PUBLIC NUISANCES: The Hippies' Last Hurrah/ Fear of Fox
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES R. Emmet t T yrr ell, J r . The Hippies’ Last Hurrah WASHINGTON W HAT IS IT IN THE AIR THIS SPRING that is so familiar? There is a war abroad, and the bien pensants are...
...To those of us familiar with the 1960s generation, this is the late 1960s and early 1970s all over again...
...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 It is surprising to me that so little today is made of the fact that the dominant figures in the Democratic Party are members of the 1960s generation...
...There is courage for you...
...One wonders what the uniform of these brutes looks like...
...Now, cowed by the bullies, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have pulled out of forthcoming Black Caucus-Fox debates...
...Moreover, most of the conservative ideas of the Bush administration were taking shape in the 1960s...
...The American political context is freer, or has been until recently...
...As I say, there is something familiar in the air this spring...
...Former aides to the President are going over to the other side, as an energetic Democratic majority on Capitol Hill ferrets out scandals even where there is only faux pas...
...One of his most recent insights goes like this: The liberals’ favorite argument is that there is no argument—nothing uttered in opposition to liberal beliefs exists, at least nothing worthy of their intellectual engagement...
...An anonymous army of bloggers from “Color of Change” and MoveOn sitting around in their pajamas and underwear tap out threats and the aforementioned Democratic presidential candidates vamoose...
...The Clintons, Dr...
...They are 40 years older, wider in the midsection, and grayer if not glabrous—but they are as indignant as they were back in the good old days when they were wearing bell-bottomed pants, abstaining from deodorant, and dreaming of the perfect commune—perhaps one with a genuine Indian mystic seated in his underpants...
...Yet there is the stuff of amusement here...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES R. Emmet t T yrr ell, J r . The Hippies’ Last Hurrah WASHINGTON W HAT IS IT IN THE AIR THIS SPRING that is so familiar...
...Yet other young idealists from the Summer of Love and the campus demonstrations are among the leading personages of the “Spring of 2007...
...Howard Dean, al-Gore, and Jean-François Kerry, all played their roles in the late 1960s agitations, and here they are today...
...Yet, oddly, the aforementioned Democrats’ roots in the 1960s generation of pot and protest are never mentioned...
...That is: the liberals’ favorite debate is no debate unless the forum is totally dominated by them...
...The Nazis mastered such forums, as did the Communists...
...MoveOn’s work is alien from what we in America recognize as true liberal values: free debate, tolerance, opposition to coercion...
...Given that the 1960s was such a momentous generation and that the senior positions in media and academe are populated by 1960s youth, one would expect more comment on the impending intragenerational faceoff...
...I remember him...
...The Clintons and their cogenerationists have quietly abjured the values of their glorious past...
...This, students of rhetoric and knowledgeable of 20thcentury European history will tell you, is called propaganda...
...In fact, many of the same dramatis personae who howled against the war and the embattled White House in the late 1960s are leading the pack again today...
...They are practical enough politicians to know that they need the support of a broad base of Americans for their Democratic Party to be a winning party...
...He perished after jaywalking across Wilshire Boulevard after becoming an “entrepreneur...
...Or at least that surly vulgarian was the commentariat’s favorite sage until those two gifted hucksters, Sharpton & Jackson, saw in Imus’s bleak humor another opportunity to engaud their résumés...
...Do they goosestep...
...The Clintons, Dean, Gore, and Kerry were prime specimens of the leftwing of that generation...
...Fear of Fox WASHINGTON W E ALL HAVE OUR FAVORITE SAGES...
...It will be a battle to lay claim to the identity of an entire generation...
...They are following the cue from the left’s most vehement brute group, MoveOn, which famously proclaimed of the Democratic Party in December 2004, “we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back...
...The intellectual positions they proclaimed R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Fox News is a runaway winner in cable news ratings...
...Only two national commentators whom I know of have mentioned it...
...Sitting before their computers, the naked armies of the night are intent on taking over the Democratic Party...
...There is a war abroad, and the bien pensants are agitating feverishly for a pullout...
...Barack Obama and his supporters believe their time is at hand...
...Yet these aging 1960s youth in media and academe might dimly perceive that their side of the generation was a bust...
...My only question is, who will be pliable enough to be their candidate...
...Just the other day the Washington Post ran a long piece chronicling Hillary Clinton’s work as intellectual acolyte of the radical left-wing agitator Saul Alinsky...
...Socialism and “alienation” are museum pieces from a bygone era...
...The Clinton presidential legacy is one of disgrace, and within the Democratic ranks today’s “youth rebellion” is rebelling against the Clintons...
...It is perfectly sensible for the Black Caucus to combine with Fox to sponsor open debates among Democratic presidential hopefuls...
...The Black Caucus is more in touch with those values...
...Nor, for that matter, are the Bush White House’s origins in the 1960s conservative youth movement mentioned...
...Now he is a whimpering bundle of apologies, his First Amendment rights having been jettisoned almost instantaneously along with his heman demeanor...
...Ah, yes, the Yippies’ Jerry Rubin is no longer with them...
...More than half of its audience is composed of independent voters and Democrats...
...George W. Bush was no college activist in the 1960s, but Karl Rove was...
...Now because the Black Caucus is exercising its freedoms and in the American democratic spirit of liberality co-sponsoring debate with Fox News, some recently emergent online nightriders called Color of Change is accusing the caucus of “dancing with the devil...
...On this there is very little dispute...
...The Washington Post’s veteran columnist, David Broder, adumbrated the clash in commenting on the Bush-Kerry match up of 2004, and Rush Limbaugh noted the intragenerational rivalry earlier this spring...
...Who is their leader...
...The cast of characters is similar...
...When I first heard of him and of his enthusiasm for the Open Society, I thought he was a friend of freedom and democracy...
...Despite their tough language, the bloggers’ uniforms remain pajamas and underwear...
...It is those values that eventually triumphed over oppression and racism...
...And the 2008 election is shaping up to be of historic import: one final battle between the young left of the late 1960s and the decade’s young right...
...Now with the liberals’ sudden assault on the Black Caucus for its co-sponsorship with Fox News of a pair of presidential primary debates this autumn, I have an addendum to Sowell’s insight...
...Members of the Black Caucus are often themselves old enough to have fought for those values in the civil rights movement...
...There is a Republican in the White House, reviled by the bien pensants and under heavy siege...
...Those who follow their work tell me it is George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire who once spread his millions to encourage the Open Society in the countries of the former Soviet bloc...
...Demonstrations against the war are under way, and there is talk of impeachment from the agitated idealists on the left...
...Even then there will preferably be no argument, just the liberal point of view sedulously propounded in a forum shaped completely by them...
...So perhaps it is not surprising that the squabbles of the “Spring of 2007” are very reminiscent of the squabbles of the late 1960s...
...They have moved to the right while we 1960s conservatives remain steadfast to our roots and see free markets and traditional conceptions of society observed widely...
...Thus, à la, Al Gore, they proceed to reiterate their point of view boldly, heroically, and with the insistence that no other point of view is worthy of notice...
...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...
...I look forward to their appearance at the 2008 Democratic National Convention...
...The attempt to intimidate the Black Caucus and take over the Democratic Party is not the work of a true democrat or friend of the Open Society...
...After years on the lam for a drug trafficking charge (entrepreneurship fetched him too), he committed suicide in 1989...
...are now pass...
...No generation in the 20th century was celebrated as extravagantly as the 1960s generation...
...And the Yippies’ other co-founder, Abbie Hoffman, also has had his obituary filed...
...Other brute left-wing groups are on the attack...
...Why is this so rarely remarked on...
...Do MoveOners and their nightriders at Color of Change wear hobnailed boots...
...Official Washington has Don Imus...
...The tougher ones probably wear no clothes at all...
...My favorite sage is the economist and columnist, Thomas Sowell...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
