PUBLIC NUISANCES: The Left Always Gets Its Man / Who Is This Guy?
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES The Left Always Gets Its Man WASHINGTON USTICE NEVER SLEEPS. Or rather the free-floating moralism that is the left never sleeps. The...
...What would provoke such a born blank to pronounce on the intellectual capacities of either Just-ice Thomas or Justice Scalia...
...Today the Harry M. Reids believe in Vast Right-Wing Conspiracies, a government as good as Sweden's, and the United Nations as a monitor of American foreign policy...
...Thirty years ago Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said all the "new ideas" were coming from the right...
...Yet, like Franco, he did return his country to democracy...
...Rather he is just another vulgar mind, raised to eminence by Democrats and emboldened to favor us with his crude thoughts...
...For the New York Times Guzman's decision was front-page news—in fact, the day's major news story with a color picture of Guzman embraced by Pinochet's emotion-al opponents...
...Doubt-less, he would have a morally superior explanation if anyone questioned his etiquette...
...The answer is not very...
...In the body of the Times story the word "Communist" never appeared, only "Marxists...
...The other day a Chilean judge, Juan Guzman Tapia, decided that an 89-year-old man was competent to stand trial for human rights abuses, though it has been 14 years since he left office, and when he did he handed his thitherto troubled country over to democrats and eventual prosperity...
...So Senator Reid is not a small-town bigot...
...WASHINGTON DO You KNOW WHO HARRY M. REED might be...
...In fact, many of those cheering for Pinochet's neck today blithely lump PUBLIC NUISANCES Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush into the same category they reserve for Pinochet...
...Whether he succeeded or not, the Democrats paid no more attention to his ideas than they paid to the right...
...Who Is This Guy...
...How many has Fidel Castro murdered, tortured, and jailed...
...The left worldwide reserves its hostility for people on the right and for America and its allies, who are the real guarantors of the rights of man...
...For all the untutored reader knows, Pinochet's victims might have been the country's librarians or butterfly collectors...
...Well, it turns out that this fellow Reid is a United States senator...
...The old Soviet bloc countries are filled with retired brutes who did far more damage to the civil liberties and the prosperity of their countries than Pinochet ever did...
...The old boy came to power in 1973...
...As he made these utterances recently on Meet the Press I concluded that the man must have some stature, unless, of course, the issue being treated on the show was small-town bigotry...
...The Nevada senator who pronounced on Justice Thomas's record and literary merit is a man of no intellectual distinction whatsoever...
...For six months before he took over politicians and private citizens in large numbers had been imploring the military to deliver Chile from President Salvador Allende, a romantic and incompetent Marxist pseudo-intellectual who spent his last year in a drunken haze while economic chaos spread...
...He is in the minority and that minority will remain a minority for a very long time with him as Leader.: February 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...Having read over the transcript of his remarks on Meet the Press, I can tell you he articulates woodenly...
...They slumbered contentedly in their conceit that they were the morally and intellectually superior...
...Frankly I did not know either until he was quoted in the newspapers as having said on NBC's Meet the Press that Justice Clarence Thomas is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court...
...Its economic position is that of John Kenneth Galbraith, without the wit...
...That word "Marxists" appeared in a quote from Pinochet who said a year ago on a Spanish-language television show: "everything I did I would do again...
...This is the consequence when liberalism's morally superior mindset affixes itself on mediocrity...
...Yet it is not the opponents of Pinochet who have made great strides in the elevation of human rights world-wide...
...Now they are being led by this preposterosity, Reid...
...They are confident that they stand in that long line of prodigies that goes back to the New Deal and beyond to the Progressive Era...
...They are the ones who have to ask me for forgiveness, them, the Marxists...
...They doubt the outcome of the 2004 election because they approached Election Day absolutely confident that they were headed for a stupendous triumph...
...One is that the left—whether Communist or simply glassy-eyed reformist—never tires in hunting down its enemies...
...Its social policy is that of Betty Friedan, without the charm...
...Who am I supposed to ask for forgiveness...
...Off and on he tried to come up with some new ideas for the Democrats...
...Senator Reid will replace the ever-purring Senator Tom Daschle as minorityleader after Senator Daschle's mishap on November 2. This should be amusing...
...Their forebears believed in the Bill of Rights, the right of laborers to organize, public health, internationalism, and other perfectly sensible matters...
...Nor was his war as bloody as General Francisco 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR February 2005 Franco's war against Communists and other leftists in the 1930s, but it was brutal enough to offend civil libertarians everywhere, including me...
...The 89-yearold man is, of course, General Augusto Pinochet, and his human rights abuses are not even reported in the newspapers as "alleged" human rights abuses...
...How many Communists have done that...
...In fact, he is the incoming Senate minority leader from Nevada...
...Right now those people are leading the world in a struggle against tyrants who, unlike an 89-year-old retired general, can actually shoot back...
...On the same program he also said Justice Antonin Scalia would probably get his support if the president nominates him to be chief justice because Justice Scalia is "one smart guy...
...The moral pretense of the American liberal is a thing to marvel upon...
...Oh yes, and they believe Justice Thomas does not write very well...
...There is a great deal of posturing about civil liberties and justice in the campaign against Pinochet...
...If Senator Reid does not know who Warren Harding is, I suggest he call Justice Scalia, that "one smart guy...
...How well he writes I cannot say with total confidence, but if he writes as well as he speaks he is—after his first few simple sentences—unreadable...
...Moreover, Communism accounted for scores of mil-lions of innocent victims in the 20th-century...
...There is also something else...
...There are two points worth noting here...
...Of course, if Franklin Roosevelt were resurrected and forced to enunciate the positions of today's national Democratic Party he too would probably have lost in 2004...
...Its foreign policy is that of Warren Harding...
...He also asseverated that Justice Thomas's opinions "are poorly written...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES R . E M M E T T T Y R R E L L, J R. The Left Always Gets Its Man WASHINGTON USTICE NEVER SLEEPS...
...Are any of Pinochet's present-day tormentors demanding Castro's prosecution for crimes against humanity...
...They believed that despite the fact that their presidential candidate was the most ridiculous presidential candidate since, well, since General Wesley Clark, who could not have been more preposterous if he had run as a nudist...
...The incoming Senate minority leader believes he is part of that large gaggle of impostors who consider themselves liberals or "progressives," as they in their florid vanity would have it...
...They also believe that they won the presidential election in 2000 and many believe that they won it in 2004...
...It is difficult to explain, but it is observable...
...There is no effort to prosecute these enemies of freedom commensurate with the effort against Pinochet...
...His thoughts are banal...
...Pinochet's regime allegedly accounted for 4,000, not all of them peace-loving progressives...
...The other is that its enemies are always on the right—or at least the perceived right...
...The photograph dominated three columns...
...Pinochet's political assassinations were not as numerous as those practiced by Soviet satellite countries...
...Rather it has been North Americans and Europeans, most notably the Engjlish-speaking peoples...
...Finally, when Fidel ultimately croaks he will have left what was once the most prosperous country in Latin America in a heap...
...For the next 17 years Pinochet, his military, and his secret police waged war against leftists, usually within Chile but occasionally abroad through a series of political assassinations...
...Today Castro remains a bloody tyrant and far more of a problem beyond his shores than the general with the absurd sun-glasses and the 18th-century uniforms ever was...
...So is the intellectual pretense...
...The problem with Harry M. Reid's party is that it is about 30 years out of date...
...If in the course of Meet the Press he were to have wiped his nose on his sleeve, I would not be surprised...
...How prominent have Pinochet's opponents been in the struggle against Islamofascism and the sadistic Saddam Hussein...
...And he thinks his judgments on Justice Thomas matter...
...If indeed the prosecution of Pinochet would elevate regard for human rights worldwide, I would be among the first to celebrate Judge Guzman's decision...
Vol. 38 • February 2005 • No. 1
