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Cttnton on Scandals: Heads Wttt Be Rotted Who's responsible for the seemingly endless chain of White House fund-raising scandals now coming to light? Listening to Bill Clinton's recent press...
...Bill Bradley was the first prominent political figure in either party to come right out and say that we might want to rewrite the First Amendment in order to enact what now passes for campaign-finance "reform" on Capitol Hill...
...This time, they promise, "voices will be raised...
...Distributed to volunteers, the document emphasizes that "in speaking or writing, remember that children or adults with disabilities are like everyone else—except they happen to have a disability...
...It was only ten years ago, almost to the month, that another set of headlines said much the same thing...
...Add to that list Dick Gephardt, who was quoted last week in a Time article on campaign-finance reform as follows: "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy...
...That would be judgmental, so say "non-disabled...
...It was the most the political people and the lawyers and the other apologists would allow...
...According to Landon Parvin, a Reagan speechwriter who worked in the White House during Iran-Contra, the passive, pronoun-free phrasing was not accidental—no mistakes were made in the choice of words...
...Thus volunteers are advised not to say "handicapped or disabled child" but instead "child with disability...
...He had urged the party to "act boldly, but speak temperately" and to "stand up for what you believe is right, but tolerate those who disagree with you on this or that issue...
...The only problem is, nobody ever has confessed...
...Similarly, don't say "retarded" but "person with retardation...
...Don't say "normal" or "healthy...
...a nine-point bulleted list of items on which the party has failed her (and that's just on abortion...
...And so the first-person pronoun finally made an appearance at the press conference: "It's up to me to do what I can to clean up the system," said the president...
...None Dare Call Tt Soltpstsm President Reagan's chief of protocol Selwa Roosevelt took to the op-ed page of the Sunday Washington Post a week ago in despair over the valedictory op-ed written by outgoing Republican party chairman Haley Barbour...
...People with Cluelessness Deserving of at least a footnote in the history of Bill Clinton's second inaugural is the document distributed by the Presidential Inauguration Committee that offers "a helpful hints reference guide for politically correct speech when interacting with individuals with disabilities...
...But 'mistakes were made' was sort of the lowest common denominator you could get away with...
...What does this mean...
...The points include such purported fiascoes as "the veto by Bush of the District of Columbia's legislation to pay for abortions for poor women" and "the inability of the Bush administration for months to find a suitable candidate to head the National Institutes of Health" because they wanted a pro-lifer...
...Listening to Bill Clinton's recent press conference, it was hard to tell...
...But she was having none of that...
...They have investigated the situation carefully, and they have concluded—as they put it in an open letter to German chancellor Helmut Kohl—that "the deplorable tactics of the 1930s cannot be permitted...
...Talk about litmus tests...
...Roosevelt, by the way, is sure that she holds the key to electoral success for Republicans...
...In an analysis reminiscent of Pauline Kael's famous befuddlement over the 1972 Nixon landslide—since absolutely everyone Kael knew in her neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side had gone for McGovern—Roosevelt writes that just as she couldn't bring herself to vote for Bush in 1992 and Dole in '96, "almost every Republican woman I know also defected in both elections...
...They seemed to have made themselves...
...Bush Says 'Mistakes Were Made,'" announced a front-page story on December 4, 1986...
...World War II, you see, would have been unnecessary had the American entertainment industry been as enlightened then as it is today...
...Fair enough...
...State Department's just released annual human-rights "country reports" (again) single out Germany for criticism on anti-Scientological grounds...
...We'll still take freedom of speech any day...
...More to the point, surely the new dogma has been around long enough to have reached the population that volunteers for Democratic inaugurations...
...Especially if that somewhere is the Federal Republic of Germany, and the assembled luminaries of Hollywood are standing alongside, shoulder to shoulder...
...Parodies of such hand-outs date back more than a decade...
...An editorial in these pages ("Silencing Free Speech in the Name of Reform," November 25, 1996) pointed out that Bradley had at least injected some truth into an otherwise suffocatingly dishonest debate...
...Wow...
...Despite the fact that the worst confirmed German "discrimination" seems to have involved the cancellation of a jazz concert by American Scientologist Chick Corea, the U.S...
...The closest the president came to an admission of guilt was summed up in a page-one Washington Post headline the next day: "'Mistakes Were Made,' Clinton Says of Gifts...
...And in both cases it was unclear, from the official semi-apologies at least, who, exactly, had made the mistakes in question...
...Talk about a long memory...
...We are the gender gap...
...The result: Clinton didn't stop with trying to avoid responsibility for misdeeds...
...he went for the extra point and tried to take responsibility for a good deed...
...And unlike those notoriously intolerant and dogmatic right-wingers who apply "litmus tests" on the abortion issue, the moderate Republican Roosevelt offers...
...Except in the Clinton administration, the "political people and the lawyers and the other apologists" don't have to argue their case at White House strategy meetings— they're the only ones present...
...Dick Gephardt can speak for himself when it comes to his desires...
...Longtime Post readers couldn't help but feel a sense of deja vu...
...Roosevelt is what is commonly referred to as a "moderate" Republican, which is to say that her heroes are pro-choice Republicans Christie Whitman, William Weld, and Colin Powell...
...At the time, says Parvin, "there was a horrendous internal battle [at the White House], with some people wanting to go further...
...Is there no end to the need for re-education...
...It was always very hard to get the first-person pronoun in there...
...It still is...
...You can't have both...
...Hobson's Choice...
...And outside of Maoist cells, it would be hard to find another instance in which the words "politically correct speech" have been used without irony since before many of the volunteers were born...
...Don't say "confined to a wheelchair" or "wheelchair bound" but "uses a wheelchair...
...Less than a week later, a follow-up piece informed readers that "President Reagan acknowledged yesterday for the first time that 'mistakes were made.'" Both stories referred to the Iran-Contra affair then consuming Washington...
...State's New Spine There's been a well-publicized campaign these past few months to raise American consciousness about the alleged, um, religious persecution of Scientologists in the Federal Republic of Germany...
...Some of our great country's most prominent public intellectuals have joined the cause: Mario Puzo, Frank Sinatra's daughter Tina, Larry King, Goldie Hawn, and suchlike...
...Apparently, in between making nice to China and accommodating itself to the new doctrine of we'll-do-business-with-anyone, the State Department can still put its foot down somewhere and say: Damn the consequences, there are universal human rights at stake...
...In fact, the Germany report is a bit more pointed than it was last year...
...No one is blameless here," said the president, since "at the edges, errors are made, and when they're made, they need to be confessed...
...With a straight face...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 21
