Public Nuisances: The Maestro Exits the Stage/Welcome Truths
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Maestro Exits the Stage In mid-April one of the most finely tuned musical instruments ever to be heard in America was withdrawn from public view,...
...Some myth...
...and Mrs...
...Cleanly written, lucidly reported, Truth at Any Cost disinters the facts of the Starr investigation from the bovine fertilizer...
...When the Clintons and their apologists do so with hyperbolic references to conspirators and haters, they do so to confuse the public and to smear their opponents...
...Most words uttered to an audience expire the night they are uttered...
...Yet, his most notable role has been that of maestro of the word, both written and spoken...
...Just the other day after an interview with what seemed to be an objective and equable journalist from a moderately liberal magazine, she actually described me as the "premier Clinton hater...
...Of course I exaggerate, but I do so to amuse...
...Just to let posterity know about his virtuoso performances at the speaker's dais, he has gathered some of his finest lectures into a volume that will be published soon...
...Outside the debating hall Bill had won the debate...
...The resurgent movemerit began to twitch and to breathe in air in the early 195o's...
...Is there any Clinton critic--or for that matter any Clinton victim--who is not a "Clinton hater...
...He does have some tricks left to play...
...After all, can you think of any critic of the Clintons, no matter how temperate, whom the Clintons respectfully disagree with...
...One of those books has got to be a memoir...
...She went on to call rny magazine "the ultraconservative American Spectator...
...To think otherwise is to think that any magazine with a point of view is extremist...
...Warren G. Harding of Marion, Ohio...
...According to Judge Susan Webber Wright, "The president responded to plaintiff's questions by giving false, misleading, and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process...
...in America, they have a cloying air of pomposity...
...Ultras" are farther to the right and to the left...
...We see spring showers and avail ourselves of an umbrella rather than a bomb shelter...
...Today Galbraith is 91...
...Such hyperbolic squawks are examples of what the eminent American historian Richard HoG tadter termed "the paranoid style in American politics...
...They say that, except for a regrettable libidinal lapse with the callipygian Monica, he has led a morally irreproachable life in the V~qaite House, though they cannot explain why, during his years as Arkansas's chief executive officer, he was accused of precisely the same kind of misbehavior that put him on the road to impeachment in Washington...
...announced that this was his final public performance...
...There the president and all the other New Democrats would quietly set aside their 25 YEARS AGO IN The American Spectator University bars were never as good as we remember them to be, and it does no good to go back again...
...In most departments he has been right...
...That is why the arrival of Schmidt and Weisskopf's Truth at Any Cost is so welcome...
...T here is good news for those of us who see the world as it is and hope our fellow Americans will too...
...And one bar, Jimmy's, which somehow had clout with Chicago's engineers (and ward committeemen) survives...
...Rather than hating Clinton, I have been laughing ever since, early in his revels, it struck me that he and his bossy wife are the 199o's incarnations of Mr...
...Galbraith still believes the market to be a myth...
...Throughout the 198o's and 199o's, Bill was left debating the ghost of Galbraith and a few second-rate sophists...
...He dwells in ~ ) ' ~ s the intellectual ruins but is content...
...A disciplined account of Ken Starr's investigation of Whitewater and all the attendant Clinton scandals that followed, Truth at Any Cost sees the independent counsel's investigation of President Clinton as it is...
...For whatever reason, there are large numbers of people in and around politics who cannot see the world as it is...
...It is not, as Clinton diehards spin it, a "cou l) d'dtat" or a "conspiracy...
...The American Spectator is no more "ultraconservative" than her magazine, the New Republic, is "ultraliberal...
...Thus, in American college saloons are found the ubiquitous chess boards, the little five-foot shelves (usually containing Tynan, Mailer, and Dante, cheek by jowl), and the eternal booming of the stereo speakers above one's head...
...So Bill has quit the lecture circuit and there will be no more debates from him...
...The good news is that Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf's book, Truth at Any Cost: Ken Start and the Unmaking oflBiIl Clinton, has just arrived in bookstores...
...So much for urban planning...
...She is merely another casualty of the Clinton campaign to depict any critic as a fanatic...
...He is, as a now famous judge described him after seeing him as he is, even under oath...
...Rather, Staff's work has been the orderly procedures of a duly constituted prosecutor pursuing the irregularities of a politician who clearly and repeatedly has lied under oath and obstructed justice...
...No wonder he is retiring...
...But Bill's lectures have been composed with great care and spoken with a fine sense of drama...
...but lest the New Democrat wreck the economy, he allows the market to work...
...They have insisted that Clinton is a public servant cruelly beset by "scandalmongers," though they offer no explanation as to why he attracts these swarms of scandalmongers while previous presidents have remained comparatively scandalmonger-free...
...Taverns were not included in urban renewal, and most of the fabled places have been razed...
...It is a very good read for those who desire to see the world as it is...
...Perhaps one reason is that people supposedly debate to arrive at the truth...
...Around the University of Chicago neighborhood, these days, drinking has gone to the dogs...
...We see prosecutors pursuing a crooked politician and recognize the workings of the American legal system, not the intrigues of a "vast right-wing conspiracy...
...Then he might have popped over to visit friends in the White House...
...His views on the economy, the environment, and all ,..,C ) the other artifacts of progress are unchanged...
...The Maestro Exits the Stage In mid-April one of the most finely tuned musical instruments ever to be heard in America was withdrawn from public view, abruptly and probably forever...
...Some--the most reckless--lie under oath...
...We pretend that, while silting and drinking, we are all "being geniuses together...
...His books will be read long after he assumes room temperature...
...Radiant wit, critic, author, editor, and public intellcctual, BiI1 Buckler is also one of the two or three most important figures in the founding of modem American Conservatism...
...On both counts I believe my interviewer innocent...
...I am a Clinton chuckler...
...Why it died is an open question...
...To those of us who see the world as it is, Clinton is what he has been since we began viewing him sometime around 1991, to wit, a rogue who puts himself above the law...
...What is left today is but a few memories of a neighborhood famous for its muggings and saloons...
...The orotund voice of the Republic's finest debater and lecturer was on its way to retirement...
...I have in mind those of us who see our neighbor's household pet and recognize it as a dog, not a potential beneficiary of the Bill of Rights or an eventual naturalized citizen of the United States...
...What they revealed was that they were not interested in the truth so much as they were intent on conforming to the orthodoxy of Progressive Thought...
...Remember the Twenties in Paris...
...His ideas, epitomizing those of the growing conservative movement, have spread through both political parties (that New Democrat in the White House boasting of his balanced budget and welfare reform while calling conservatives "extreme right" is but a New Hypocrite...
...After all, what is there to debate...
...He knows more about how America got here from there than almost anyone else...
...Even I have been called a Clinton hater...
...He has a book coming out on Elvis Presley and more in the planning stages...
...So much the better for most of the mediocrities who speak publicly in America nowadays...
...Such thinking is not quite adult, or at least not very cosmopolitan...
...From then on Bill played practically every role required in a political movement: organizer, polemicist, fundraiser, and even candidate...
...Inside the debating hall his opponents merely ignored the evidence and continued to hold to the Old Time Religions of Progressive Thought...
...I specifically informed my sunny interviewer when she called that I am not a "Clinton hater...
...His debates have been even better, especially when they were with such bright prestidigitators of the left as John Kenneth Galbraith...
...That was long ago, arid no heirs to Galbrafth ever replaced him...
...If he were a little younger he might have shown up in Washington recently to demonstrate against "global capitalism...
...The writing is grand...
...Philip Brantingham limmy's aM AII That-The University Sabon JUNE/JUI ~ 1975 Z ZZZZZZ2 Zi Z;: il Zi i Z2 IZZZ~Z ZZZZ~I 16 J~ne 2000 The American Spectator enthusiasms for world trade, balanced budgets, and all the rest that they have learned from Bill Buckley's debates, and accord Galbraith's antique concerns abundant amens...
...Mory's, The White Horse, or the Seppq, the world over, university taverns have an air about them, of childish indulgence, of self-importance, of hokey tradition...
...Debate in America died 2o years ago...
...Unfortunately, it is Bill's spoken words that are now in danger of being lost...
...There is nothing particularly unusual or villainous here...
...In Europe, most university saloons are resorted to for pure drinking and fun...
...Through the years, while Buckley debated the value of free markets, limited government, moral absolutes, and all the lesser desiderata of his point ofvieu, socialism was being abandoned, government bureaucracy was being exposed, and the anarchy of life without standards was leaving wretchedness and absurdly as its obvious consequences...
...They say that his critics are not critics, but "Clinton haters...
...The heyday of those debates was in the 196o's when liberalisrn's intellectual and political possibilities were still arguable, and when liberalism's proponents were still vigorous and disciplined in their thought...
...Politicians lie all the time...
...He was the delight of the 1965 New York City mayoral race when he ran a campaign mixing puckishness and sophisticated policy proposals as the Conservative Party candidate...
...From a speaker's dais in Fort Wa?ne, Indiana, William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Looking back on the debates between conservatives and liberals since the 196o's, one gets the impression that truth was not the goal...
...Through all the years of Clinton scandals, the Clintons and their apologists have tried to hornswoggle the public into seeing things as they are not...
...And she cited him for contempt of court...
...The New Democrat talks on both sides of every issue...
...Surviving Hardings are free to object, but please do not call me a Harding hater...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
Vol. 33 • June 2000 • No. 5
