Editorials/Our Real Economy and Theirs/Seducing the Hill
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
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...Such is the combustible nature of the modern world that the President must not be restrained from decisive action...
...Most economic indicators have been agreeably robust for years now, thus explaining the economy's unparalleled growth...
...This entailed playing three-on-three basketball on a terrace made into a human amphitheater by the surrounding crush of appreciative male spectators, packed in tight to watch the girls perform...
...El...
...That is why all Presidents and advocates of decisive American foreign policy have, since its inception, opposed the War Powers Act, particularly its requirement that the President obtain Congress's approval within ninety days of taking military action or of facing even "imminent involvement in hostilities," or he must withdraw our forces...
...EDITORIALS...
...Yet through sixty-four consecutive months of economic growth during which 16 million new jobs were created, the Democrats and their trained wailers in Academe and in the media have depicted the economy as moribund and facing recession or worse...
...Several hundred students were gathered on the terrace of the student union, drinking Coors beer, eating bratwurst and hot dogs, and listening to a rock band that had been booming away since two p.m...
...Perhaps they recognize that, alas, Reaganomics has made "working people" the largest voting bloc in the country...
...Most of the audience seemed to consist of those hardy septuagenarian heartlanders for whom the founding of the United Nations was the culmination of a dream and who have never given up hoping that Americans will one day come to their senses, disarm, and preach a sensible communitarian socialism unto all nations...
...And have the one-worlders not heard of civil war...
...After all, this requirement notifies our enemies of precisely the length of time they will have to face American firepower before we leave the field of combat to them...
...This year's star speakers included Ted Turner, the chairman of the board of Turner Broadcasting System, whose plenary address was entitled "One World...
...Andy," one lad said to his neighbor, "that girl Leslie Cook is gorgeous...
...The same decisiveness that thwarted insolent enemies in Grenada and Libya has defended our interests in the Gulf...
...Conflicting goals, some noble, some actually comic, separate members of Congress from each other and from the President, making consensus almost unimaginable...
...with all the zeal of a defector...
...Alas, such is the condition of American politics in this glorious age of the televised campaign that those elected to Congress are often as free of a knowledge of statecraft as they are of a knowledge of the Punic Wars, or of any natural phenomena beyond the borders of the United States, for that matter...
...and unit labor costs have been falling 2.4 percent...
...They were dressed in the white and pastel sports clothes, T-shirts, cuffed Bermudas, and tennis shoes that are now standard campus wear across the country...
...He allowed that only a few years ago he had been "a rampant nationalist and a rabid rightwinger," believing it to be America's destiny "to rule the world...
...For them Congress is a learning experience...
...I asked one or two of the students on the terrace why they weren't attending the World Affairs Conference, and what they thought of it...
...Congressional oversight of ourintelligence community has educated many to the needs of our intelligence...
...A collection of his essays, The Electric Windmill, was published by Regnery Gateway this spring...
...In Canada the rate was 7.8 percent, in Italy 6.9 percent, in Germany 7.0 percent, in France 10.6 percent, and in the United Kingdom, where economists marvel at the economic rebirth, the rate was 9.0 percent...
...But the Democrats know how to scare hell out of them, which is still good politics...
...Problems persist, however...
...Ted Turner's television network had broadcast "A Thousand Cranes," a joint U.S.-Soviet endeavor to save the Siberian crane, "one of the programs we aired to counter the destructive in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 11...
...This would not be much of a problem if these were the good old days when the congressional opposition under Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg had by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Kinsley in the 1980s, like Professor Galbraith throughout his long life, is one of those curiosities who diligently hand down erroneous judgments while rising ever higher in the esteem of their fellows, at least some of whom are more accurate...
...Gene La Rocque, the left-wing rear admiral who has made quite a retirement career for himself addressing such globalist conferences...
...I think it's very beneficial to our community," said one wag named Joseph, a senior from Boston...
...Manufacturing productivity was rising less than one percent annually, and unit labor costs were climbing 8.8 percent annually...
...There Congress supported the executive branch, making our policy credible and resolute...
...Manufacturing output has grown four times the rate of the late 1970s...
...Many of us tried to reason with the professor, presenting him with mounds of evidence that the economy was indeed "fundamentally sound...
...T here was in fact a sizable crowd in the Glenn Miller ballroom for the Tuesday afternoon "One World" session with Ted Turner (Jed Duvall, discussant...
...Anyway, the work of healing was evidently progressing...
...laughter, almost spilling their beer...
...But through it all the Democrats ululations have rent the air...
...Across Broadway, at the Sigma Chi fraternity house, they were just coming to the end of a party that had been going on all week"Back to the 'Fifties Derby Days," it was called, Stroh'ssponsored, with one thousand sorority girls arriving in relays to compete for Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...The estimable editorial page of the Wall Street Journal considers this weird...
...F red Ikle, until recently our hardline Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, has said that the unwieldy War Powers Act should be given the old heave-ho, to be replaced by congressional resolutions of the kind that sup ported presidential decisions in Afghanistan...
...SEDUCING THE HILL Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Two adoring freshman girls, one on either side of him, doubled over with 'For more on Admiral La Rocque, see "The Center for Defense Misinformation," by Michael Fumento, in TAS, April 1988...
...It was instead "the arms race, over-population, and environmental decay...
...Obviously the Reaganites know how to keep the "working people" working...
...And the solons and numas of Capitol Hill believe that the world would be a better place if presidential decisiveness were restrained by such instruments of congressional encumbrance as the 1973 War Powers Act...
...So he formed an organization called the Better World Society, with a board of directors that includes Georgi Arbatov of the Soviet Union, Jimmy Carter, Lester Brown of Worldwatch, and various figures from the general region where the United Nations and the population-control lobbies intersect...
...In 1929 every high member of the Hoover administration rushed to say that the economy was `fundamentally sound.' That is exactly what I seem to be hearing today...
...There's still an element of people that's filled with hatred, suspicion, and paranoia," Turner said, referring to his former comrades on the right...
...In fact we now know that despite the market crash the Gross National Product for last year's last quarter rose at a respectable 4.8 percent...
...Given the fractious condition of Congress, it is unlikely that foreign policy consensus is near at hand, but recent experience suggests that there is another way to make Congress an ally in our foreign policy rather than allowing it to continue as a haven for those who would obstruct foreign policy...
...Jed Duvall of ABC Morning News...
...They recognize that with this growth there has been dislocation and apprehension...
...It remains for the Republicans to recognize the dislocated workers and to address their problems...
...OUR REAL ECONOMY AND THEIRS I f you have been following this season's presidential ceremonies you know that every campaigning Democrat addressed himself with grim solemnity to "working people...
...I n the Persian Gulf the President again showed his old decisiveness this April and smote the forces of a renegade regime that, if allowed to roam with impunity, would bring bloody chaos wherever its brutes might go"One, Two, Many Beiruts...
...Turner said that he had made six trips to the Kremlin...
...But Mr...
...Since 1981 manufacturing productivity has climbed 4.5 percent annually, the highest rate in the postwar period...
...Derby Queen...
...We are one species and the time has come for us to start acting accordingly," Turner said...
...In fact unemployment rates dropped to 5.5 percent...
...And holy wars...
...Congressional oversight of our intelligence agencies has actually benefited many intelligence programs by confronting members of Congress with the real problems American interests face abroad and enlightening them to the needs of our intelligence community...
...Some sort of oversight of military action might educate them to the needs of statecraft and bring them into the foreign policy process constructively...
...With Governor Michael Dukakis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson coming down the stretch it is now plausible to argue that the Democratic ticket could be as far left as that of the Socialist Workers party, winner of 25,000 votes in 1984, and the Democrats' ticket might not have any more experience in national government than the Socialist Workers, whose vice presidential candidate is a woman coal miner...
...0 reached a consensus with the Democratic administration as to the purposes of American power abroad...
...But the grim chorus could not be cheered up and soon the New Republic's child prodigy, Michael Kinsley, was exaggerating the threat of inflation...
...Roger Ebert, the film critic...
...Today no such consensus exists, and congressional oversight is problematical...
...Perhaps they know that the Labor Department recently reported that there are more people employed in the Republic today than ever before...
...The United States has been producing more jobs more rapidly than any industrialized nation on earth and probably at a faster rate...
...Some of the youths were showing off their hackysac skills for the benefit of the co-eds, but most just stood around with big beer-filled plastic cups emblazoned with the U. C. logo...
...On the hopeful side, a new breed of Soviet leader had at last come to the fore, the "first of the post-revolutionary generation," Mikhail Gorbachev, "a man who likes to hold babies...
...For them it was clearly a wondrous experience to find that they now had on their side this admittedly rather brash, but nonetheless highly enthusiastic businessman, embracing their ideas with so much zeal and energy that perhaps their dreams might yet unexpectedly materialize (for they are getting old and beginning to lose hope...
...Signs warned that "Beer must be consumed inside ropes...
...A big wall sign on the terrace read: "Colorado Reggae Spring Splash IV/Rankin Scroo and Ginger/Tony Brown Caribbean All Stars/Mumbo Jumbo Sunday April 17, Glenn Miller Ballroom...
...It believes that the Democrats at the national level have lost touch with the real condition of the American economy...
...And airplane hijackings...
...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 Yet those of us who see the present congressional involvement in presidential foreign policy decisions as an encumbrance might want to consider an alternative congressional involvement...
...But Turner is a "history buff" and one day something came to him"the realization that perhaps the biggest threat to our security and survival was not the Soviet Union...
...What might benefit both branches of government and American policy," Ikle" claims, "is a kind of resolution by which Congress would endorse or reject the purpose of a military effort instead of imposing a deadline-something like a declaration of war but less grave...
...CAPITOL IDEAS a Friday afternoon is party time at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus...
...John Stockwell, the ex-CIA agent who now roams the nation castigating the U.S...
...Possibly so...
...And tour ship hijackings...
...and there were about 100 others...
...At the end of the last Democratic administration, the economy was a ruin...
...and when the stock market, which during the Reagan Administration had soared 250 percent to historic highs, dropped 22 percent in a day the Democrats and their agents thrust from mind the economy's sound fundamentals and echoed the lament of their venerable savant Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who proclaimed, "This debacle marks the last chapter of Reaganomics...
...Over to the right, Rocky peaks towered up in the spring mist...
...Again the evidence was not there to substantiate the alarm...
...Then again, the Democrats' morbid incantation to "working people" might just be a residue from the days when Democrats were the country's cleverest politicians...
...This interpretation overlooks the datum that most murders occur between family members...
...I was at Boulder to attend another week-long event, the Conference on World Affairs, organized every year since the 1940s by an emeritus sociology professor named Howard Higman, now 73...
...He had struck some kind of a television programswapping deal with the Communists, his goal being to "bring people together with technology," and "work together for peace" The illusion persists among one-worlders that we remain divided into warring tribes and nations because we do not understand one another well enough-a "failure to communicate...
...Declarations of war normally don't tell the enemy that we will pull out after ninety days...
...Unfortunately, back in Washington even the combustible nature of the world is expected to yield to the magisterial process of the congressional mind...
...That is very gentlemanly of the congressional giants who composed this bill, and it might serve them well in their rivalry with the executive branch, but it could handicap the United States in its rivalry with foreign adversaries...
...But they do show an enemy our national resolve...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
