KOWTOWING-TO-THE-DICTATOR AWARDS
Kowtowing-to-the-Dictator Awards Chinese strongman Jiang Zemin's Victory over America Tour produced a level of self-abasing moral-equivalence mon-gering not seen since the Jimmy Carter era. Some of...
...The proposed reporting requirements on the sale of supercomputers wouldn't necessarily prevent episodes like this, but they would be a step, albeit a small one, in the direction of restoring some sanity to the Clinton administration's reckless export-control policy...
...We have things to learn from other societies as well...
...Racial Healing, Houston-style Voters in the city of Houston, Texas, will decide this week on a ballot question, "Proposition A," that would end racial preferences, much as the California Civil Rights Initiative did...
...Next, as ambulance sirens wail in the background, a narrator sadly reminds listeners that "it happens over and over again: Just when our community starts to move ahead, some people try to turn back the clock...
...King's voice is then cut short by the sound of a gunshot...
...Then Clinton treated us to a remarkable disquisition on what democracy means: "I think it would amaze many of our Chinese guests to see some of the things that have been written and said about me, my family, our government...
...No member of the state's Republican congressional delegation has endorsed the initiative, either...
...He really enjoyed it...
...But he neglects to mention that President Jiang obstinately refuses to countenance any corresponding American complaints about the fabrique Chinoise...
...Not to be missed in the press category is American Spectator Washington correspondent Tom Bethell, henceforth to be known as the Walter Duranty of the Right...
...And yet after all this time, I'm still standing here" (and that damn Michael Kelly walks the streets a free man, you could almost hear the president muttering...
...The Scrapbook counts at least three offenses against sound moral reasoning here...
...Bethell is apparently unaware that Jiang is the first Chinese leader with a higher education...
...Good thing he didn't go to a French university, like Pol Pot...
...27 New York Times, Jeff Gerth and Michael R. Gordon spelled out in rich detail how 16 IBM supercomputers were illegally diverted to a Russian nuclear-weapons laboratory...
...Laws like Proposition A, that is, which you cannot vote for, apparently, without also endorsing "the forces of bigotry"—and King assassin James Earl Ray...
...Finally, The Scrapbook noticed this headline in the Washington Post: "Septuagenarian Displays Vigorous Health...
...But the president's most Feinsteinian moment came in a speech at the Voice of America where he reminded his listeners that Americans in glass houses shouldn't throw stones at Communist dictators...
...In case anybody misses the point, the narrator makes it explicit: "Sometimes they do it with bullets, sometimes they do it with laws...
...During a joint press conference with Jiang, the president did utter some pidgin Hegel about how China would remain on the "wrong side of history" so long as its repressive practices were maintained...
...Some of the highlights: The Dianne Feinstein Laureate As Confucius—or was it some forgotten Massachusetts politician?—said, the fish rots from the head...
...They should all be ashamed of themselves...
...As for past diversions of supercomputers to Russia and China—which led to the provision—Berger says the fact that these supercomputers are in the process of being returned shows that "our policy has not failed, but is, in fact, successful...
...Second is Clinton's suggestion that Chinese dictators have any standing to comment on a Western democracy—and that Americans have an obligation to listen...
...Especially now, since the battle over this referendum has turned worse than ugly...
...He goes out of his way to second the Chinese critique of America's "social fabric...
...National security adviser Sandy Berger wrote to House National Security chairman Floyd Spence on Oct...
...Bethell's joy contemplating the great economic leap forward he is sure China will soon take is dimmed only by the possibility he foresees that someday China may become democratic...
...Then, says Bethell, "intellectuals will have been restored to power...
...Time earns special honors with this clever explanation of why Jiang is stiff in public and prefers to read from a script when talking to reporters: "On those occasions when he allowed himself a little spontaneity, it tended to backfire...
...Not that successful...
...In the Oct...
...Bethell is not kidding...
...It therefore took distinctiveness to score a mention here...
...When THE Scrapbook wants to read about the vigorous health of septuagenarians (which is not often), we expect the reporter to have found, at the very least, a 79-year-old Iron Man Triathlete...
...This is really the first Chinese leader with a higher education...
...Honorable Mention Sen...
...But until that happens, let us rejoice that there is at least one country in the world where they are not in charge...
...Taking delight in the vigorous health of the maximum leader is what they do in dictatorships...
...20 complaining that the reporting requirement "will tax sorely the resources of our export- control agencies and the intelligence community...
...The president's third error is his biggest...
...With spontaneity like that, who needs a firing squad...
...In a 1990 interview with Barbara Walters, he described the Tiananmen killings as 'much ado about nothing,' prompting outrage...
...The ad opens with a recording of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech...
...The group that paid for this disgusting ad, "One Houston," has received a $10,000 donation from the city's outgoing mayor, Bob Lanier, whom President Clinton recently praised for his contributions to American racial healing...
...President Clinton is therefore this week's Dianne Feinstein Moral Equivalence prizewinner (so named for the California senator whose craven apologias for the Chinese government have set the standard for appeasement in our time...
...Special Feinstein Media Prizes This was a hotly contested category, as a number of press organs competed in portraying Jiang as the greatest closet connoisseur of American pop culture since Yuri Andropov curled up with a bottle of Chivas to listen to his jazz records...
...The story was about how Jiang, 71, had splashed in the surf in Hawaii...
...But the White House will have none of this...
...With Successes Like This . . . Even modest attempts to control the export of sensitive technology are being rebuffed by the White House these days...
...Included in the conference report of this year's defense authorization bill is a provision requiring computer exporters to notify the government in advance of prospective sales of supercomputers to countries such as China and Russia...
...she attended the state dinner thrown by our president...
...If the secretary of defense, state, commerce, or energy questions the sale within 10 days of being notified, the sale cannot go through without an export license from the Commerce Department...
...and she met privately with Jiang...
...Clinton administration officials learned of the diversion not through the enforcement provisions boasted about by Berger, but because a top Russian official mentioned in a press conference that the country had obtained supercomputers...
...George W. Bush has declined to endorse the initiative, citing a policy of not "intervening" in local political issues...
...Our crime rate is too high, too many of our children are still killed with guns, too many of our streets are still riddled with drugs," the president said...
...Last week, Proposition A's organized opposition began airing a radio ad that for taste-lessness and vulgarity has rarely been topped in recent American history...
...In an astonishing celebration of Jiang's regime in the magazine's November issue, Bethell sarcastically suggests that China's critics, when they talk about human rights, are really just resentful that it is a country "where intellectuals have been deprived of their rightful powers of agitation...
...And if we expect other people to listen to us about the problems they have, we must be prepared to listen to them about the problems we have...
...One is the insulting analogy Clinton draws between American street crime and Chinese political torture...
...I always felt he was underestimated," she told the New York Times...
...Feinstein herself, it should be noted, had a very busy week squiring around her favorite foreign leader...
...She hosted a friendly reception for Jiang that only a third of her fellow senators showed up for...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 9
