Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Fred Barnes on Drugs It must somehow be very comforting to have the self-righteousness to support a war to force others to live according to the dictates of your conscience. And so...
...There are conservatives who believe that animals are not on earth to be brutalized by humans...
...I live in New York City, and the government, all its agencies, all the bureaucracy, is certainly controlled by the New Left...
...Whitman is half right...
...Or is it...
...MR.V...
...Lee Poteet Petaluma, California...
...Andrew Ferguson for his wonderful piece ("Bush Bash") in the March 1989 issue...
...There are two solutions...
...M.R.V...
...Kudos Please extend my thanks to Mr...
...And so the Ayatollahs will stop at nothing to prevent heretics from corrupting our minds while Fred Barnes cheers on Drug Czar Bennett and his band of fanatics ("Bennett the Drug Czar," TAS, April 1989) as they wage their crusade against those who would corrupt our bodies...
...My article was about what Bennett should put in his plan...
...While reading the article I had an epiphany...
...I have contributed cash to your cause...
...Bail denial...
...If the Barnes Agenda is enacted, several things will likely happen: dozens (if not hundreds) of American servicemen will die in various Latin American nations, civil liberties will be diminished (one need not be an ACLU "zealot" to favor individual liberty), a few billion dollars will be wasted, and thousands will continue to destroy themselves with drugs...
...Who controls most of the major media...
...And while responsible journals, such as your own, have for some time been busy pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, the debauchees in the media seem to like it that way...
...It is much the same reason why states like Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico have never been able to take full advantage of the Sun Belt revolution and why so many of their more enterprising youth have to leave to find anything like a decent economic situation...
...Obviously, the objects of their wrath are so tempting to impressionable subjects that we, like Odysseus confronting the Sirens, lack the volition to just say no...
...It is also the reason why the United States as a whole, under the ruinous influence of a House of Representatives more permanent in its membership than the British House of Lords or the Soviet Politburo and a Senate that has returned to the control of the "Democratic" party, is rapidly legislating the United States into the same position...
...there is no deterrent...
...And unfortunately, Ralph Nader is its prophet...
...I have paid for trial subscriptions for students...
...After all, we too are now an elite that need not dirty our hands or our minds with honest work...
...Absolutely...
...But the more I read the more I could not believe that the author was serious...
...They, too, know something is wrong, but old truths are simply too declasse...
...David Kahn thinks I should have ridiculed Czar Bennett's drug war as a failure...
...Why, in this case, have you acted like liberals in letting your visions obscure your judgments...
...As I pointed out, ". . though the New Left failed as a political movement, the influence it has exerted over American politics is much more powerful than anyone supposed...
...Gary M Torrent Austin, Texas (continued on page 55) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1989 7 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) Don't Be Cruel I am a thoroughgoing conservative...
...Obviously Mr...
...I'll stipulate that the federal government's prior antidrug efforts failed embarrassingly...
...No more will I heatedly state that the equilibrium level of infant mortality rates should not be zero, while amidst a group of those who genuinely care about the human race...
...But prior efforts weren't the subject of my piece...
...The spoils system in American politics, which in spite of the rise of the Civil Service System is still firmly entrenched in most cities, counties, and states (probably Washington, as well) and growing stronger due to the demand to populate all levels of any bureaucracy with the necessary number of women and minorities, has led to the establishment of the mercantilist mentality...
...Mary Pfeiffer Oakhurst, California Our Other Path I was much amused to find that Tom Bethell and Irwin M. Stelzer found the information in Hernando de Soto's book The Other Path new and worthy of commentary in your journal (TAS, April 1989...
...But for heaven's sake, the guy has just gotten to the combat zone...
...Who controls most of the major unions...
...I adore TAS and agree with its positions...
...Ferguson does...
...I hope Bennett has the moxie to propose it...
...Frankly, any organization that can achieve as much as the New Left has in less than thirty years can hardly be called a failure...
...I know that this is a weakness of most conservatives, and I plead guilty...
...Barnes: the rewards of the drug trade are worth any risk...
...James Clark Stooksbury doesn't like my advice...
...The Supreme Court, as Woodward points out and real conservatives have always known, legislates...
...Yes, punishing drug users severely is a good idea...
...The New Left's lingering presence is felt primarily through the impressive constellation of single-issue lobbies which, to cite just one example, was largely responsible for the rejection of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court...
...And while Mr...
...All of this in the name of protecting people from themselves...
...He doesn't promulgate his big strategy until September...
...Almost any other government program that promised as much, as often, and delivered as little as the drug war would be the object of TAS's ridicule...
...Barnes's "D" rating for movies and TV ought to have a terrific effect on the nine-year-old crack runner as he comes in from a hard afternoon's work at $100 an hour...
...It is as facile and useless to blame our "drug problem" on the dealers (they'd deal oat bran if the numbers were the same) as it is dishonorable and cowardly to blame it on Third World countries...
...Stooksbury, what's liberal about a unilateral military raid on the drug labs of Colombia...
...Congress (having forfeited its own) is appropriating the power and function of the executive branch...
...Memorize this, Mr...
...No, legalization of drugs is not a conservative position, nor a good one...
...The New Left Failed...
...The first, legalization, would stamp out the drug trade overnight, and with it the violent crime and corruption so necessary to the dealer to maintain his turf and the user to buy substances he could easily afford if they weren't illegal...
...The difference between a writer and myself is this: While I realize Sid, Up With People, and Kris are total morons, I do not have the ability to say it while making people laugh...
...Fine...
...I must live on another planet or at least a different country, because where I live, the New Left has certainly not failed...
...Maybe Mr...
...and the President is prating about a "kinder, gentler America" while federal judges are setting employment rules in cities like San Francisco that essentially amount to "white males need not apply...
...The former takes only guts and salesmanship...
...However, Arch Pudding-ton's article in the March 1989 issue, "Those Were the Days: The SDS Revisited," has moved me to write...
...To get up and running, the latter would cost about $150 billion and put serious but tolerable pressure on the Bill of Rights...
...But I am deeply offended by your making fun of people who protest against cruelty to animals...
...Tell me, though, Mr...
...Steve Masters Rego Park, New York Arch Puddington replies: Steve Masters obviously did not read my article to its conclusion...
...Barnes cannot address America's "drug problem" sensibly because he can't comprehend the staggering profits involved in the manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs...
...I quote the first sentence: "The question of why the New Left failed as a political movement . . ." I thought that was an ironic or sarcastic beginning...
...David Kahn New York, New York With all due respect to Fred Barnes, George Bush can sleep in Bill Bennett's office seven nights a week and it won't make any more of a dent in America's "drug problem" than lapel pins, slogans, or disendorsements by such ghetto role models as Nancy Reagan...
...Wowie, that ought to throw a scare into those drug baddies...
...It's our problem, not theirs...
...I for one can no longer support you if you continue to flaunt your insensitivity...
...Masters's picture of leftist domination of American political and cultural institutions is exaggerated to the point of caricature, the point is valid that many, many individuals whose values were shaped by the New Left experience occupy positions of influence throughout society...
...Like just about everybody else, it seems, Mr...
...Please realize, concern for the well-being of animals is not confined to the political left...
...It's too, too bad...
...The second, criminalization and imprisonment of users, would eventually return drug abuse to the wretched but minor problem it was forty years ago...
...I very seldom write to express either my agreements or disagreements with published views...
...No more offhand remarks referring to those of an alternative lifestyle as butt-pirates while in a crowded elevator on the University of Texas campus...
...I have sent copies to friends...
...That's the whole point, diminishing the liberties of drug dealers...
...What's liberal about denying bail to drug dealers caught red-handed...
...He over and over again illustrated the truth of what he had to say from things culled from the National Geographic and other contemporary journals plus events closer to home and I have never forgotten it...
...And while we're at it, Mr...
...Where the New Left failed most notably is in the realm of ideas and values...
...Who controls more and more of the "prestigious" universities...
...Pulling a dealer off the streets just sets off a war to succeed him...
...Why alienate them...
...Who controls most of the large foundations...
...Whitman San Francisco California Change the subject matter of Fred Barnes's article from drugs to something like "Homelessness," and it would sound like yet another ritual incantation of idiot liberalism...
...The New Left . . . failed...
...Maybe I will a year from now...
...Both are sound conservative positions...
...De Soto and which so few Americans can now describe, is now going (just as Mr...
...Puddington sees a different world than I do, and if such be the case, I would like a pair of the rose colored glasses he uses...
...But what makes it "idiot liberalism...
...I was giving advice...
...The article has inspired me to be a kinder-gentler-wittier person...
...If they'd succeeded, we wouldn't need Bennett now...
...James Clark Stooksbury Knoxville, Tennessee Fred Barnes replies: Hey, not so fast...
...Who controls the Democratic party...
...The "idiot" part Idon't mind, but "liberal"—that hurts...
...Jefferson feared) by the board...
...No sir...
...No more bull-in-a-china shop reaction to the assorted jackasses around me...
...why should a Colombian peasant care if a lot of spoiled Americans, our ghettoyouth specifically included, want to trash their blessings and destroy their souls...
...My mother's father, Jonathon Herbert Osborne, had told me exactly the same things about Latin American economies repeatedly when I was between ten and fourteen years about forty-two years ago...
...Unfortunately, the set of rules and the process by which they were made which so fascinated Mr...
...Stooksbury complains that "civil liberties will be diminished...
...You yourselves may not care about animal suffering, but ridiculing those who do seems callous and uncalled for...
...Radical participatory democracy, America as imperialist bully, American society as incorrigibly racist, middle-class students as paragons of morality and wisdom, free love, Uncle Ho as a Jeffersonian agrarian reformer—these notions, so crucial to the New Left, were consistently and resoundingly rejected by the American people, as witness the results of the last three presidential elections...
...After all, you just can't have people starting businesses without adult supervision, making things and providing necessary and even frivolous services for profit...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
