of American government...
...All the aforementioned contretemps have brought America back to a case of what in the late 1970s a great President referred to as "paralysis and stagnation and drift...
...N o, the stories that the press retails these days about a public figure's private life do not constitute data from which to make character judgments...
...Otherwise fundamental conditions here and, for that matter, in South Africa, are little changed...
...South Africa had to respond...
...Every one of them is blue about the Administration's present condition, particularly about this fellow Meese...
...How, bearing in mind the imperative of privacy, do we discover a candidate's character...
...I have consulted widely...
...Particularly in those last two places, Soviet stratagems have been sorely tested and at very little expense to the American taxpayer...
...Alas, this law professor as recently as 1978 indulged in a drug that is (a) subversive to Western culture, (b) anti-social, and (c) always taken to sozzle the mind...
...But the real answer is simple logic...
Vol. 21 • January 1988 • No. 1
