PUBLIC NUISANCES: The First Amendment Project, The Triumph of Conservatism
Tyrrell, R. Emmett
The First Amendment Project BY R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. ith the bizarre W shuffling ofleadership in the Senate, Senator Orrin Hatch, he of the colorful neckties, is about to be replaced as...
...He associated that paranoid style with the right usually...
...They are now regularly being applied to people who for twenty or more years have peacefully governed and otherwise conducted politics in the country...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Come back to the Constitution, Pat," Safire implored his friend...
...He urged Leahy not to persist in "waving a vacuum cleaner at an editorial office"-my editorial office...
...My response was the same brief reply General Anthony McAuliffe made to an earlier generation of brutes that time at Bastogne, "nuts...
...Studies of the 2000 vote by media and other monitors have reviewed the vote, and the consensus is that George W Bush won...
...Safire called Leahy's letter an "outrageous intrusion" on First Amendment rights...
...I do not think this bodes well for the First Amendment...
...Socialism fell out of fashion...
...The electorate continued to put Republicans in charge of governor's mansions, state legislatures, and Congress...
...The only support came from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times and from columns by the excellent Seth Lipsky on the Wall Street Journal's on-line magazine OpinionJournal.com and by Dave Shiflett on National Review's NationalReview.com...
...Abroad Communism disappeared as a menace to world peace and to the rights of workers...
...128 ummer Reading Issue 2001 The Triumph of Conservatism y sardonic friend, Robert H. Bork, has filed an astounding observation...
...Thinking that conservatives had no moral right to win and govern, liberals began the politics of personal destruction...
...Nor did the literary and journalistic communities rise up to join Safire in his defense of the First Amendment...
...Accurate testimony before Congress was never so important to Leahy and Waldman during the Clinton administration...
...Is he right...
...Such terms as "far right" and "extreme right" began to be applied to Ronald Reagan's heirs...
...On the op-ed page of the Washington Post he noted recently that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 represented a "seismic shift" in the "American political culture...
...Democracy triumphed...
...That is about the way that today's liberals would like to see things go, with theirs being the dominant persuasion...
...During the recent jihad by the Judiciary Committee's Democrats against the nomination of Ted Olson for solicitor general, Senator Leahy rode the lead horse...
...Writers are not popular with large numbers of Americans who apparently do not see why writers should be immune from the general litigiousness of the country...
...Evidence to the contrary does not move them...
...Most Democrats and Republicans moved the country toward free trade, limited government, law and order, and other conservative values while maintaining concern for the environment, minority rights, and other liberal values...
...Obviously it has now been picked up by the left...
...Yet something odd crept into the American political discourse...
...Hoftadter would be amazed...
...Olson's account of his role in The American Spectator magazine's 'Arkansas project' was accurate...
...Asked the kind of questions sexual harassment law requires that an alleged sexual harasser answer, the president lied under oath and obstructed justice...
...He charged Olson with lying to the committee about the extent of Olson's involvement with an American Spectator reporting project...
...Said Laura Murphy of the ACLU's Washington office upon seeing Leahy's letter, "The ACLU does not think that a newspaper or a magazine should be compelled by Congress to turn over anything about their editorial process...
...The conservatives' growing popularity with the electorate and effectiveness in government did not change these liberals' minds...
...They still seem to believe that there is something illegitimate about what is called, in happier times, "the loyal opposition...
...Beyond that, only the American Civil Liberties Union was preparing to jump to the First Amendment's defense...
...The American Civil Liberties Union finds in the polling it reviews a general impatience with First Amendment rights by many Americans...
...1-800-695-9599...
...Throughout American history those terms denoted racists, fascists, and other assorted anti-democratic authoritarians...
...Quality subsidy publisher accepting manuscripts...
...with subpoenas...
...BOOKS BECOME A PUBLISHED AUTHOR...
...On the local level it brought the Republican Party back from the doldrums of the '50s and '60s...
...You may have to jump to the defense not only of The American Spectator but also of other writers...
...That last estimate comes from William Safire...
...In fact, evidence does not move them...
...Other conservatives have followed...
...It turns out that it is the writers and politicians who wish to pollute the atmosphere of freedom with coercion...
...Would neglect of the truth have made me a better journalist...
...ith the bizarre W shuffling ofleadership in the Senate, Senator Orrin Hatch, he of the colorful neckties, is about to be replaced as chairman of the Judiciary Committee by Senator Patrick Leahy, he of the spotless reputation for fairness...
...Even lying before grand juries was understandable...
...Now Democratic pundits and members of Congress have come to her position...
...Hofstadter, the American historian who believed in America, hoped "variety" would triumph...
...This is democratic government as it is expected to be practiced...
...Bork provides the answer...
...Bravo, Miss Murphy...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR E Summer Reading Issue 2001 He urged Leahy not to persist in "waving a vacuum cleaner at an editorial office"--my editorial office...
...Frankly, I am willing to put my trust in the population at large...
...They are embodying what the distinguished liberal historian of a generation ago, Richard Hotftadter, essayed as "the paranoid style of American politics...
...Many liberals," he says, upon being confronted with conservative governance "shifted gears from smug superiority to utter fury...
...and that turncoat is a clearly conflicted witness...
...To that threat I noted that the senator was making "friendship a misdemeanor and journalism a felony"-again "nuts...
...It is the writers and politicians who worry me...
...At some point the president of the United States got entangled in one of his own legal enthusiasms, sexual harassment law...
...An heir to Ronald Reagan's politics was elected in 2000...
...In a particularly hefty essay, "The Intellectual: Alienation and Conformity," he associated anti-intellectualism with the right and the philistine center ofAmerican life...
...No, the animus against Olson and The American Spectator was clearly motivated by the articles we published about Clinton, articles that have never been disproven and have gained in validity with every passing day of Clinton's presence in public life.Which brings me to a question I have always wanted to ask the journalists who oppose me: "Would I be a better journalist had I stifled my knowledge of Clinton's corruption...
...Well, he does bring to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation some thirty years ago that some liberals believe that conservatives have no place in "the natural order of things...
...Moreover Olson's truthfulness-and mine for that matter-was attested to by all but one person at the Spectator during the Senate proceedings...
...The conformity today's liberals seem to want and liberals like Hofstadter disdained will not last...
...Two-party politics came to characterize the Republic, wherever the voters' voice was heard...
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...Yes, the political and cultural eruption that first became a national phenomenon in 1964 with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater came to govern in 1980...
...Free book...
...Yet Leahy persisted, warning, "should that request be declined, the committee as a whole should take appropriate action to obtain the information...
...Democrats use the terms regularly and few squawks are heard.Why...
...He feared that "conformity" to anti-intellectualism would become more intense in America...
...Bork has thrown his weight onto the scale...
...He also wrote authoritatively about anti-intellectualism in America...
...It is possible," Hofstadter wrote, "that under modern conditions the avenues of choice are being closed, and that the culture of the future will be dominated by single-minded men of one persuasion or another...
...I say this based on more than the brute behavior of Senator Leahy...
...Safire wrote a hortatory column from his op-ed redoubt at the New York Times, charging the senator with "trampling on the First Amendment...
...Other journalists, namely the rebarbative Joe Conason and his sidekick Gene Lyons, were egging him on to pursue government investigations of fellow writers and of a lawyer who had offered legal counsel to a magazine they did not like...
...A healthy political dialogue was guaranteed...
...He was impeached, but the country moved on...
...Now, of course, Leahy is no longer in the minority on his committee, and he can harass writers who practice amused resistance (an improvement on passive resistance, no...
...I am confident that, given a chance, I can make a case with the average American for freedom...
...He wanted to see the magazine's documents...
...In fact Hillary Rodham Clinton referred to conservatives as "conspirators," members of a "vast right-wing conspiracy...
...So far," he wrote, "as the weight of one's will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it [conformity to one persuasion] is not to be so...
...At home diverse policies were adopted, diminishing the role of what was once called "collectivism...
...The governance continued for 12 years...
...Apparently they think so, which is one of the reasons all Americans have a stake in the First Amendment...
...Then in 1992 Bill Clinton was elected, and what happened...
...After Olson was confirmed and Leahy's committee lost interest in me, Bill Clinton's former director of speechwriting, who now roosts at the John E Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Michael Waldman, wrote approvingly in the New York Times of the Democrats' sudden acquisition of the subpoena power "to seek detailed information from more witnesses on whether Mr...
...PUBUSHERS ALL PUBLISHERS AREN'T THE SAME - Our books get reviews...
...The vacuum cleaner reference was to a letter that Leahy had written to me demanding that Olson and I "provide copies of the internal audit, board books and minutes...and all notes and records of Board discussions of the audit...
...They believe that those who oppose them are conspirators...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
