Editorials: No to Drug Legalization / Touched by Fidel / Facts of Primary Life
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorials: No to Drug Legalization" by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. No to Drug Legalization This is a joyous occasion! William F. Buckley, for a quarter of a century my friend and moral superior, has given me an opportunity to...
...I forget...
...That did not work out, but after Pat Buchanan won in New Hampshire the press went again into stampede...
...Okay, how about a quiz...
...And if he gets as excited as the press, his health may be impaired...
...Ponder the condition of the inner city...
...The consequences of drug use have been appalling...
...Miss Ehrenfeld reminds those who say drugs are here to stay that so are other crimes, but we need not decriminalize them...
...His team "beat" the Havana Industriales...
...In debate, a sharp logic and artistry with the syllogism has sent many opponents of drugs packing...
...Senator Alan Simpson, who is retiring, accused Buchanan of fanning "racist fires...
...He blamed the Bay of Pigs not on the Kennedy administration but on President Eisenhower...
...They doze off...
...Inhumane as that notion is, it has more appeal to me than the idea that legalized drugs will not drastically harm the commonweal...
...It is also inaccurate...
...police enforcement is so lax there that, in many areas, drugs are so freely available they might as well be legal...
...There was a slight frenzy for Lamar Alexander, or is it Alexander Lamar...
...And Emerging Fact #7: Any of the major Republican candidates willbeat him except for Alexander Lamar, who along with the burden of being just another slick Southern governor has the burden of a financial record not unlike Hillary Rodham Clinton's...
...Steve Forbes, an attractive speaker with a sound economic grasp and a message not far removed from that of the most successful president since President Eisenhower, plus plenty of money and a record of how to manage it, was told he was hopeless before his recent victories...
...Fact #2: The promise to cut taxes and of withdrawing the tentacles of government from private lives recently won Republicans their first Congress in forty years...
...Watch out, Steve—the bovine herd with its cameras and microphones might be headed your way again...
...How many of the prophets of drugs or the rock troubadours of drugs have achieved their average life expectancy...
...Buckley in the 1960's...
...When the Kennedy brothers mention family property that he expropriated, he mocks Sen...
...Before not too long I would like to see Fidel Castro brought to justice by his sorely abused countrymen...
...And he discussed ideas—his passion...
...Two of Robert Kennedy's sons and their associates in some misnamed organizations of the misnamed environmental movement were meeting Cuban officials for obscure reasons...
...From about the 1960's on, arguments for the legalization of drugs have been dominated by intellectual sophisticates...
...For my part my eyes not only see movement in the room but my brain is alert to meaning...
...Then they were in a stampede to bury him...
...One of his disciples, Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered your uncle and our president...
...Stop the primary season...
...These are people who have distinguished themselves for over a decade at all levels of government...
...Senator Christopher Dodd, who has no national standing, called the millions voting for Buchanan neo-Nazi skinheads...
...Druggies are about as amusing as cadavers...
...Drugs are indulged solely to depart reality: "Come my darling, let us envelop ourselves in a dream" and hope no one steps on us while we dream...
...16 April 19 9 6 • The American Spectator Over the years sophisticated minds have absorbed our unhappy experience with drugs and developed arguments against them that I find overwhelming...
...Fact #3: Tax cutters keep getting elected over their opposites...
...Yet here we see him greeting a star-struck American delegation of mindless goody-goodies onthe front page of the Times . In a priceless photograph the Americans display awe at the fat Communist has-been CD swaddled in his archaic revo- C lutionary garb...
...Forgive me my prejudice...
...Since then, usage has almost been halved...
...Lamar...
...As the Times (Continued on page 72) Touched by Fidel 6 The American Spectator • April 19 9 6 17 Editorials (Continued from page 17) reporter chronicles in this very piece, Fidel Castro remains a thug...
...Presumably Castro is thinking President Kennedy, the Cold Warrior, was going to become a McGovernite...
...dent group similar to the dissident groups that sprang up behind the Iron Curtain and successfully agitated for freedom and democracy...
...One of the Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Now Forbes is doing well again...
...Alexander, or is it Mr...
...Fact #6: Character will be an issue...
...Watch it, fellows—the word "beat" in Cuba is not to be taken lightly...
...And then there is the sudden discovery by the press corps that their colleague in Washington broadcast punditry, Pat Buchanan, is an "extremist...
...Kristol pronounced in the New York Times, "I'm a friend of his, and I hope he gets out of the race...
...Peak usage occurred in 1979...
...Then he speculated, "It's unfortunate things happened as they did, and he [JFK] could not do what he wanted to do...
...They follow actions taking place in the room...
...Buckley favors not the thralldom but the instrument of that thralldom, drugs...
...She demonstrates that the war against drugs is being won...
...A few months ago as Steve Forbes entered the race with a popular message, they went into a stampede toward his banner...
...When did Mr...
...They forget 10o when a boring primary season for the Republicans put people to sleep and a rock'em sock'empleasant tete-a-tete, ten members of the Consilio Cubano were arrested in another of Castro's crack-downs...
...Then one of President Kennedy's nephews, Michael Kennedy, chimed in...
...Those "conditions" have allowed him since 1959 lawlessly to roam a once-prosperous country, pillaging, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering...
...Tens of thousands have suffered injustices at his hands both within Cuba and abroad...
...He sings Shakespeare to them...
...What drives the press's hysteria is their deep distrust of politics...
...Castro mocks them to their faces, telling them he will consider release of the wretches if our government adjusts its policy to his liking...
...William F. Buckley, for a quarter of a century my friend and moral superior, has given me an opportunity to disagree with him, and I shall do so with gusto...
...EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...They found plenty, for instance, Bill Kristol fresh from prophesying the Colin Powell presidential juggernaut...
...Details were included...
...In fact he exonerated the Kennedy administration...
...Contrast if you will an interesting column by the independent-minded syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer on Fidel Castro's personal plaything, Cuba, with a recent front-page piece in the New York Times on Fidel himself...
...Fact #5: Clinton has no economic policy...
...We will not lose control," Fidel Castro pronounces...
...All of the people I know who work in drug therapy recognize that there are compulsive people in our society with a low tolerance for drugs...
...How many have left in their trail happy, elegant works of art, human or otherwise...
...They think, for instance, that the lively Republican race is "tearing the party apart...
...My friends the martini, the bottle of Bollinger, and the brandy are not solely an escape from responsibility...
...They really do not like what Frank Kent, the Baltimore Sun political correspondent, called some decades back the Great Game of Politics...
...Our press is incapable of dealing with the most elementary facts...
...No, that would be the behavior of the discredited Cold Warriors...
...And so the brain-dead keepers of American political culture snooze on: Castro, the reformer, America the belligerent and bully of the Cold War, expropriation of the Kennedy boys' family compound in Cuba, justified...
...It is also supremely inconsistent coming from those moral paragons who decry "negative campaigning" and abusive rhetoric...
...He remarked on Babe Ruth and Louis Farrakhan...
...Who in the Washington press corps can identify Eleanor and Adlai...
...Kristol had moved on to promote the candidacy of Mr...
...This fellow Castro hated your uncle and your father, Michael...
...We seem to have, over the years, lost a lot of wars that have always been worth fighting—the war against crime, the war against the progressive tax, the war to balance the budget...
...Fact #4: The Clinton economy is beginning to display the kind of anemia that Our President exploited in 1992...
...Touched by "history...
...One is the arrival on the Cuban scene of the Consilio Cubano, a dissimore likely to commit such acts on drugs...
...race among the Democrats set John F. Kennedy on the road to the White House...
...The headline reads, "Kennedy-Castro Encounter Touched by History...
...Over the past few years, it has risen somewhat, but have those not been the years in which the Clintons and their kind have celebrated the 1960's...
...The contrast demonstrates once again one of my favorite themes, to wit, the major institutions of our political culture are brain dead...
...Buckley fought them so spiritedly yesterday...
...In Castro's efforts to bring some sort of economic life to a Cuban economy that his Marxist ministrations rendered comatose, he is attracting not entrepreneurs but international criminals, mainly drug tycoons...
...Furthermore, they know no more about politics than the received truths of the moment...
...The Kennedy brothers ask him about releasing political prisoners he still holds...
...Those who traffic in drugs are killers...
...If Buchanan wins the nomination he has my vote, and he will have millions of others' votes...
...And was John F. Kennedy not disesteemed by Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson as being too far right...
...He feels we have lost a war against drugs...
...The eyes move...
...One of his arguments for legalizing drugs was that it was a civilized way to put inferior people on the shelf and out of society...
...Let us then have high spirits in pursuing this war against drugs...
...This time they were stampeding toward Buchanan with charges of extremism and worse...
...Buckley become so pessimistic...
...The rest of the piece spoke of Forbes in the past tense...
...Miss Geyer reports that one of the last Communist despotisms is being animated by two "fascinating developments...
...She ends her piece quoting the scoundrel who has to be listed among the world's top ten dictators of the past three decades...
...But no thought process is going on...
...Frankly I find all this cerebration over legalizing weeds that smell ghastly, and concoctions that might or might not be what the seedy peddler says they are, 1960's nonsense...
...The other is less promising...
...corrosives of contemporary America is the evasion of personal responsibility...
...Oh yes, the jovial, personable, highly intelligent Fidel prattled on with his agog Yank guests about world leaders past and present...
...In one of the report's weird digressions the Times noted that Fidel did not greet his guests until early afternoon owing to his staying up late the night before to watch a "baseball game...
...A more appropriate word would be fantasy...
...She soundly refutes the notion that drugs can be just another pharmaceutical product and that once legalized they will be reasonably priced without a black market...
...The tone of the -- -. report is respectful...
...Buckley's friend Malcolm Muggeridge writes of his experience in the 1930's teaching English to the affluent children of decadent Egyptians somewhere along the Nile...
...Consequently Castro—who is not all that busy these days—invites them in for one of his famed "colloquies...
...For three hours (!) the cameras flashed, the reporters scribbled, and the pish-posh accumulated...
...But now experience is catching up with these armchair liberators...
...They wander out into the dusty streets, their minds inert, their spirits easily controlled by their colonial masters...
...Most drug laws regarding possession amount to not much more than a nudge...
...He assured Castro that recently declassified U.S...
...But do not eliminate them...
...The Times report ends with a laconic reference to the fact that before this jokey, The condition of the Republic's press corps must be near exhaustion...
...Does anyone get even slightly irked with Fidel...
...To return to the press corps' uselessness...
...Truth to tell, the average Americano desirous of learning about this campaign is at a dreadful disadvantage if all he reads is the American press...
...Buckley on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal...
...But hold on...
...The stampede against Buchanan by people who were perfectly happy to work with him in media has been as idiotic as all the other stampedes...
...Put them on happy pills a la Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and get them out of our sight...
...In a symposium on drugs in his otherwise brilliant fortnightly, National Review, he has come out for legalizing that which kills and (as the Founding Father of libertarian conservatism, Edmund Burke might say) enthralls...
...She notes that our high prison population is composed of brutes who have committed heinous acts and are (Editor's Note: This column appeared in the Washington Times one day before Cuba shot down two private American planes on February 24...
...In thinking over Mr...
...Is any aspect of `,1 this wretched scene what we !, want for the rest of America...
...documents indicated that the Kennedy administration was indeed about to pull a McGovern before that unfortunate event—smiles all around...
...That is another pretty thought that has been embalmed in our political culture, unsupported by fact as it is...
...We have the conditions to prevent us from losing control...
...Michael Scriven, a professor of the philosophy of science, was a very liberal intellectual who relished debating Mr...
...I am right and he is wrong...
...In fact Buchanan's beliefs square with 75 percent or more of the views held by most conservatives...
...The free society is the wisest society...
...Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of two books on money laundering and the drug trade, Evil Money and Narco-Terrorism, has very successfully disputed Mr...
...What were their positions on cigarette smoking in public...
...Facts of Primary Life 72 April 1996 The American Spectator...
...Food is ingested, digested, and excreted—the American political culture...
...Fact #8: There are no extremists or racists prominent in American life —save in some instances those partisan political animals who call others extremists or racists...
...Fact #1: The economy and, in recent years, taxes are the major concern of the electorate...
...The hacks need a rest...
...The gaiety and nonchalance that arises with a drink can be experienced without abandoning vigilance against departing reality...
...It is not as though a drug-free society takes the fun out of life...
...It is they who should suffer draconian laws for preying on the weak and spreading a vice through our society that abets the flight from personal responsibility that today endangers the free society for which Mr...
...To legalize drugs is to sign these people's death warrants...
...Upon further reflection, we are not doing so badly in those wars today, and often because Mr...
...I write as a libertarian...
...I have had my disagreements with Buchanan, but I know he is no bigot...
...He has had years to blurt out a racist line and never has...
...but surely society, being the embodiment of what generations have learned, has some obligation to nudge the citizenry in the right direction...
...Well reporters looked around the Beltway for what we might call "cooperating witnesses...
...When they are more draconian, liberalize them...
...He was also a professor of mine — briefly...
...How did the press know...
...I am for freedom and he is for slavery...
...Buckley's neatly argued but badly flawed case for legalization, I am reminded of one of his old antagonists...
...Jesse Helms's legislation to ensure just compensation...
...Buckley and my fellow libertarians have striven so ardently...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
