THE GOOD OLD DAYS
The Good Old Days Instead of more bad news of toadying to the butchers of Beijing, let us suspend for a week the Dianne Feinstein Moral Equivalence Awards and return, as the radio announcer used to...
...But her appearance on NBC's Dateline mainly showed how little interested in the truth journalists continue to be...
...Calamity Jane_ Jane Alexander announced last week that she would be resigning from the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts, having successfully stared down congressional Republicans and other critics of the federal arts agency...
...Ms...
...And Shultz was not a man to lose his temper by accident, but he blew up at that point...
...Or you can lie low and wait 10 years for the Clinton administration...
...Between moderating debates, accepting awards for her courage, and covering the speakers circuit, Anita Hill has been many things, but a reluctant public figure, no...
...Ah yes, how very clever—streamlining grievance procedures to heighten the conflict among the tentacles of the military-industrial complex...
...But within a year, public opinion did a flip, and now six years later, according to a Dateline/NBC News poll, more people think she was telling the truth, but an awful lot of people still don't know what to think...
...In fact, if you read the American press and believe it, and maybe they were right, we were on the verge of a complete rupture and loss of all the gains that had been made in two previous administrations with China...
...Jane Pauley held a virtual pity party for Hill...
...Pauley wasn't about to provide them with any assistance...
...Squillacote led something called the "Protest Reform Working Group," which sounds oddly enough like some leftist Berlin groupuscule, badly translated into English...
...After all, the Washington labor lawyer— arrested last week on charges he spent two decades spying for East Germany's murderous secret police force, the Stasi—has an impeccable "democratic Left" credential...
...Stand is a member—at least he was at the time of his arrest—of the Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (the Michael Harrington socialists...
...In wrapping up the story, Pauley called attention to Hill's modesty through her troubled times...
...And, to his great credit, he resisted that...
...And if you don't like it, if you'd rather be a Frenchman or a German, go to France or Germany...
...In his column the next day, Hunt scarcely mentioned Ickes, except to say that his appearance before Thompson "lent credence" to the notion that the Thompson hearings are going nowhere (a notion Hunt disputed, by the way...
...Why don't other DSA members—like AFL-CIO president John Sweeney or Gloria Steinem or Rep...
...In fact, as explained in the New York Times, it's a group that "sought to simplify losing bidders' protests of Pentagon contracts...
...Ah, the depths of the liberal imagination...
...As for who violated the Privacy Act and delivered Hill's statement to the press, Pauley tried to maintain mystery: "Some of the members of the committee had never seen her statement . . . but someone who did, it's never been determined who, leaked it to the press...
...Most people concluded that Anita Hill had lied," said Pauley...
...Sorry, Jane, everybody knows it was Ricki Seidman and James Brudney—aides to Ted Kennedy and Howard Met-zenbaum, respectively—two liberal hired guns paid to derail Bush administration appointees...
...And the DSA's left-wing supporters never tired of telling us during the Cold War that the organization was "non-partisan," "anti-Communist," "just an idealistic branch of the labor movement," "the socialism of Mitterrand, not Mao...
...Viewers looking for merely an imitation of journalism had to be disappointed, as Pauley instead played the cheerleader ("I can see the steel in your spine even as you say that...
...And there was all kinds of pressure on Shultz to go to China and be nice to the Chinese, and give them whatever they asked for to try to improve the atmosphere...
...And finally a question came on a subject that is still around, which was, Why can't we sell nuclear reactors to China when our French and German competitors can do so...
...Now we see the true horror: It might be created but without federal funding...
...How can they sit silently by...
...The Anita Hill Fan Club Anita Hill is back in the spotlight, promoting her new book, Speaking Truth to Power...
...There was no mention of the dozens of times Ickes was conveniently forgetful about his days at the White House...
...Cable viewers of Fred Thompson's campaign-finance hearings saw columnist Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal warmly greet Harold Ickes as the former Clinton White House aide was about to take his seat and testify...
...Eine Kleine Red-Baiting Will the "democratic Left" rally to the defense of Kurt Stand...
...Alexander said artists were 'very astute' and so were now seeking support for controversial work elsewhere...
...In Senate testimony last week, Paul Wolfowitz, dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, made many cogent points about the U.S.-China relationship and also recalled this striking moment in George Shultz's tenure as secretary of state: "I think the basis of a good relationship [with China] comes when they recognize that they have to respect our interests, especially on something as fundamental as American security...
...Reluctant...
...Harold Ickes and His Pal Al (Hunt) It looked like a scene out of college fraternity rush...
...And he said, Well, we have regulations to regulate this trade because it is an unusual and dangerous trade...
...The following day, Alexander vented her true feelings to the New York Times and revealed the astonishing damage wrought by the Republican campaign against the NEA...
...Ron Dellums—come to Stand's defense...
...Ms...
...That is indeed intolerable...
...Does Barbara Ehrenreich, another honorary chair, think he's being railroaded...
...To 1983 to be precise, when Feinstein was still the mayor of a left-coast city and not yet The Scrapbook's eponymous appeaser of China, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and when "moral equivalence" was still fightin' words...
...Surely they won't submit to the capitalist yoke by throwing him off the Political Committee...
...Indeed, so skilled that she was the recipient of a performance award from Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review...
...The Good Old Days Instead of more bad news of toadying to the butchers of Beijing, let us suspend for a week the Dianne Feinstein Moral Equivalence Awards and return, as the radio announcer used to say, to those thrilling days of yesteryear...
...What has happened is that the applicants themselves are not sending in proposals for provocative work because they want to get funded,' she said...
...The air of mirth and good humor and utter familiarity between Hunt and Ickes was palpable, Hunt acting like the glad-handing fraternity president and Ickes the prize freshman rushee...
...Alexander," the Times reported, "said that the persistent assault by conservatives had a chilling effect on the willingness of arts groups to apply for Federal aid...
...This was unusual, even by the standards of the Washington press corps: a public display of bonhomie between a journalist and a central figure in a still-unraveling scandal...
...I might say as an aside, I was with Secretary Shultz when he visited China in 1983, his first visit as secretary of state, and a particularly difficult period in U.S.-China relations...
...The "danger" of the anti-NEA campaign, one supposed, was that "provocative" art (or what passes for it) would not be created...
...So what does DSA honorary chairman Cornel West think about his Communist colleague...
...Meantime, Stand's wife, Theresa Marie Squillacote, a Pentagon lawyer who was also charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, was apparently pretty skilled at her day job...
...Now we understand what the vice president meant by "reinventing government...
...I remember, in fact, one incident that took place in Beijing when he was meeting with the, as it turned out, erroneously named American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing— I say 'erroneously named' because he had one question after another that could have come from the Chinese ministry of trade or the Chinese foreign ministry...
...Anita Hill has been a reluctant public figure, but writing a book seems to be an acknowledgment that notoriety is here to stay...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 6
