SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT ... New York is revising its state history curriculum for high school students, and the first draft is beyond parody. The last major rewrite, in 1987, contained...
...The editorial page's position, claimed a Nov...
...Next thing you know, the Washington, D.C., Metro will be renamed the Hayek Public Transit System...
...Top Clinton appointees at the Pentagon have insisted on vetting and approving the study group's analysts and participants...
...Except that it hadn't...
...Otherwise the "rule of law"—magnet-ic north for the editorial page's moral compass until the elections—would be dangerously weakened...
...According to Carroll, "The Clinton section highlights the 'social concerns' of health care, education, welfare and Social Security—sounding remarkably like a Dick Morris political ad...
...When it became clear the president wouldn't confess, however, the Times editorialists found themselves painted into a corner...
...The lucky recipient of that $14 million was Gen...
...But sections have been added that are just as egregiously politicized...
...AL GORE'S INSPIRATION That empty-sounding new Al Gore slogan, "practical idealism," rang a bell with one fan of The Scrapbook, who kindly faxed in the following book excerpt: "Idealism without pragmatism is impotent...
...And for those who have been wondering how the Clinton years will go down in the history books...
...Spend the $14 million on spare parts for some of the Pentagon's crashing helicopters...
...Constitution to the Iroquois Confederacy...
...The rub was not that the Times had ever insisted Clinton be impeached (it had always favored censure), but that it had once insisted Clinton confess to his perjury as a precondition for censure...
...Well, none of the myriad scandals makes it into the draft at all, except for a passing reference to the Senate Whitewater Committee...
...national security policy...
...From the assertion that "the rule of law is too vital to be sacrificed," the Times editorialists evolved in a brief few weeks after the election to the position that the "removal of this weak man would impose [a trauma] on the people and the political system...
...Instead, the Times suspended its earlier principles and indulged in the pretense that its standards hadn't changed at all...
...This is an easy one for the next Republican Congress: Cut it...
...Say what...
...Al Gore, meet Richard Nixon, who beat you to the punch...
...Do you remember the last congressionally mandated study, the National Defense Panel's report of last year...
...Yes, it's a stirring peroration from that 1990 classic In the Arena...
...19 press release, the U.S...
...Charles G. Boyd, one of Newt's pals and advisers...
...NEWT'S PORK The soon-to-be-departing Newt Gingrich leaves many legacies for the next Republican Congress to build on...
...They could have stuck to their principles and pointed out that—absent the presidential confession—"a Congress that gave up on impeachment and opted for mere censure was complicit in his crimes," as Seligman put it, dryly adding: "It is, after all, possible for editorialists to say what they think is right even when they know they won't prevail...
...Having been held up to ridicule, these parts have been removed in the new draft, according to Thomas W. Carroll, president of the Empire Foundation for Policy Research, a New York think tank that is bird-dogging the rewrite...
...Now, Boyd, a decorated veteran and prisoner of war in Vietnam, is not the problem...
...It's hard to imagine a more hilarious fate for the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, who made a cult out of rugged individualism, than to be memorialized by the ultimate symbol of government bureaucracy...
...20 editorial, had proceeded from "the political consensus of the American people...
...The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism...
...The price tag for this new study: $14 million...
...The problem is that this eye-poppingly expensive study has already been hijacked by the Clinton administration...
...But one of them is a minor scandal...
...The last major rewrite, in 1987, contained partisan howlers like a "Dismantling the Great Society" section for the Nixon years and multicultural excesses like tracing the intellectual sources of the U.S...
...Don't worry, no one else does either...
...Sometime last year, Gingrich pulled money out of the Pentagon budget to set up yet another interminable, congressionally mandated study of U.S...
...The Clinton presidency, for instance, is allotted five times as much space as the Civil War—an unusual decision, to say the least, for a history curriculum...
...Let us repeat: $14 million for a national security study...
...Law and political consensus are not the same thing...
...Rewriting history "seems almost self-destructive," Seligman notes, "in an age when Nexis makes it so easy to look up stuff from the past...
...THE ULTIMATE ANTI-LIBERTARIAN PLOT In a Nov...
...The curriculum is now going into a second draft, the writing of which is reportedly being much more carefully supervised by New York State Education Commissioner Richard Mills...
...In stark contrast, a parallel section under the Bush years is titled 'social problems'' and includes drug abuse, homelessness, and gang violence— issues that the authors presumably thought disappeared the minute Bill Clinton was elected...
...However, some heroin users complained about the quality of the heroin offered" (New York Times, November 25...
...TROUBLE IN PARADISE "The Dutch Health Ministry said it -L would extend an experiment to distribute free heroin to hard-core drug addicts after a three-month pilot scheme showed no serious, undesired side-effects...
...Pragmatism without idealism is meaninglessness...
...The Scrapbook has heard that the board will include the likes of Gary Hart and Andrew Young...
...A FOOLISH INCONSISTENCY In a column last week in the New York Post, Dan Seligman thoroughly embarrassed the New York Times editorial page by comparing its positions on impeachment over the last four months...
...Postal Service announced that among the new commemorative stamps released next year will be one honoring Ayn Rand, the sixteenth author to appear in the "literary arts" series...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 13
