Editorials / Off Their Feed/Why Not Spy?
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS Off Their Feed by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. C onsider the absurdity of the scene! America's journalists, possibly the most sanctimonious collection of bores since the authors of the...
...Now Congressman Lee Hamilton, one of the most respected Democrats in Congress, has urged congressional hearings...
...CI Why Not Spy...
...The Pilgrim bores, circa 1620, called themselves "Saints...
...On the one hand, you have the celebrated writer and pontificator Susan Sontag stating early in her career that which has become a common theme of America's perpetual graduate students: "America was founded on genocide...
...Only Joe Sixpack and his wife Joyce fly American flags and sing America's virtues...
...Actually the doves were wrong about almost everything, but those of them who relentlessly criticized an America that never was made it much easier for the Ameses of this world to betray democracy with a clear conscience...
...Perhaps Hillary Clinton will charge that Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese encouraged her to take a $2,000-a-month fee from the floundering S&L to represent that fly-by-night operation before bank regulators beholden to her husband, the Arkansas governor...
...On the other hand, you have Strobe Talbott, whom President Bill Clinton has raised from the ranks of journalism to the second highest position in the State Department...
...Isikoff, the Times wrote, had accused the Post of spiking a story that gave credence to the allegations of Paula Corbin Jones—namely, that then-Governor Clinton had, unbidden, exposed his private parts to her in a Little Rock hotel room...
...Arguably it is larger, involving as it might the removal of Vincent Foster's corpse...
...The collapse of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and the Clintons' Whitewater investment date back to Ronald Reagan's decade of greed...
...but it is more common today to get ahead and make a buck by denouncing America as a sham or worse...
...The doves in the Great Debate of the past 40 years," he wrote, "were right all along...
...This is a doomed country, it seems to me...
...Egad...
...Talk-show connoisseurs are going to miss a lot...
...Okay, let bygones be bygones, but the present White House coverups are as current as the morning newspaper, and the fallout should be reported...
...Oh, 'tis true, 'tis true," responded Dr...
...It's the whole character structure of modern American man...
...The Clintons' claque insists that all these stories are hoary with age...
...In fact, it is a country that has nearly torn itself apart attempting to implement those ideals to the nth degree...
...Think of the fascinating stories the Ameses could tell about struggling with a multicultural marriage in the smug suburbs of Virginia...
...The press was reporting legitimate news stories, created by the incompetents in the White House...
...16 The American Spectator April/May 1994...
...Their concern for the environment was apparent—and for global warming, and the unwholesome abundance of red meat in little Sergei's diet...
...I was taken aback at seeing the improbable Richard Cohen abominating Ames's treason in the Washington Post...
...This is not a frenzy of feeding but a frenzy of events...
...And now in the immediate aftermath of Hubbell's resignation a splendidly informative story by the Washington Post's Howard Schneider and Sharon Walsh reports a vast amount of information about nearly a dozen of Hubbell's questionable dealings both as a lawyer at the Rose Law Firm and as associate attorney general...
...What were they right about...
...So is reporting the recent subpoenaing of ten White House officials and the forced resignation of White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum...
...He might even have the pluck to point out that New Soviet Man wasreporters gathered that information and if it would ever have seen the light of day without Hubbell's hasty exit...
...Reporting those meetings is the press's duty...
...Ames could spice up the proceedings with some horrified shriek about the time she caught Aldrich eating the garter belt he got her for Valentine's Day...
...CI essentially gay, that feminism began with Khrushchev, and other whoppers eminently believable to an audience of American university professors...
...For that matter the press was duty-bound to report the Clintons' petulant character assault on Republicans who sought congressional hearings into what appears to be the largest agglutination of sleaze since the Nixon administration...
...Is he, too, engaged in a "feeding frenzy...
...What stupidity might he utter about America and Russia, particularly Communist Russia, that has not been resounding from progressive faculties for years...
...And maybe it was the Bush administration and not the governor of Arkansas that enhanced the Whitewater development by building roads into its otherwise remote hills and forests...
...Aldrich, with his sophisticated demeanor and comparative youth, would make a splendid replacement for Alger Hiss...
...One wonders how long the M arch 1 was a bleak day for the bookers over at the "Donahue" show, at Oprah, at Geraldo, and at the other talk shows...
...The KGB fellows who handed him the loot in exchange for the names of our double agents all loved their families and worried about their hairlines—ha, ha...
...14 The American Spectator April/May 1994 Actually, the press has been very cautious about speaking ill of the Clintons...
...With increasing regularity for decades now, the chic intelligentsia have been solemnizing America's shortcomings...
...Were they right when they said Moscow was peaceful and harmless...
...Just the other day Rod MacLeish, the Washington bureau chief of Monitor Radio, was solemnly beseeching another local Saint, that congenital groaner Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post, as to whether, apropos of Whitewatergate, all Washington was in a "feeding frenzy...
...By mid-March all Washington echoed with this sort of claptrap as the anointed of the dominant media culture began to betray their sense of phony guilt...
...Surely, the herd journalists of the American media consider themselves "saints" too...
...Late in 1989, when all Americans should have been celebrating our peaceful victory in the Cold War, Talbott paused in Time magazine to snipe at those Cold Warriors, Democratic and Republican, who had persevered...
...No, most of the criticism has been directed at Ames not for his lack of patriotism but for putting a price on his deed—how very American...
...It is not the American press's fault that President Clinton's White House counsel and Mrs...
...That is no "feeding frenzy," you see...
...Well, let me file my criticism against the humbug intellectuals who have prospered by depicting American history as a chronicle of rogues and scoundrels, racists, exploiters, and war-mongers...
...Outbursts like that won her a $340,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1990...
...I can see him now, mesmerizing the professoriate and an audience of teacher's pets with a lecture entitled "The Surprise of Discovery": his Russian contacts were so very much like him...
...And surely Mrs...
...Doubtless there would also be appearances by the Ameses on the more intellectual shows, say, "Larry King Live," and what a hit they would be on the campus lecture circuit...
...True,there was a day when cheap patriotism was a phony way to get ahead or make a buck...
...That was certainly true of the Los Angeles Times's reluctance to publish Jonathan Rempel and Douglas Frantz's scrupulously reported story on Troopergate...
...As I write, very few pundits have spilled much ink condemning the Ameses for betraying a country that happens to embody most of the noblest ideals of our civilization...
...On second thought, perhaps Aldrich would not be such a hit on campus...
...Were they right when they called Americans warmongers, tools of the Military Industrial Complex, capitalists intent on exploitation...
...I only pray that when America founders it doesn't drag the rest of the planet down...
...That is evidence of abuse of power, conflict of interest, and obstruction of justice...
...But just to keep things simple for the simpletons now carping about a "feeding Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...The only other criticism I have noticed has been directed at the CIA for lax security...
...It was on that day that United States Magistrate Barry R. Poretz denied bail to the accused spies, Aldrich H. Ames and his chic South American wife Maria...
...Maybe she will claim that it was Michael Milken who taught her and her associates to "flip" real estate lots—occasionally several times a day, inflating their value and using these inflated values to artificially pump up their asset values...
...What Ames did is simply a logical extension of what purveyors of progressive thought have been saying for years...
...Doubtless it has been a real trial dropping off their bright-eyed, idealistic youngster at a thy-care center dominated by the grasping progeny of all those rich Washington lawyers and psychiatrists...
...frenzy," most of the Whitewatergate news stories are reports of events recently perpetrated by the White House Machiavels...
...The day after President Clinton's splendid bamboozling of a supine reportoriat at his nationally broadcast press conference, the Washington Times broke the story that its crosstown rival had suspended star investigative reporter Michael Isikoff for two weeks...
...And so the media's preeminent moral exhibitionists raised the lament that all Washington was amuck in a "feeding frenzy" nibbling on the tender parts of Boy Clinton and his cruelly persecuted wife...
...After all, he is surely more the "happening-guy" than the octogenarian Alger: no catty allusions to the early homosexuality of a Whittaker Chambers for Aldrich...
...But wait...
...America's journalists, possibly the most sanctimonious collection of bores since the authors of the Mayflower Compact, are now languidly flagellating themselves for engaging in a "feeding frenzy" at the expense of the Clintons...
...These are legitimate news stories,which the press is duty-bound to report...
...Patriotism is laughed at...
...The other day, when Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell resigned, was the press to look the other way, lest Haynes Johnson and Rod MacLeish descry a "feeding frenzy...
...Washington bureau chiefs have muzzled some hard-working journalists who obviously have been sitting on information for months...
...Johnson, "'tis all too true...
...Clinton's chief of staff attended controversial meetings with Treasury officials who briefed them regarding the Clintons' involvement in federal bank probes...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
