APPEASEMENT IN OUR TIME
Appeasement in Our Time The Scrapbook has been enjoying voluminous nominations for the Dianne Fein-stein Appease-China prize. What with the approaching Bill clinton-Jiang Zemin summit, making...
...Fake Tocqueville Lives...
...Earlier this year, the Christian Defense Fund published One Nation Under God—according to the cover, a compilation of "powerful statements by America's Founding Fathers on the crucial role of the Christian faith in building our great nation...
...Sociologists say the darndest things, and reporters who spend too many years pondering the "root causes" of crime sometimes parrot them...
...How's that...
...Kapp...
...A third would appropriate $2.2 million over two years to monitor political repression in China...
...What with the approaching Bill clinton-Jiang Zemin summit, making goo-goo eyes at China is fast becoming the dominant indoor sport in the nation's capital...
...We hope we've heard the last of that tune...
...Gee, there's a paradox...
...I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution...
...For your deft elucidation of this theory, you are this week's Dianne Feinstein laureate...
...This is ludicrous...
...The proper posture of a global superpower, the business-at-any-price lobby wants to make clear, is prostrate, with an ingratiating smile across its face...
...This last item's appearance on the Kapp hit list provoked a counter-volley from Alberto J. Mora, a member of the broadcasting board of governors that oversees VoA, Radio Free Asia, and other U.S...
...sought to stamp out in these pages two years ago— "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great"—not only lives on, it metastasizes...
...treaty on global warming...
...Nor is there anything embarrassing to the Administration about these broadcasts, as you mistakenly suggest...
...And lest you think the headline writer, in a stab at euphony, has misrepresented the story, here is the lede on Fox Butterfield's thumbsuck-er: "It has become a comforting story: for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder...
...Turner whined quite a lot about freedom of expression when he was presiding over the Committee to Protect Journalists in 1995...
...Does this have anything to do with Turner's environmentalism and his newly forged U.N...
...Astonishingly, the possibility that longer sentences and less parole might be playing a large part in that falling crime rate merits only one tiny subordinate clause in the article, which argues instead that rising prison populations may soon lead to a crime wave...
...America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great...
...Despite A-Bomb, Japan Surrenders Okay, the headline in the Sept...
...Five different bills in "mark-up"—parts of which may or may not eventually be passed—that Kapp describes collectively as "inflammatory," "punitive," and "intentionally polluting [of] the prospects for U.S.-China cooperation...
...This week we're led to surmise something else: It won't go into free-speech programs, either...
...So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up...
...of what, precisely, does this "juggernaut" consist...
...Kapp was concerned that a "House China Bill Juggernaut" would "prove very inflammatory, embarrassing to the Administration as it prepares to meet Jiang Zemin, and so embarrassing to the Chinese guests that their impact on the summit meeting itself . . . could be disastrous...
...Another would prohibit entry into the United States by Chinese officials who have been responsible for imprisoning, detaining, or otherwise repressing religious people in China...
...But it also adds to the confusion, providing a long version of the infamous fake Tocqueville quote on page 13...
...I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her harbors...
...And finally, there is a bill that would increase funding for Radio Free Asia and Voice of America broadcasting into China...
...The fake Tocquevillism that John J. Pitney Jr...
...Well, locking up more and more felons has diluted the "stigmatizing effect" of imprisonment...
...CNN, in which Turner still owns a share, has just pulled ads that criticize a proposed U.N...
...Consider the "very urgent" memo we have obtained, which was sent last week by Robert A. Kapp, president of the United States-China Business Council, to the council's member companies...
...The book's goal is to set the record straight, and in certain respects it does...
...At his first staff meeting, he ordered employees to stop using the word "scandal" when referring to the Clinton fund-raising . . . scandals...
...Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power...
...Leitner, Mr...
...Ted Censor_ Last week, Christopher Caldwell noted in these pages that Ted Turner's billion-dollar U.N...
...Or is this just the way the new CNN operates...
...Certainly Rick Kaplan, new president of Turner's CNN, is hardly a champion of untrammeled expression...
...Congratulations, Mr...
...gift wouldn't be a billion dollars, wouldn't go to the U.N., and was perhaps less a gift than a quid pro quo...
...There is nothing 'inflammatory' about either Voice of America or Radio Free Asia broadcasts other than the truth, responsibly presented," wrote Mora to Kapp...
...How can broadcasts that lead to a better-informed Chinese citizenry and, consequently, increased mutual understanding between the United States and China ever be considered 'punitive?'" How, indeed...
...1 New York Times story on Israel's refusal to extradite Maryland teenager Samuel Sheinbein, who has been charged with the murder of one Alfredo Tello: "Ms...
...The international-relations theory of the appeasement caucus seems to be Machiavelli-in-reverse: Since the United States is the world's most powerful nation with an economy 30 times the size of China's, and China is a Great Power wannabe desperate to buy our technology, we should therefore strive to give no offense to the sensitive Chinese dictators, whose constitutions are more delicate than a Faberge egg...
...The introduction argues that American students are routinely subjected to the mistaken liberal belief that the Constitution and America's founding both call for strict separation of church and state...
...One bill, finding that Iran has acquired Chinese cruise missiles, directs the White House to enforce a law already on the books—the Iran-Iraq Non-Proliferation Act of 1992...
...in her fertile fields and boundless forests...
...Another calls for a study on the feasibility of providing ballistic-missile defenses to Taiwan...
...government broadcasting...
...in her public school system and institutions of learning...
...For its part, The Scrapbook fears that an America that persists in putting the words it wants to hear into the mouth of a dead French nobleman will soon cease to be great...
...ties...
...Does it have anything to do with currying favor at this week's confab at the White House on global warming...
...in her rich mines and vast world commerce...
...Clintonism of the Week From an Oct...
...Sheinbein's lawyer, said her client 'doesn't at this time remember being involved in anyone's death...
...28 New York Times wasn't that outrageous, but it came close: "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling...
...But whatever happened to the stigmatizing effect of an editor's derisive laugh...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 5
