The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING CRISIS • In August, millions of earthlings went to the beach to relax, but apparently President Mikhail Gorbachev headed for the beach to prove Mr. Michael Ledeen's thesis about him,...
...government into supporting Israel at the expense of America's real interests in the Middle East...
...Such a response does two things: first, it demarcates the terrain of decency and civility that mark the high ground from which Buchanan appears to have decamped...
...A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, woman, Miss Mary Vahec, 23, was killed when her car was hit by a flying manhole cover, and in Kewanee, Illinois, thanks to having drunk enough beer to "loosen" himself up at the instant of impact, Mr...
...Brock criticizes me for leaving the room after my questioning and not staying to hear other Members of the committee question Secretary Baker...
...Her accent was askew...
...That theme is that the Jews are an alien people living among us who have somehow gotten control of the most important institutions of our society and are using that control to further their own nefarious purposes...
...By a vote of 69-30 the Senate elected to allow women to fly combat sorties, provided that they do so modestly, with minimal makeup, and never with their hair in pin curlers...
...The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People expressed disapproval of Judge Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court, and in northern India, at the Chandigarh Zoo's famed male hippopotamus bath, Raju and Bittu battered their 14-yearold father, Bholu, to death...
...It may be that he does not wish to know...
...The roommate was injured slightly, but the cat died...
...Brock refers in his article to testimony by Secretary of State Baker before a December 6, 1990 hearing of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and to my questioning of Secretary Baker during that hearing...
...Possibly Dr...
...The excesses of women's liberation are causing alarm in the Soviet Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, where, according to the Uzbek newspaper Narodnoye Novo, liberated women are taking their new-found freedoms to logical ends and committing suicide in such inordinate numbers that Uzbek wife-beaters are considering celibacy...
...In fact, I praised him for being available to meet with Members and for being generous with his time...
...Although Buchanan's apologists are often pleased to refer to such statements as examples of his brawling polemical style, the fact is that they are unmistakable invocations of traditional anti-Semitic ideas...
...Another turtle-smuggling ring has been broken up in Birmingham, Alabama, and the Pakistani cabinet voted to impose the death penalty on anyone guilty of cheekiness toward the Prophet Mohammed...
...Usually faced with the dilemma of needing to be in two or more places at the same time, Members must try to straddle meetings...
...Controversy continues to entoil CBS's decision to yank—if you will pardon the expression—reruns of Mr...
...Early in August, small groups of scholars emerged from virtual house arrest to celebrate the fall of the most feared autocrat in Stanford's 106-year history, President Donald Kennedy...
...Multiculturalism spreads its obnubilations even into the respected spheres of science...
...Ed Dawdy, the proprietors of that great city's Corner Deli, responded to the local health authoritarians' diktat that they install a second restroom for their 18-seat restaurant by placing a portapotty in their front window...
...Pee-wee, drawing fans from all over the Big Apple, including veteran human rights activist Miss Marge Leeds, 67, whose eloquent placand read, "To masturbate is human...
...Friedman's sycophantic relationship with Baker is entirely consistent with his self-declared career aspirations...
...Yitzhak Shamir...
...Pee-wee Herman's television show after Mr...
...I have two comments with respect to the article...
...In Gadsden, Alabama, Mr...
...Then consider, too, that for the first time someone can actually make sense out of the jumble of calamities that have hit American foreign policy on Baker's watch.—R...
...It may be that Robert Novak, like so many other commentators these days,no longer really knows what anti-Semitism is...
...Brock made two factual mistakes...
...Maggie Valley, North Carolina The Business of State I write concerning statements about me made by David Brock in his article entitled "Not Losing at All Cost: Smooth Jim Baker's Rocky Reign at State," in the August 1991 issue of The American Spectator...
...Steve Munson Washington, D.C...
...Lee H Hamilton, Chairman Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East House of Representatives Washington, D.0 David Brock replies...
...It is this reasoning that animates such typical Buchananisms as dubbing Congress "Israeli-occupied territory...
...The woman, who was carrying an Argentine passport and a plastic bag with $30,000, was assumed to be referring to Israel's prime minister, Mr...
...On the belles lettres front, Mr...
...Posterior to months of federal investigations into allegations of fraudulent billing practices, human rights violations, sexism, drug abuse within the faculty, early library closings, witchcraft, animal sacrifices, bigamy, abuses of local throw-away-bottle statutes, and an intolerable prevalence of typographical errors in the university's printed materials, President Donald Kennedy announced his resignation, effective in 1992...
...The days of the Kennedy junta thus draw to an end, and it is with quiet pride that The American Spectator observes that this is the seventh installment of "The Continuing Crisis" this year in which we have reported on President Kennedy's appalling behavior...
...This is a classic political charge made against Members of Congress...
...Gorbachev's cronies were preparing a coup...
...second, it puts the intellectually honest on notice that to present people like Buchanan as "mainstream conservatives" is to lie...
...and that, unlike other interest groups, American Jews wield some secret power which enables them to manipulate the U.S...
...In consumer news, Sheik Yahya Sagish of Saudi Arabia was arrested in downtown Hyderabad, India, for purchasing a ten-year-old girl from a rickshaw driver...
...Staheli has not heard of hookworm and stubbed toes...
...Second, Mr...
...Brock did not contact me about the hearing, and it is evident from what he wrote that he did not check the transcript of the hearing...
...At least one desperate bird lover has begun sniping at suspected homosexuals...
...An investigator for the House Government Operations Committee reports that an unnamed engineer has testified that in 1989 he was fired from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for refusing to pad his estimates of earthquake damage so as to allow the university to overbill Washington for compensation...
...that because such support is illegitimate, American Jews have no right to press Israel's case...
...Jerry McCloud, 33, whilst fleeing from a mob of law-andorder fanatics wishing to detain him for shoplifting, fell into an open manhole...
...Michael Ledeen's thesis about him, to wit, that he is the greatest bungler in Soviet history, a history that now—most agreeably—appears to be adjourning...
...To deny that this is the case, as Robert Novak does with some vehemence, serves only to help make such ideas more respectable...
...There, Mr...
...The Economist reports that warfare has broken out in New York's Central Park between unlikely antagonists: indigenous homosexuals pursuing liaisons al fresco and bird watchers who have become concerned that sexually aroused poofters are frightening the birds...
...The current version of this slander is based on several unstated but nevertheless evident assumptions: that American Jews' support of Israel is a sign of disloyalty to the U.S...
...Bob Tyrrell has it right and Bob Novak's got it wrong...
...though, as he is 75 years old and she was soundly squiffed, she could have been intoning the Hebrew words for "Check, please...
...In the middle of the month, the lamebrain went to his dacha in the Crimea, despite warnings from such astute countrymen as former Politburo member Mr...
...Our man Ledeen noted Mr...
...I also did not ask the Secretary to appear before the subcommittee I chair...
...I support Pee-wee Herman...
...Yet violence availeth us not—for as the Economist reports, "Some homosexuals say they learnt the [park] was the place to meet like-minded friends from the publicity the shootings received...
...Over the past three years an army of State Department correspondents and dozens of famous columnists have been unable to unearth even a tiny portion of the compelling story Brock was able to ferret out...
...Therein he laid down a thesis on the Soviet flumdiddler that we have held to ever since...
...A poll conducted by the Roper Organization reveals that one in five Americans favors reinstitution of Prohibition, and that the typical wine imbiber is a "well-educated Republican male...
...Even Stanford University has felt the vivifying breezes of reform...
...and Mrs...
...Derek Humphry's Final Exit hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list of advice books during the first week in August...
...I made this request precisely because I understood that the Secretary's time was so precious...
...Hamilton's correction regarding his request to Secretary Baker...
...He had been using his five-horsepower riding mower since his license was suspended five years ago...
...Gorbachev's cloddishness as early as our August 1986 issue, in which he published "Our Man in Moscow...
...Late in the month it was reported that American students registered the lowest Scholastic Aptitude Test scores in language ever and the lowest math scores since 1984...
...In Seoul, South Korea, English-language purists got carried away when they heard a 19-year-old student practicing English at a subway station and beat him to death for his "disgusting" locutions, a useful reminder that our schools could use a dose of old-fashioned discipline...
...Herman was arrested for publicly touching himself where he goes to the bathroom...
...When the dunce's long-time friend Mr...
...Three days later the coup fizzled, as Russian President Boris Yeltsin heroically mounted armored personnel carriers and impromptu podiums to quarterback the neoconservative resistance, and Gorbachev's cronies proved to be even more inept than their boss...
...Anatoly I. Lukyanov flew to the Crimea to justify his role in the coup, the pathetic Gorbachev yawped, "You've known me for forty years...
...Aleksandr Yakovlev that Mr...
...We do not need to peer into his soul or even to know him personally, as Novak suggests...
...The hearing transcript has not yet been printed, but I accept Rep...
...In the August issue of the journal Pediatrics Dr...
...In the case of a journalist like Buchanan, the question of anti-Semitism comes down to the meaning of the words he has written and spoken...
...Elizabeth B Lurie President W H. Brady Foundation, Inc...
...Other egghead extravaganzas were more successful: Authoress Miss Tama Janowitz, whose works include the classic A Cannibal in Manhattan and some unmentionable graffiti in the ladies' room at the Royalton Hotel, hosted a literary Circle Line cruise around Manhattan to benefit a new charitable organization, POWARS (Pet Owners with AIDS Resource Service...
...It may be that he knows all too well...
...All donations were to be made in the memory of Andy Trouble, a dog owned by Miss Janowitz's friend Miss Paige Powell until it assumed room temperature after eating a pair of Belgian slippers—possibly the first Belgian slippers to carry the AIDS virus and God knows what else...
...Soon the hansdoodle was surrounded by plotters and imposed upon to step aside...
...Said the erstwhile university strongman cryptically, "It is very difficult for . . . a person identified with a problem to be the spokesman for its solution...
...David Frum did everybody who is in the mainstream a favor by taking Pat Buchanan to the sidelines where he belongs in all his splendidly confused isolationism...
...In Collinsville, Illinois, the spirit of liberty lives...
...RET CORRESPONDENCE Novak's Buchanan Contrary to what Robert Novak writes in defense of Patrick Buchanan (Special Correspondence, TAS, August 1991), anti-Semitism is not a matter of character or motives, but of behavior...
...Meanwhile the charges continue...
...Edward Lee Treaster was arrested in Tempe, Arizona, for hitting his roommate in the face with a cat...
...Lynn Staheli lauds shoelessness, and in a subsequent interview with the Reuter News Service the distinguished orthopedist goes on to aver that "studies of non-shoe-wearing populations in Africa and Asia conclude that people who do not wear shoes have healthier feet, fewer deformities, 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 and have greater mobility than people in shoe-wearing societies...
...To spy in a dark theatre is fascist...
...Michael Runyon escaped certain death when his lawn mower stalled on a railroad track and was hit by a freight train...
...Hamilton does, however, confirm the central point of the anecdote: that he spent his time for questions asking for more information from the administration, then left for the day...
...S. England Arlington, Virginia David Brock names Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as one of the Washington-based journalists who are "apparently happy to have Baker dictate their stories for them...
...First, Mr...
...I did not "badger" or criticize the Secretary...
...CBS's action touched off —if you will, again, allow me—a Manhattan demonstration on behalf of the aptly named Mr...
...Hamilton leaves me curious as to what could have been more important to his duties as a legislator that day than the Gulf crisis...
...The book adumbrates dozens of excellent ways to effect one's own happy dispatch rather than face the 1992 presidential elections in America and the rise of Rotary in Russia...
...You don't have to hang noodles on my ears...
...Security agents for the Israeli national airline, El Al, were sent back to the drawing board after a buxom beauty tore off her clothing on a flight from Berlin to Tel Aviv and began shouting in Hebrew, "Bring me Shamir...
...Senators Albert Gore and John D. Rockefeller IV withdrew their names from consideration for the Democrats' 1992 presidential nomination, and Mr...
...While a student at (continued on page 47) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 7...
...I asked him to allow other ranking officials in the Department of State to appear before my subcommittee to answer questions regarding the situation in the Persian Gulf...
...The curious situation Members of Congress faced during the war was that we had hundreds of questions, many prompted by our constituents, but only three or four very high ranking officials (essentially Secretary Baker, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Powell, and Secretary Cheney) who were allowed to testify, and of course, they had heavy demands on their time...
...Re: the continuing fracas over Pat Buchanan...
...If Buchanan wants to join the movement, then Tiirrell's given him a generous invitation...
...But one more comment: Novak needs to be told that when more-than-faintlyfascist ideas are penned by people claiming to be conservatives, and moreover, to speak for conservatives, then a strong response is not only appropriate but morally compelled...
...In New York the famed literary set known as Beaux Arts was barred from holding what would have been its second seance at Manhattan's Brotherhood Synagogue with the late Miss Marilyn Monroe...
...Runyon has been charged with drunken driving...
...Now that that necessary deed's been done and it's clear that Buchanan is no spokesman for anything that could conceivably call itself mainstream, we can all get on with the agenda...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...Whatever the case, it is clear that neither he nor Buchanan speaks for the vast majority of Americans, who continue to admire and support the sole, and still beleaguered, democracy in the Middle East...
...We must simply be willing to listen to what he tells us...
...Brock Solid David Brock's cover story on Jim Baker (TAS, August 1991) is the most convincing proof yet that not only does conservative journalism exist today, but it can be, if properly done, the nation's most vital form of reporting and analysis...
...And there is more poignant news from the literati...
...And what Buchanan has been telling us recently is quite clearly a variation on an old anti-Semitic theme...
...The irrepressible Boston Herald reported that 62 percent of the Massachusetts electorate thinks Senator Edward Kennedy should not run for reelection, despite all the enticingly bad luck that has befallen him...
...There is a bumper sticker in all this...
...We saw the future and it did not work...
...I understand this criticism, but it is a criticism that can be made ofany Member of Congress at any time...
Vol. 24 • October 1991 • No. 10
