Editorials/The Brady Bunch/ Hang 'em High
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
It is the fear of many of President Bush's supporters that he will not be able to renew his call for tax cuts until Secretary of the Treasury Brady and budget director Darman go. Without tax cuts it...
...It was rationalized in wild rhetoric about Islamic martyrdom, the destruction of the wicked West and the elimination of an entire nation, Israel...
...Is this terror now fading away...
...Waite was the negotiator sent by the Church of England to negotiate hostage releases...
...Without tax cuts it is hard to imagine the economy resuming the robust growth that diminishes the deficit's dangers...
...Maybe the improving investment climate will attract Boeing or Ford...
...Commercial airplanes filled with innocent passengers were blown from the skies...
...The major problem with the economy right now is that high taxation is denying capital to private business...
...Is that why they now invite our bankers and businessmen in...
...And now, so the students of this dark corner of the world tell us, the monsters are seeking foreign investment...
...Have the monsters of the Middle East become bored with their evil lives...
...Their departure had amazed not only me but also the Communists' former victims, many of whom had emerged from prison to govern their countries...
...0 18 The American Spectator January 1992 There is something grotesque about the Middle Eastern potentates and kidnappers who have held innocent Western educators, journalists, merchants, clergymen, and even negotiators in a dark hole...
...The monsters' goals were always ludicrous, their strategies idiotic, their means unspeakably cruel...
...The Western sense of justice demands that these killers and kidnappers be tried and if convicted punished—and even when punished they will be better treated than their victims...
...Will the governments charged with the protection of these innocent men agree...
...Wealth is not created...
...And what are the monsters now seeking foreign investment going to do about those of their victims who cannot be flown home...
...A careful reading of the recent senatorial campaign in Pennsylvania suggests that the middle class recognizes that Washington is responsible for the economy's decline...
...They bombed department stores at the height of European rush hours...
...Hence the economy does not grow...
...0 Hang 'em High by R. Emmett Tyrrell, jr...
...The Republicans who imposed the failed budget deal should retire, so that the President can challenge the Democratic Congress with 1980s tax cuts and ask it to retire too...
...When I was visiting former Communist tyrannies in Eastern Europe a couple of months ago, I noticed that the Communist secret police and their equally cruel superintendents in the governing Communist parties had simply faded away...
...Other barbarities were committed for well over a decade, but now the barbarous want to let bygones be bygones...
...What are they going to do about the Lebanese Christians who have been expropriated by them, the orphans left by Syrian and fundamentalist death squads, the Christian families that live in terror in Beirut and southern Lebanon...
...In the late 1980s, after years of practicing daily cruelty upon their victims, the Communists tired of kicking people in the head...
...20 The American Spectator January 1992...
...Such cruelty became a bore and a burden, and so the brutes retired to their country homes...
...The monsters' sudden relish for entrepreneurship is supposedly the reason that they are releasing their innocent victims...
...Few of the terrorists have paid a price for their brutality...
...We recognize that now this was a wrong thing to do, that holding hostages achieves no useful, constructive purpose...
...We apologize for having captured you," one of Terry Waite's tormentors weirdly declared upon releasing him from nearly five years in chains...
...Are they going to get apologies...
...The monsters would simply stick a gun in your stomach and carry you off to a sunless, unventilated room where you would be chained to a wall for 23 hours and 50 minutes a day for years on end—and you had better be polite to your jailers...
...I developed a theory as to the Communists' sudden change of heart...
...Now they say they are sorry...
...Yet get this: when it was useful to do so, its practitioners claimed all the rights and niceties of international law and decency...
...You know, a nice Kraft Foods plant on the outskirts of Beirut, a Brooks Brothers downtown...
...Possibly they are also sorry for butchering captives they took while highjacking unarmed commercial airplanes and cruise ships...
...You and I could have been their victims, if we had been in Beirut at the wrong time—perhaps doing foreign-aid work, teaching, or arranging construction of a Coca Colaplant...
...It is a rather naive theory I admit, but I shall mention it anyway and brave the jeers from the galleries...
...Its aims were never very concrete or even plausible...
...Some of the monsters locked him up too...
...Its bloody means broke all the conventions of international law and decency...
...Well, before we introduce them to these Western worthies, I hope we introduce them to Western courts and, in some cases, the noose...
...The middle class is squeezed...
...It specialized not in killing soldiers on the field of battle but in ambushing unarmed citizens, usually civilians...
...Employment does not expand or actually declines...
...Nightspots frequented by our soldiers were bombed...
...At some point in the 1970s the world had a new kind of warfare visited upon it, state-sponsored terrorism...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
