Editorials/The Healer as Heel/FDR Cracked Up
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS The Healer as Heel by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I can think of no president in our history so cheap and hollow as to exploit the anguish of the Oklahoma City bombing in the way Bill...
...John Paul Hammerschmidt back in Arkansas' Third Congressional District, he always provoked unanticipated dislike...
...The other day soi disant liberal columnist Carl Rowan associated Gingrich and Dole with the Oklahoma City bombers and said, "I am absolutely certain the harshest rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles creates a climate of violence in America...
...Here is how he began his presiAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Now, however, a grown-up Clinton says things like this: "We still have freedom of speech . . . but we may have to have some discipline in doing it...
...He spoke of paranoia and violence in America as though those qualities were very close to the American mainstream...
...Yet, as I say, Clinton has for years been committing precisely the same sins he admonishes against...
...Perhaps he really believes that Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole are anti-democratic fanatics...
...On Sunday he called for "healing...
...Such people should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law when they break the law, even when:---probable cause having been established—they conspire to break the law...
...Today he declaims against "divisiveness...
...Anyone who would characterize Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush as racists or given to "racial baiting" is either a cynic with a very low opinion of his audience's intelligence or a bit of a nut himself...
...Mark Koernke, a janitor at the University of Michigan who insists he is a "militiaman...
...He holds forth on short-wave radio at night...
...But it's the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington...
...For the last two years, Clinton and some of his supporters have continued to depict what hitherto has been called the Loyal Opposition in terms reserved by scholars in the 1950s for identifying right-wing extremists...
...Our own federal government is establishing a secret national police force composed of Los Angelesstreet gangs, Nepalese Gurkhas, and the National Guard...
...We know about race-baiting...
...Thank God we shall have some red-blooded Americans over us...
...People do not like to be lectured to by obvious hypocrites...
...Perhaps Clintonand like-minded Democrats really are incapable of distinguishing fanatics from the properly elected members of the political majority...
...Did you ever hear Reagan or Bush talk in racial terms...
...I can think of no president in our history so cheap and hollow as to exploit the anguish of the Oklahoma City bombing in the way Bill Clinton now is doing...
...Well, they are fantasists like Mr...
...Juan Williams, another soi disant liberal commentator, went even further, calling the bombing "the essence of the Anglo white man taken to some extreme, some fanatic extreme, and I will grant you that...
...Congressman Charles Rangel has accused Republicans of being "Nazis...
...He of Whitewater fame and the Miracle of the Cattle Futures, attacking a whole class of Americans for supposedly not paying their share of taxes...
...And, as he always does, he lectured his fellow Americans against those very same qualities he now encourages: divisiveness, intolerance, and—so it appears—limiting free speech to him and to his...
...Unfortunately, many of the restraints against prosecuting anarchists were put in place by the protest generation of which Clinton was a part...
...They've used that old tool on us for decades now...
...According to him, the United Nations is going to take over America and force us—even women and children—into a "new world order...
...And he speaks of "America in peril...
...The next day he associated his political opponents with "loud and angry voices...
...Well, then, so were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison...
...Oh yes, and through all these slanders has 12 The American Spectator June 1995 run Clinton's assertion that those who urge limited government are intolerant and demented...
...dential existence back on October 3, 1991, when he declared his candidacy: "For twelve years, the Republicans have tried to divide us, race against race...
...Friends of democracy do not like the sound of that last line, uttered by Clinton in Oklahoma April 23...
...Apparently the Clintons of this world expect us to believe that those who never speak of race are racists, and those who attribute racism to the duly elected choice of the majority of the American people are free of racial motive...
...He depicted them as "purveyors of hatred and division...
...While addressing this singular orator in comparative terms, I can think of no other American president possessed of such a low opinion of the American people as to think he can manipulate them by associating the millions of Americans in the talk-radio audience with hate...
...That is one of the reasons that since the beginning of his career, running against incumbent Rep...
...We have come a long way in the decline of intellectual standards in our country, and Clinton and his pals are leading the way...
...Now who are these right-wing anarchists whom Gingrich and Dole are being lumped in with...
...And then the man who was to become the candidate of Hollywood's nouveau riche harangued the "rich...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
