Editorials/Double Trouble/Goodbye, Cruel World
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS Double Trouble by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. T he other day in Knoxville, Tennessee, Vice President Dan Quayle said, "Let's look at the record. . . . Bill Clinton said that he is for...
...Bill Clinton said that he is for capital punishment...
...He boasted of how tough he was and then, as the heat turned up in the kitchen, hightailed it, protesting he was in a race that he could not win...
...The United States seemed to stumble from bungle to bungle as it so often does until Call the matters become critical...
...And both promisemore government programs...
...They wrecked their countries and murdered millions...
...And one other reason: they loved the idiot jargon...
...Then came Tito in Yugoslavia to protect his perks, then Gomulka in Poland, Mao in China, Ceausescu in Romania, and all the other gangsters right up to August 1991...
...the collapsed into drunken comedy and at atomic bomb...
...But whatever happened to the Marxist dream of a monolithic Communist world of peace and freedom, and where have the real practicing Marxists gone, as opposed to the American pseudos...
...They are like love songs sung by eunuchs...
...to Washington's insistence that the European powers adjourn their empires...
...And when George Bush bobs and weaves, is he aware of how he appears...
...Where has the Vice President been these last few months...
...He told us he opposed homosexuals in his cabinet and, amid the rancorous aftermath created by the career homosexuals of the Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...With the emergence of the tyrant Stalin, all the Marxist dreams of world-wide proletarian bliss were doomed...
...He told us that he was against soundbites and engaged solely in sound-bites throughout his campaign...
...where, particularly among chic modTheir imbecilic coup looked very omi- ernists in Italy and France...
...Even the insults hurled are meaningless...
...and so the old boys retired to their dachas in the country, leaving their once proud nations in a heap...
...The planned economy and least one suicide—so long, Cold War...
...No, I believe all the presidential aspirants are totally unaware that there is meaning to words and to gestures...
...Bill is for economic growth, and George is too—but if you earn more than $200,000 that is too much economic growth, and Bill can better spend your money than you...
...Militant feminists, militant homosexualists, and enrages of the multicultural mysteries—all have adopted many of Marx's complaints against Western civilization and much of his jargon, his nonsense about dialectical shimmies in the cosmos, false consciousness, scientific socialism, and endless class warfare...
...The party platforms have no meaning...
...In the 1950s nous as Soviet armor rumbled into Stalin, that sly and inscrutable chess Moscow and government media pumped master known to his loyalists as "the out the same Red bilge that had been genius leader of all progressive issuing from the Kremlin since Stalin...
...Then in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in Moscow in 1991 the Marxist establishment evaporated...
...Soviet model seemed to be the way of the future, and then China went over to Stalin...
...And is there a voter in the land who actually takes seriously any of the convoluted policies devised by the candidates to bring us all closer to heaven on earth...
...Then the putschists and developing (or is it stealing...
...The Democrats who opposed the Gulf War chide George Bush for getting out of the Gulf War too soon...
...The words have no meaning...
...Both Bill Clinton and George Bush promise elaborate policies to cut the growth...
...Marx...
...republic, brought in a homosexual aide as a liaison to "the homosexual community...
...Yet he said that one of his first Supreme Court appointments could be Mario Cuomo, who is an outright opponent of capital punishment...
...Ross Perot, too, has been a doubletalker of genius...
...Moreover, they became very influential in the Third World,, despite the fact that many of the Third World's recently libQuestions about your erated nations owed their independence subscription...
...I have met many who were Stalinists in Moscow flummoxed beyond raised as Marxists, but they are infidels repair Mikhail Gorbachev's futile efforts now...
...Tyrannizing one's fellow citizens became a savorless burden...
...Marxism is at an American university...
...And most of the angry ideologies that fume and fret on campus are the deformed offspring of Dr...
...From the 1930s to the early 1980s, all Toll-Free Subscriber the smart money among world sophistiService Line cates was with Marxism...
...I do, however, have one enduring question about the candidates' meaningless twaddle and vacuous posturing...
...I do not think so...
...absolute power corrupts absolutely," which explains Communism's problems from Stalin to the ineptitude of last August's putschists...
...1-800-783-6707 Today, about the only place where one can count on finding minds absorbed with the numinous abstract flapdoodle of / 14 The American Spectator October 1992...
...He boasted of CY11111— great gains in science and industry...
...And, of course, the ninety percent of the corn(continued on page 14) 12 The American Spectator October 1992 mentators who are liberal and Democratic jump on the President for his shiftiness, his schizophrenic policy suggestions, and various alleged scurrilities...
...But Bill Clinton and George Bush are not the only candidates guilty of doubletalk—almost ceaseless doubletalk...
...Goodbye, Cruel World It go...
...Perhaps there is hope for American feminists and all the other intolerant zealots that have come to inherit Marx's angers...
...During most of the Cold War, to reform Marxism-Leninism into a mod- Marxist thought thrilled neoterics everyem instrument of good government...
...George Bush promises to cut taxes for everyone...
...Khrushchev followed Stalin with threats to bury the West...
...Yet in the West, swank minds still believed in Marxism...
...In fact, the President seemed to be saying that this mysterious program would not cost anyone anything...
...George is for a strong America with a powerful army and so is Bill, who compares his years of stewardship over the Arkansas National Guard very favorably with George's stewardship over the armed forces of the only superpower left on earth...
...The very day of Vice President Quayle's declaration, President Bush was in Union, New Jersey, saying that he had developed a $10-billion job-training program that would not cost the taxpayer a nickel...
...the Suez crisis and war in Algeria...
...To be able to intone gibberish about dialectics and false consciousness is to keep a step ahead of the petit-bourgeois Joneses...
...Why do our political commentators let them get away with it...
...mankind,"- had conferred on Marxism an For a few days in August of last year it aura of historical inevitability by defeatappeared that the Cold War was going ing Nazism, gobbling up Eastern Europe, into a second edition...
...and then came American Spectator Vietnam, Watergate, and Jimmy Carter...
...There so many of the profs believe that wealth is created by stealing—expropriation of the rich, say the rigorists...
...planned society on the...
...The Republicans chide Bill Clinton for his wife's political extremism and then disavow such chiding...
...Oh sure, the ten percent of the commentators who are conservative and Republicans jump on Boy Clinton for his shiftiness, his draft dodging, his dubious private life, and his schizophrenic policy suggestions...
...The speeches employed by the solemn would-be Lincolns do not matter...
...States in steel production, international athletic contests, and with their Sputnik...
...The federal government grows at an alarming pace...
...Marxists the all did Since then I have traveled behind the here W has now been more than a erstwhile Iron Curtain and I have found year since a coterie of quasi- no Marxists...
...higher taxes, say the civic-minded...
...American presidential politics is increasingly a vast display of meaninglessness...
...Then after announcing the new $10-billion job-training program that would not cost anyone $10 billion, the President trundled up to Connecticut to promise "less federal government spending...
...As Lord Acton wrote in 1887, "Power tends to corrupt...
...You can't have it both ways...
...My conclusion is that in Prague, in Warsaw, even in Moscow, it just became too hard to be a Communist...
...France and Britain were humiliated by Want to place an order...
...I have had a year to think about it, aided by interviews in Eastern Europe and books, the most recent being Adam Ulam's useful The Communists: The Story of Power and Lost Illusions, 19481991 (Scribners, $27.50...
...When Ross Perot appears on television hinting slyly that he both is and is not still a candidate, does he recognize the absurdity of his position...
...They wanted the power a Marxist regime offers...
...Boy Clinton promises to raise taxes on those making more than $200,000 annually...
...The Soviets did indeed surpass the United...
...Power was the cancer that killed Communism...
...When Boy Clinton raised his leadership of the Arkansas National Guard as somehow comparable with being commander in chief of the American armed forces, was he aware of the hilarious stupidity of this comparison...
...But in this campaign, more wantonly than in any I can recall, the candidates are, as Vice President Quayle might say, "having it both ways" It is time for the commentators to put their partisanship aside, and leap upon the candidates' meaningless speechifying, a meaninglessness that suggests nihilism...
...Ever since the first grunt of campaign '92, the leading presidential candidates have all been having it both ways, and with the utmost abandon...
Vol. 25 • October 1992 • No. 10
