Capitol Ideas / Turnabout Is Fair Play
Bethell, Tom
Turnabout Is Fair Play by Tom Bethell T he old political blocs, frozen during the Cold War, really are breaking up, as the events following the Oklahoma City bombing showed. In some respects there...
...So now we oppose sickening patterns...
...is a waning institution—a cushy sinecure for the politically well connected...
...Work within the system...
...It seems we do now have a right, which is a novelty...
...The Court ruled 5-4 that the Commerce Clause of the U.S...
...Those armed with legal powers are bound to be more of a threat than those with firearms alone, as we saw at Waco, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho...
...What all this tells me is that the liberals, unlike the Communists, are not going to give up without a fight...
...Constitution was insufficient justification for a federal law outlawing gun possession near schools (see page 55...
...In some respects there has been an almost comic reversal of allegiance...
...That's what I find myself saying today: "Work for change within the system...
...Oklahoma reminded me of conversations in the 1960s...
...Don't give up, the liberals would reply...
...Liberals love their government and fear thepeople...
...True, those on the far right often are terribly misguided—believing in a U.N...
...They have no power of coercion, no desire to spend my money or take my property...
...President, we have a disaster . . ." President: "Increase federal power...
...plot to take over the United States, for example...
...plots to take over the U.S...
...Thank you, communications revolution...
...President Clinton, the croaking mouthpiece of liberalism, has been talking up law-and-order...
...Clinton's response has been entirely along the lines of: "How dare they suggest...
...SCENE: The White House Aide, entering Oval Office: "Mr...
...How dare they criticize . .." He has been surprisingly partisan—openly on the side of Big Brother and the recipient classes...
...The post–Cold War idea that the right was in disarray because it had lost its enemy may have been wishful thinking by liberals...
...That is more or less the complaint of Washington Post columnist Jessica Mathews, who worries about "our over-faxed society...
...We, of course, will keep pressing for peaceful change, working within the system...
...Jessica Matthews's ridicule of conspiracies to "make the nation states disappear" would be more persuasive if she had not herself argued that climate change and other "trends" are "undermining sovereignty in ways we cannot restore...
...Clinton said at one point...
...There is nothing patriotic about . . . pretending that you can love your country but despise your government," he said at Michigan State...
...Aide: "Some people think the Feds have too much power, and . . ." President: "Increase it all the more...
...Conservatives have been reminding us of our civil liberties...
...These admittedly were the people who voted for him...
...That's funny, I don't Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...What I have not seen is any acknowledgment by liberals that maybe the federal government has accumulated too much power, and needs to back off...
...10 The American Spectator July 1995 17...
...What did you say the disaster was...
...Its abandonment would indeed be counterrevolutionary, but that would be too much to hope for...
...rather than the reverse...
...I checked some recent issues of the Nation magazine, and Alexander Cockburn seemed positively perky about right-wing disenchantment with federal law enforcement...
...And rightly so, for those in power have no need of conspiracies...
...It's not so much the notion of a one-world goal as the conspiratorial attainment of it that leaves liberals aghast with disbelief...
...The "official" news media have begun to worry about . . . the media...
...Repeatedly, conservatives have denounced the Oklahoma City bombing as a shocking and immoral act...
...Liberals have had the luxury of "no enemies to the left...
...In reality the U.N...
...The National Rifle Association discovered "a sickening pattern of sexual harassment" and "institutional racism" within the ranks of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms...
...All those awful people out there are beginning to communicate with one another without asking anyone's permission...
...There has been little acknowledgment that he is, as they used to say, president of all the people...
...Constitution—as though it were not already in tatters...
...America was so sick and racist that trying to change the law was futile, some said...
...It was long repudiated by liberals, who thought ideas were "persecuted" and denied that legitimizing pornography and irresponsibility (via welfare) would affect the wider culture...
...1 n May, George Bush emerged in his true colors...
...Don't have the right, Mr...
...Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times drew attention to one of the great modem-day political asymmetries...
...First he agreed that the GOP should drop its anti-abortion plank, then he won a round of easy applause by attacking the NRA...
...The shoe is more nearly on the other foot...
...Since the 1930s, the Commerce Clause has been one of the most important 16 The American Spectator July 1995 rationales for the centralization of power in Washington...
...Peggy Noonan put it best, on NBC's "Today" show: "Americans love their country and fear their government...
...Conservatives, on the other hand, have been expected to repudiate anyone to their right...
...Now Rosenthal worries that conservatives are daring to copy the liberals: "No enemies to the Right...
...Clinton followed suit, reminding us that we are in the second half of the Bush-Clinton administration, and that for years we had something close to a one-party system in Washington...
...New anti-terrorist legislation would have to be rushed through Congress as quickly as possible...
...remember him saying that at the time of the 4,000-odd bombings by the Weathermen and related groups in 196970...
...As the Wall Street Journal noted, Clinton himself once claimed a patriotic basis for anti-government sentiment, in his 1969 letter to the Arkansas ROTC director...
...Rightists would be closer to the truth if they saw it as a tool of the U.S...
...Fidel Castro, for example, is no better than a mass murderer, but liberals risked nothing by admiring his good intentions, his alleged health-care achievements, his soaring literacy rates...
...The High Court Loses Restraint," the New York Times angrily responded...
...Guilt by association" was strictly forbidden...
...Some things admittedly never change...
...Unlike Bush, he has the political sense to shore up his own base...
...The Oklahoma City bombing was a disaster and therefore construed as an opportunity to expand federal power...
...p resident Clinton seized the opportunity to appeal to patriotism, but with an inappropriate argument...
...but the whole world, and do so openly...
...Er, what does the ACLU have to say about that...
...Responding to the liberal will, Supreme Court justices have acted as federales, imposing federal law on the states, overturning state law at will, and almost always waving congressional enactments through the constitutional checkpoint without a second glance...
...President...
...With the law on your side, you can proceed legally...
...As we do so, let us bear in mind the words of John F. Kennedy: "Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent change inevitable...
...They do not accuse me of greed, tell me whom I may or may notassociate with, contribute to the delinquency of minors, or pose incessantly as my moral tutors...
...Until this usurpation has been corrected, patriotic Americans will continue to fear their government...
...For two months Clinton has been moving to the left rather than the center, obviously heading off a challenge from within his own party...
...That's the world we have lived in for decades...
...Now they point to Newt Gingrich's comment that Democrats are "the enemy of normal Americans," and remind us that opinion leaders are responsible for "the consequences" of their words...
...On term limits, they once again acted as the Beltway's reliable ally...
...Right-wingers are deluded indeed if they think their opposition is so hemmed in by the law that it is reduced to clandestine and illegal subterfuges...
...The attempts by New York Times columnist Frank Rich to "connect the dots" between anti-abortionists and right-wing groups brought to mind analogous attempts by the John Birch Society to connect up the left-wing dots...
...It's a measure of the extent to which the Constitution has been subverted that liberals no longer need amend the document in order to achieve anything they want...
...Lewis, who has often accused people of hate without evidence, now realizes that "words matter...
...Notice Castro's royal progress through the higher Parisian echelons recently...
...Personally, I don't regard them as my enemies, although I do disagree with them...
...Meanwhile, liberals seek to preserve their "gains": the massive expansion of federal power they engineered over the last sixty years...
...That's one way of describing what the Court has been doing for these many years—cracking down on the states and giving the Congress carte blanche...
...Johnson's famous adage should be amended: Scoundrels find refuge today not in patriotism but in children—whom budget cuts will hurt the most...
...The draft system was "illegitimate," he said, because no government "should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose . He was right about that, but he should realize that the government over which he presides has illegitimate features...
...Liberals could nonchalantly share the podium with guerrilla leaders from El Salvador and members of the Communist Party...
...By the way, I have heard it said that in light of recent rhetoric Dr...
...are precisely the people who hoped that one day the U.N...
...Ideas Have Consequences" used to be the quintessential conservative slogan...
...policy makers in Vietnam to worry about the consequences of speech...
...They may have been critical in the past, but now is the time for all good lefties to come to the aid of Big Brother, Ellen Willis said in the Village Voice...
...Any attempt to connect those dots was called McCarthyism...
...Restraint...
...We'll buy that...
...No one has the right to run law enforcement officers down," Mr...
...We should also remember that those who disparage U.N...
...They have long intended to re-educate us, remake our lives, shape our thoughts, our habits, and our bank balances, and they are not about to abandon the effort just because the country is in what they see as a "cynical" mood...
...would take over not just the U.S...
...There was admittedly a rare exception in April...
...Anthony Lewis of the Times reminded us that "the First Amendment gives us responsibility along with freedom"—just the kind of thing Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media used to say...
...He was too busy excoriating U.S...
...The Oklahoma City bombing, Lewis added, makes us think about the "consequences" of hateful speech...
...The federal government has steadily accumulated a vast amount of unconstitutional power over the last sixty years, with the connivance of judiciary and press...
...The far right also believes some sad, poignant things, such as the existence of a plan to rescind the U.S...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
