COMMENT
COMMENT 'If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other...
...In the sixteen years since the death of J. Edgar Hoover, we have endured revelation after revelation of domestic surveillance of harmless citizens by the FBI...
...Outside, the Waukesha police used stun guns to arrest peaceful protesters...
...I hope to stand for a new harmony, a greater tolerance...
...11 On the Occupied West Bank and in Gaza, the Palestinian resistance, the intifada, continues, undiminished by increasingly harsh Israeli measures...
...And instead of backing off the basic issue of the Pledge, he should echo the Supreme Court decision and explain that in America, no creed or philosophy or religion may be shoved down anyone's throat...
...But his military credentials were quickly revoked when the facts about his National Guard service came to light...
...But Charnes obtained files on the Court as recent as 1985, and there's no reason to think the spying has ended...
...If U.S...
...abandoned its friends, the consequences were a human and moral disaster...
...When Bush assaults Dukakis for being against guns, a Dukakis campaign aide responds that the Governor "supports the right of hunters and sportsmen to own guns and for other law-abiding citizens to own guns for the protection of their homes...
...Israeli politicians, campaigning for re-election and hoping for a more decisive outcome than the voters have granted them in the recent past, are responding to these momentous developments by vying for the distinction of taking the toughest line against peace and accommodation...
...He's appealing to the coarse, the vindictive, and the violent—and it may be a winning strategy...
...The peculiar thing about that controversy is not so much what it tells us about Quayle (yes, he used influence to get into the Guard...
...Where is the legitimate law-enforcement interest in this...
...If he wins, it will be a testament to how fundamentally right-wing a vast section of this country remains...
...Court employees have been importuned to spy on Justices and on various people—such as defense lawyers—associated with important cases...
...The response, as enunciated recently by Police Chief Martin Felker, is to "pay special attention to groups of black juveniles...
...The outlook is for more conflict, more violence, and more repression once a Palestinian provisional government is proclaimed...
...The perseverance of the Palestinian people, despite almost daily killings, deportations, the razing of homes and entire villages, and the imposition of cruel economic hardships, points to a struggle that will only intensify unless a settlement is reached...
...H There are strong indications that the Palestinian leadership will soon proclaim a provisional government over the proposed Palestinian state, an act that carries with it an implicit recognition of Israel...
...The wrap of patriotism, in all its contorted and primitive forms, can sell almost any product, as Madison Avenue has long since recognized...
...He not only doesn't look mean, but once in a while a decent chromosome can be glimpsed under the microscope...
...Wags started calling the ticket "Bush and Bush Lite," since Quayle's a right-winger of the no-brain variety...
...Dukakis should take each one of Bush's attacks and fling them right back at him...
...Bush reaches back thirty-five years for rhetoric and calls Dukakis a "card-carrying member" of the American Civil Liberties Union—as if being in favor of civil liberties is somehow akin to being a communist...
...To say that is not to call for U.S...
...And it's certainly no way to stand up for what's right...
...It was great theater, and it made Bush seem as dumb as a dipstick...
...In fact, many of the war resisters have a much stronger claim to the moral high ground...
...But he has managed in the first weeks of the campaign to overcome these great disadvantages the old-fashioned way: by taking the low road...
...Dukakis should realize that he must go leftward to define himself...
...We should not be surprised when it uses that license...
...He's scared to: He thinks the American people won't buy it...
...We don't blame anyone for not going to Vietnam...
...Hoover worried constantly about the "pro-Communist tendencies" of the Court...
...funds were withdrawn or significantly curtailed, Israel would have no choice but to reassess its position with respect to Palestinian aspirations...
...Harassment on the streets, directed at a particularly vulnerable segment of the black population, is a good issue around which to mobilize a larger campaign of resistance to resurgent racism...
...In either case, he's not attracting voters...
...The conservative Likud Bloc makes no attempt to disguise its interest in absorbing the occupied territories into Israel, though what it would do with the Palestinian population remains shrouded in ominous vagueness...
...On some issues, Dukakis has the makings of a progressive candidate...
...If he had any sense, Dukakis would explain why he is against gun control simply by reciting the ghoulish facts that demonstrate how frequently Americans kill each other with handguns and rifles...
...Such "preventive" abuses of civil liberties are all too common...
...With Ronald Reagan's days blissfully numbered, we were inclined to feel that the worst was over...
...A free society is no place for a Bureau with a license to spy on its citizens, but that is what the FBI has...
...Because he's afraid to be tarred a liberal...
...He's a walking case of cognitive dissonance...
...In Toledo, a black lawyers' group, the Thurgood Marshall Law Association, is fighting back with a lawsuit...
...When we went into Vietnam, our intentions were noble," he writes...
...His biases tend toward the superrich and the ultraright, his decision-making is shoddy and his judgment poor...
...war makers are...
...The American people want to know where the next President will lead them, and Dukakis gives no clue...
...State Department—of a "Jordanian solution" to the Palestinian problem...
...Anyone who doesn't recognize this is unfit for national office, says the great unfit one...
...Neither does a cry for competence...
...Supreme Court...
...Wake-Up Call Michael Dukakis has failed to respond effectively to George Bush's attacks because he is unwilling or unable to offer an alternative vision to the American people...
...And trafficking in the fear of crime has always served the opportunist politician...
...Since 1932, it turns out, the FBI has been keeping confidential dossiers on members of the U.S...
...The Usual Suspects Community tensions run high in Toledo's racially mixed Old West End, and sometimes they erupt into violence...
...supporters have demanded as a prerequisite for negotiations...
...I want a kinder, gentler nation...
...He opposed, to the last minute, the INF treaty with the Russians—a stance that warmed American Legion halls around the country...
...He's for universal health insurance and a comprehensive test-ban treaty...
...Repeating in dullest monotone Good jobs at good wages does not exactly stir a crowd...
...He voted against the Civil Rights Restoration Act, for school prayer but against school meals, against increasing Social Security, and against raising the minimum wage...
...At almost every campaign stop, Bush waves the musty issue of the Pledge of Allegiance, condemning Dukakis for vetoing a 1977 Massachusetts bill requiring teachers to conduct the Pledge in class...
...Even Bush's handlers, or mishandlers, admit that Quayle may not be the most qualified person since John Adams to be nominated for Vice President...
...We've got to leave the tired old baggage of bigotry behind...
...as one Israeli journalist recently wrote in the newspaper Ha 'aretz, Labor is "terrified of its own dovish image" and determined to dispel it...
...It is time for those aspirations to take their rightful place on America's—and the world's—agenda...
...When Bush raises the Pledge of Allegiance issue, Dukakis responds by saying he supports saying the Pledge but the courts have ruled it unconstitutional...
...Recent events have undercut the most stubborn of the myths and slogans that have long stood as obstacles to negotiation and reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinian people...
...But they surely won't buy his empty gestures...
...And much of the material in the 2,000-plus pages of documents recently obtained by Alex Charnes, a lawyer and journalist in Durham, North Carolina, dates from Hoover's era, of course...
...We don't blame Quayle for not going to Vietnam...
...The Quayle choice reveals the worst about George Bush...
...Bush's choice of Indiana Senator Dan Quayle as his Vice Presidential running-mate provided great amusement for a couple of weeks—from Quayle's first botched press conference to his eighth-grade-style acceptance speech, from his seclusion in a sound-proof booth to the well-staged hounding of the media in his hometown of Huntington, Indiana...
...But what a right-winger he is...
...As our nation has failed to address the roots of the crime problem, simplistic solutions—such as capital punishment and looser gun laws—can be hawked to eager customers...
...He doesn't have much to lose, because if he doesn't define himself, he's a goner anyway...
...And a successful claim for damages could go a long way toward getting the cops off innocent people's backs...
...Dukakis either lacks the courage of his convictions or has no convictions at all...
...There is none...
...The statement by Bassam Abu Sharif, Yasir Arafat's official press spokesman, contains precisely those assurances that Israel and its U.S...
...Bush says the Pledge should be required mumbling, despite a 1943 U.S...
...At almost every campaign stop, Bush brags about being in favor of the death penalty and the right to bear arms, and the crowds eat it up...
...It seeks a ruling that the police department's stop-and-question policy violates the First and Fourth Amendments, which ensure freedom of association and protect against unlawful search and seizure...
...What's odd about Bush is he doesn't seem to fit the part...
...American economic and military aid—to the tune of $3 billion a year, higher than the aid allotment for any other country—is what allows Israel to be intransigent...
...After all these bloody decades, the Palestinians, too, are entitled to their promised land...
...That's no way to run a campaign...
...yes, he probably was trying to avoid being sent over to Vietnam), but what it tells us about how the morality of the Vietnam war is being rewritten...
...Nonetheless, that proclamation could make a substantial difference...
...With or without Nixon's help, Quayle appears to have survived the National Guard flap, and the Bush campaign is feeding him with an eyedropper until he is strong enough to debate Lloyd Bentsen...
...intervention but to demand that Washington stop intervening...
...The Bureau has monitored conversations and even wiretapped some Justices over the years...
...The Republicans are leading this charge, hurling their abuse at the very terms "liberal" and "liberalism...
...License to Spy If there was any room for doubt that FBI spying on Americans who haven't even a remote interest in the violent overthrow of the Government is not simply the occasional aberration of a rogue agent, that room has now been filled to overflowing with contrary evidence...
...This is not abuse of a good system...
...Officers are to stop and identify these youths so that in the event an occurrence does take place, investigators will have the names of the juveniles to work on...
...Within the PLO, strong and growing sentiment holds that in exchange for negotiations, a provisional government should renounce violence, agree to a compromise solution for Jerusalem, and even accept a demilitarized Palestinian state as a concession to Israeli apprehensions...
...COMMENT 'If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.' —Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, in the 1943 Pledge ruling Bush and Bush Lite philip burke In the featherweight bout of the year, George Bush has been beating up on Michael Dukakis in the early rounds...
...But the noises Bush has been making lately give cause for doubt...
...It also seeks $1 million in punitive and compensatory damages for Walter Wade Jr., who was followed and stopped by police though he had committed no offense...
...Supreme Court ruling expressly declaring such a requirement unconstitutional...
...And we should not expect it to stop until we tell it officially, and in no uncertain terms, to stick to bank robbers, kidnappers, and car thieves...
...H In a development that has drawn much comment around the world but has been slighted by the mass media in the United States, a prominent leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization has extended to Israel an offer of recognition, negotiations, and "international guarantees for the security of all states in the region, including Palestine and Israel...
...As Bush upholds the flag, the chair, and the gun, he's appealing to some of the basest sentiments of the American electorate...
...And it would, therefore, ultimately compel the United States to reexamine its role...
...The only way to combat a right-wing, God-and-flag attack of the kind Bush has been waging is to stand up and articulate a positive vision of a better America...
...But he hasn't woven these and other ideas into anything resembling an ideology or a vision...
...The Other Promised Land Aseries of dramatic changes in the Middle East is setting the stage for a new and possibly decisive phase in the protracted struggle for the realization of Palestinian national aspirations...
...But never mind, the crowds eat it up...
...Instead, he cowers...
...it is a system of abuse...
...He spearheaded the confirmation of Daniel Manion, the ultrareac-tionary judge appointed to the Federal appeals bench last year...
...Remember his acceptance speech in New Orleans...
...11 King Hussein of Jordan has withdrawn his substantial financial support and subtle political presence from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, dashing once and for all the fatuous notion—dear to the Israeli Labor Alignment and the U.S...
...He might be right...
...It would give the Arab states, the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies, the nations of the Third World, and even America's Western allies, an opportunity to give more than rhetorical support to the cause of Palestinian statehood...
...But the crowds eat it up...
...And they are writing the history lessons...
...But war resisters are not in power...
...When the anti-war Left triumphed and the U.S...
...Oliver North, who came to the Milwaukee suburb to support a right-wing Republican Senatorial candidate, gave a speech blaming liberalism high and low for all the evils attending the world...
...We may be entering a decidedly illiberal age, when basic individual rights, long taken for granted, lose favor with wide sectors of the citizenry...
...The latest warrior to pick up a pen is none other than Richard Nixon...
...The Labor Alignment's policy is hardly distinguishable from Likud's...
...But on the campaign trail, Bush has shelved this gentleness in favor of the easy harshness that polarizes and putrefies...
...We have our differences with liberalism, especially of the Cold War variety, but the attack on liberalism today comes from a different quarter and with a different intent: to roll back civil rights and liberties...
...To be stopped, questioned, frisked, and even detained by police for no cause is part of the urban experience for many young black men...
...Writing on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal of August 31, the haunt-ingly resilient Nixon tries to set the record crooked...
...American policy is the decisive factor in a potential Middle East settlement...
...Bush's best punch is the cheap shot, and the fans seem to love it...
...And those who went are certainly no better and no more morally upright than those who went into the Guard, or went to jail, or registered as conscientious objectors, or burnt a draft card, or fled to Canada...
...One incident this August in Waukesha, Wisconsin, typifies the brutality that can accompany the rhetoric...
Vol. 52 • October 1988 • No. 10
