Public Nuisances: Notice the Stench/Jonestown Revisited
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
P UNUISANCES by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Notice the Stench The recent revelations of Bill Clinton's brutal behavior towards an Arkansas woman, now published in print and broadcast on...
...But it is already clear to me that history will see Clinton as a Falstaff, though without the charm and with a hint of evil...
...Over 90o of the Rev...
...Over the past fifteen or so months the American press has often performed very well, and those journalists who stuck their necks out and reported accurately deserve credit...
...Twenty years from now rereading what they have said about this impeachment trial will not be pleasant either...
...Perhaps one of the reasons we heard so little about the twentieth anniversary of Jonestown's ghastly climax was that it revealed some of the dangerous aspects of the 1960's: the nihilism at the heart of radicalism, the exploitation of trendy radical notions by establishment figures, their imprudence in cultivating obvious lunatics...
...Admittedly, the Republicans were not given as strong a case as could be made...
...Notice the Stench The recent revelations of Bill Clinton's brutal behavior towards an Arkansas woman, now published in print and broadcast on television, combined with all the other Clinton squalor leave an incomparable legacy...
...Jones was longing to take his followers to Moscow's workers' paradise...
...Jones had risen from being director of the Indianapolis Housing Authority in 1963 to being chairman of San Francisco's Housing Authority a few years later...
...Jimmy Carter, who wrote from the White House that "your comments about Cuba are helpful...
...Jones from another member of the Carter cabinet so arresting...
...But the Democratic Party is not the only party that is going to have to answer to history...
...Time will reveal the full significance of his impeachment and acquittal (the subject of our symposium that begins on page 42 of this issue...
...That they continued it even when a simple vote for conviction would lead to his replacement by their vice president reveals how desperate they are for Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...With the splendid exception of Chairman Henry C, Hyde and his impeachment C ----- --- managers, the Republicans --- -acquitted themselves very poorly...
...They will have to explain their repeated denunciations of him after the exposure of his affair with an intern and the exposure of his lies...
...In domestic policy the Democrats have turned their backs on sexual harassment law in the workplace...
...Those are clearly impeachable acts...
...Wrote Joseph Califano: "Knowing your commitment and compassion, your interest in protecting individual liberty and freedom have made an outstanding contribution to furthering the cause of human dignity...
...The party may never return to the moral high ground...
...From Colonel Eugene Holmes's documents revealing the 1992 Democratic candidate as a draft dodger and from Gennifer Flowers's tape revealing him as a liar, to the 1993 Troopergate revelations of his abuse of power and sexual recklessness, to Paula Corbin Jones's testimony, to Monica's testimony, and now to the reports of rape, the Democrats' defense of him becomes ever more futile...
...Blame for that resides with the independent counsel...
...Soon the whole nation will recognize that this administration put our national security at risk for campaign contributions...
...It failed to use its subpoena power to investigate Travelgate and File-gate...
...Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, Fidel Castro, even Adolf Hitler...
...Jones was white and he brought them all together in an open grave...
...Jones on the Mondale campaign plane, after which he wrote to this great visionary: "Knowing of your congregation's deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of our country is a great inspiration to me...
...At the time of the poisoning the Rev...
...Yet given the foul ending of the People's Temple in faraway Guyana, an admiring editorial from Washington Post is the most memorable...
...As I say, the notion spread that they were some sort of Christian believers run amok...
...Brutal corporal punishment was often meted out to the faithful at Jonestown, especially to its children, which makes a letter to the Rev...
...The Democratic Party is not devoted to any of its widely publicized high principles or noble oaths...
...As some honorable Democrats have noted, protecting Bill Clinton has caused the Democratic Party to turn its back on most of its claims to virtue...
...That is fine...
...Race and 1960's radicals became his snake oils...
...As a consequence of the Democrats' lust for power there will be no moral standard for Democrats...
...The Republicans, particularly in the Senate, stand revealed as politically inept and occasionally craven...
...Midst the corpses other laudatory letters were found, from California's Governor Jerry Brown, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Senator Mike Gravel, and from Mrs...
...During the Clinton administration civil liberties have been abused and the free press harassed...
...Clinton's bombing of Arab aspirin factories brings to mind satires of presidential abuse of power such as Wag the Dog, and such presidential deceits as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution during the Johnson administration...
...Some conservatives think that we have learned that the American people have become moral nitwits...
...They make the office politically weak and add nothing to its effectiveness...
...More and more Americans are noticing the stench...
...Better it is that one party live by the moral standards expected from the Founding Fathers than that both parties breed Bill Clintons...
...Jones was palmed off as just another religious zealot, but there was very little religion in his song and dance, at least not religion as conventionally understood...
...The Rev...
...rilf4 Read a new RET column every week...
...Yet when their corpses were found I cannot recall any major news report calling them "Communists...
...Jones's followers died there late in 1978...
...The Republicans should not have wavered, and should have called the Democrats to accept the obvious...
...Bipartisanship's burden was with the Democrats, not the Republicans...
...Simply stated, Clinton lied and obstructed justice...
...I t is interesting that the twentieth anniversary of the Rev...
...orderly thought is sacrificed...
...He particularly admired the Soviet Union—not Mao's China, but for some reason Papa Brezhnev's Soviet Union...
...Located in the steamy jungles of Guyana, Jonestown was the site of the People's Temple, "an interracial sharing community" that originated in San Francisco...
...Perhaps it is not so surprising that the liberal thought leaders of our time let the anniversary of the Jonestown holocaust pass unremarked...
...He had come to disdain the Bible and to extol only a very restricted collection of luminaries: Lenin, Finally, from the Clinton impeachment we have learned that a double standard is better than no standard at all...
...The Justice Department has been politicized to an extent not known since the Nixon administration's Justice Depai hiient inspired the need for an independent counsel law...
...I doubt that they have...
...and their affection for "the beauty of Communism...
...Clinton was guilty...
...The Democratic Party had better hope that journalists and historians take the next few years off...
...Barney Frank...
...Each revelation since Clinton's improbable 1992 election revealed his unfitness for the presidency...
...The Office of the Independent Counsel did not cast its net widely enough...
...The hands-down winners," the editorialist sang, "of anybody's tourists-of-the-year award have got to be the 66o members of the People's Temple...who bend over backwards to leave every place they visit more attractive than when they arrived...
...The independent counsel law is necessary as an antidote to a politicized Justice Department, but its excesses must be curbed...
...As for now, the forty-second president is a corpse stinking in the sunlight...
...Jones had gotten much of his power and wealth through government aid programs supposedly targeted for the very poor...
...When the corpses were discovered in Guyana the Rev...
...They will have to explain the unparalleled irregularities of the 1996 campaign...
...From his positions in various race relations bureaucracies, the Rev...
...That will change...
...Visit TAS Online at www.spectator.org Jonestown Revisited 18 April 1999 • The American Spectator...
...None of the thousands of letters found among their paltry possessions betrayed any interest in Christianity or any other organized religion but in "Communism...
...The Rev...
...The evidence is that they were victims of the press's initial failure to report the Clinton scandals...
...Conjuring with race relations was a trendy con game in those days...
...Consider the fate of Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston...
...The Rev...
...The grounds for impeachment drawn up by Democrats in 1974 leave the conclusion inescapable...
...Two years before the Jonestown holocaust Vice President Walter Mondale met with the Rev...
...Actually, the Rev...
...He had courted establishment figures and they had exploited him...
...Jones boasted of his knack for solving civil rights problems, adopting left-wing radical programs for the very poor, and bringing the destitute of all races together...
...Jim Jones's Jonestown holocaust has come and gone, unremarked by such liberal thought leaders as Professor Alan Dershowitz and the Hon...
...power...
...Those scandals along with the parade of administration witnesses using the "I do not recall" response to Congress would have provided abundant grounds for impeachment covering misbehavior far beyond sex...
...Unfortunately for them, the evidence of his moral turpitude accumulating since the late 1960's could not be repressed or—as the phrase has it—spun...
...Jones abounded with 1960's moonshine right down to the reason he took his flock from San Francisco to Guyana...
...In some cases they called for his resignation or impeachment...
...Now the Democrats will have to defend their fight for Clinton...
...This is one of the perils of being an autodidact...
...It is devoted to power...
...The Democrats' great tradition of being the party of reform is now a laugh...
...Another lesson from the Clinton impeachment is that neither the political parties nor the independent counsel have what it takes to rid the presidency of a corrupt president...
...Christ and his colleagues were wholly missing from his galaxy of heroes...
...One of the lessons from the Clinton impeachment is that the Democrats want to oppose Republicans, not cooperate with them...
...We have also learned that the 9 6 16 April 1999 The American Spectator press can be bamboozled, but that its patience with being spun is limited...
...And then they will have to conjure with the reports of technology transfers by their administration...
...At his orders they drank poison or had it imposed on them...
...The Democrats thought that they could bring the corpse back to life by scotching his impeachment in the House or acquitting him in the bogus Senate trial...
...Yet they voted to acquit the man they publicly abominated...
...He left in 1977 to escape nuclear calamity, capitalism, the CIA, the FBI, and a series of concentration camps that he was convinced the government was building for him and his faithful flock, composed of a mixture of the very poor and aging flower children from that summer of love way back when...
...Letters found in the vast killing field that had been the People's Temple, "dedicated against the evils of racism, hunger, and injustice," maundered on about his followers' dread of "the capitalist U.S...
...As was established in Watergate, a pattern of ethical misbehavior is sufficient for impeachment...
...Had the Republicans been able to combine ethical and criminal lapses, their case against Clinton would be even stronger, albeit no more persuasive to Democrats...
...It feared that any accommodation to Clinton's critics would cost it the presidency in 2000...
...Who doubts, however, that traditional moral standards will be applied to Republicans...
Vol. 32 • April 1999 • No. 4
