Editorials
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Resenting Newt Over the last three decades only two other politicians have equaled Newt Gingrich in exciting the cultural elites' sumptuous...
...Back in the heyday of his speakership Gingrich actually declared Roosevelt "the greatest president of the twentieth century...
...Paula Corbin Jones...
...Minority Whip David Bonior offered that "he should be accountable...
...After all, as with his colleagues Bush and Nixon, Gingrich was not a hard-line conservative...
...He frequently expressed fondness for popular culture and even for the rumble bumble of futurism...
...He tried to accommodate all sides...
...Gingrich is not going to disappear...
...George Stephanopoulos averred that if authenticated they "could lead to impeachment proceedings...
...My guess is that within two years, he will be running again for office...
...And unless he succeeds in high office as surpassingly as Reagan their rage will only grow...
...But above all, try something...
...of the speaker's chair...
...Its organization is not unlike that of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Elks...
...He enlarged government, beginning such monstrosities as the Environmental Protection Agency...
...More ironic still, Gingrich shared some of the elitists' values and propensities...
...When reports of his Monica connection first broke even his wife admitted that if they were accurate "I think that would be a very serious offense...
...In part it is because these momentous proceedings will have serious consequences for the rule of law and the integrity of our Constitution...
...The beauty of all this is that Gingrich does not even have to do something immoral or unethical to arouse the elites' hatred...
...That was audacity for you, and surely he would have been applauding in the audience at Roosevelt's First Inaugural when the founder of the New Deal demanded "Bold, persistent experimentation," and explained that his government would "take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another...
...Senator-elect Charles Schumer, months back, advocated the president's "significant punishment...
...Today's leader of the Free World is for the fifth time in his reign befooled by the mustachioed desert titan of Iraq, Saddam Hussein...
...The spectacle has been historic, illuminating, and risible...
...Minority Leader Richard Gephardt raised the possibility that the Philanderer-inChief "be expelled from office...
...Now Gingrich is really down, and the elites are kicking...
...Soon they will be attacking Monica and Linda...
...He will write books and travel the country delivering tirades...
...so admired in the Kennedys of Camelot always played a part in every Gingrich episode...
...He attempted to deal reasonably with the leading Communist states...
...But he never maintained a large enough following to render him invulnerable to the elites' scorn...
...After that it will be congressional hearings for Gennifer and Paula...
...The majority of the American people still does not think Nixon should resign or be impeached...and more cautious editorials, including those of the Washington Post, ...have argued that talk of impeachment and resignation is still premature, smacking more of the capricious whim of popularity a la Fourth Republic France, rather than the U.S...
...Before her there was the disloyal White House aide who flew to golf matches in a White House helicopter, or was he using Air Force One...
...As for George, he exhorted his old boss to tell the truth, so did Lanny Davis and many other Clintonites, even the preposterous Carville...
...From Morocco on the Atlantic to Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, there may not remain a pharmaceutical plant standing...
...Yes, the Boy President reduces even his possible impeachment to the category of slapstick...
...He can do it by being a perfectly moral man...
...They can gang up on him...
...And, as always, hot on his trail is the intrepid Ken Starr...
...The crowd roared...
...25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator The efforts to impeach Nixon, throughout, have had a highly ideological and partisan tone, but more recently even supporters of the Administration have favored impeachment proceedings as the quickest way for the President to clear himself...
...In his tumultuous career he was often down, and the elites love to kick an opponent when he is down...
...All are very clever, but one does not get the impression the purveyors of these messages are laughing very gaily...
...That zesty quality, audacity!, that Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Much the same can be said for Nixon...
...Bascom Slemp "Letter From a Whig" JANUARY 1974 16 January 1999 • The American Spectator Anything Goes W by is it that it is our duty as citizens to treat an impeachment of President Bill Clinton with the utmost gravity...
...In politics one's seriousness can to some degree be assessed by the stature and character of one's adversaries...
...To the objective eye, Bush was a reasonable man...
...Actually, hardly a month has gone by during the Clinton presidency—and certainly not a season has passed—in which this unique world leader has not been entoiled in some bizarre controversy...
...Linda Tripp and their petty gabble on tape...
...Well, the president did have sex with the intern, and so the bar of the tolerable was lowered again...
...And how can we forget the first lady's discovery of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," which she caught "trying to undo the results of two elections...
...Retiring Speaker of the House Gingrich will not get off so easily...
...The elites will be furious...
...That explains their assault on Bush...
...In fact, the hard-line conservatives in the end were the force that pushed him out Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...But there is a more immediate consideration...
...He no longer set their blood to boil...
...I think the reason is obvious...
...Dee Dee said he would have to "change his story in some substantial way" to avoid lying to the grand jury...
...Resenting Newt Over the last three decades only two other politicians have equaled Newt Gingrich in exciting the cultural elites' sumptuous indignation...
...However...
...nuclear physics ("Nuke Newt...
...Those other prodigies were Richard Nixon and George Bush...
...He was known to deride conservatives to the right of him...
...Anything can happen with the Boy President in the White House...
...Tourists from afar might well wonder why...
...The pyramids could be bombed...
...Since the emergence of the Lewinsky scandal months back the rapid and unparalleled disappearance of political standards has been amazing...
...They simply marked him down as a lucky fumbler, a personable fool, and so good riddance...
...In other words, if Gingrich continues to be Gingrich he has a very good chance of becoming the most hated of all late twentieth-century politicians...
...Senate Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Orrin Hatch declared on NBC's "Meet the Press": "So help me if he lies ich)s, before a grand jury, that will be C . grounds for impeachment...
...If he sticks to his guns this thing never dies...
...Ronald Reagan might have been numbered in this illustrious company during the first two years of his residency at 3.600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but then he had to go out and revive the economy and win the Cold War...
...So why do the elites so hate Gingrich...
...We are living through the most comic period in American political history...
...Constitution...
...This is a breakthrough in moral philosophy...
...As with Bush and Nixon he is one of the elites' epic irritants...
...The elites' resentment of him altered...
...The women cried and the band struck up...
...until formal charges are levied against Nixon no one really expects the Administration to give this argument any serious thought...
...Had Warren Harding lived his period might have been more comic, but probably less destructive...
...Recent military decisions by the president reveal that if we proceed with his impeachment he might blow up much of the Islamic world...
...And numbered among the president's most dangerous adversaries was that French chef who tried to kill the First Family with high cholesterol sauces...
...s' Visit Nine at www.spectator.org -;Well, he did lie, and soon the bar was lowered again...
...His economics was conventional statism...
...Fastening on his unusual name the bumper stickers' authors range across several intellectual disciplines: zoology ("Newt is a Salamander"), sexuality ("Neuter Newt...
...It was one of those rare instances in recent American history when these Democrats and the aforementioned Clintonites were right...
...It is by being a perfectly immoral and unethical man that a politician elicits the elites' admiration nowadays...
...Something about Gingrich makes them stupendously mad...
...Let the impeachment trial go the way of so many other congressional responsibilities abandoned by our elected officials' cowardliness, and it will only be a matter of time before the Clintons are embroiled in still more goof-ball conflicts: pictures on the Internet of Bill at a nude beach possibly attributed to Newt Gingrich's GOPAC, the discovery of an off-shore account with Hillary and Webb's name on it, rumors that a Haitian politician is buried in the Rose Garden...
...Now they are eating their words and attacking Ken Starr...
...Once again the master of the Oval Office is imperiled by Miss Monica Lewinsky, ably assisted by Mrs...
...Like Franklin Roosevelt and later John Kennedy, Gingrich was a devotee of experimentation...
...During this past month the president's principal adversaries have crowded onto the national stage...
...Having weighed the intensity of the elites' resentment even I wonder why...
...He was the perfect gentleman...
...Speaking to his friends at GOPAC shortly announcing hisresignation, he showed his old brag and bounce...
...Vows and prophecies crossed his tonsil, landed on his tongue and were catapulted into the room...
...Finally all Islam vvill get it good and hard...
...Now it became a question of whether he lied to a grand jury...
...He is not out...
...Yet again his following was neither large nor impassioned...
...If he tells whatever the truth is I think the American people are very forgiving...
...Yet, Gingrich is only down...
...So much for the Panglosses' hope that we can discard impeachment and, as they say, "move on...
...More recently I personally was a party to what history will remember as the Bait Shop Junta, a diabolical plot organized in the president's own home state, andexposed by the president's friends at a soft-porn Internet magazine...
...For years to come those clever bumper stickers they affix to their slightly battered, foreign-built cars will abominate his memory...
...To be sure, the forty-second president has also had his mettle tested by other significant world figures, initially Miss Gennifer Flowers, then the Travel Office conspirators, and until he forked over $850,000 Mrs...
...Ideas poured forth from him...
...Dee Dee Myers said the charges had done "a tremendous amount of damage...
...18 January 1999 The American Spectator...
Vol. 32 • January 1999 • No. 1
