Scrapbook
Scrapbook An A-Pauling Lapse of Judgment The U.S. military has certainly been through some wrenching transformations since the end of the Cold War, but it's still shocking to see it hosting a...
...It] expresses the hope that he will become more Reaganlike...
...McConnell who announced in his New York Press column last week that he was departing journalism for the Buchanan campaign...
...And Pauling's political career, to be charitable, consisted of one misjudgment after another...
...his Holocaust stuff is far too weird...
...A plant in the Buchanan camp...
...It gets better...
...True to form, while cutting the ribbon on his new Nashville headquarters on Oct...
...It's not even worth discussing...
...According to the Weston Town Crier, when Gore was in Massachusetts in September, he related "the story of his mother's journey from a poor rural town in Tennessee to Nashville, where Mrs...
...Barney Frank...
...Fifth Columnist...
...Needless to say, such assertions are offensive to Jews, to friends of Jews, and all others who believe that respect for historical truth is an important feature of civilized society...
...No matter how sporadically he writes such things, they confer upon Buchanan a strangeness that makes it utterly impossible to take him seriously as a presidential candidate...
...And how...
...Agitating against a nuclear NATO in 1961, as Pauling did and for which he was rewarded the following year with his second Nobel, was rightly denounced as a travesty at the time...
...The conservative National Review treats Buchanan's campaign with deference and respect...
...Buchanan has spent too much energy denouncing neo-conservatives as 'ideological vagrants...
...Conceivably, now that the Clinton administration is pushing a nuclear test-ban treaty, someone at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where the Pauling festival will be celebrated for the next five months, may think the scientist was just a little bit ahead of his time...
...But that's all ancient history, right...
...21, 1980, during the second set of debates before the Republican primary in New Hampshire (the ones sponsored by the League of Women Voters, not the famous "I paid for this microphone" evening in Nashua dominated by Ronald Reagan) the unforgettable congressman from Rockford, Ill., John Anderson, thoughtfully intoned: "I certainly will not balance the budget on the backs of the poor...
...The same Mr...
...It has offered him a job as senior policy adviser and he has "jumped at the chance...
...On third thought, shouldn't Congress take a closer look at the Institute's budget...
...For me, it's far too late...
...And when exactly was that...
...Well, that's one way of describing Pauling's career...
...6, the vice president waxed nostalgic...
...For example, at a confab celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Americans for Democratic Action on May 7, 1977, Sen...
...The backs-of-the-poor coinage no doubt predates the Lexis-Nexis era— which contains cites as far back as a New York Times editorial denouncing that state's Republican lawmakers on May 27, 1971...
...He may have been rhetorically tone deaf on this occasion, but it's not like he's the only Republican who's ever uttered the words...
...I find it unlikely that Buchanan doesn't understand what he's doing with such musings...
...How Many Angels Can Dance on the Backs of the Poor...
...The ex-aide's name...
...It was during a time when women didn't even have the right to vote...
...As Fred Barnes points out elsewhere in this issue, when George W. Bush accused his fellow Republicans in Congress of "balancing their budget on the backs of the poor," what stung wasn't the jab but the rhetoric: "These are liberal buzz words...
...After all, he writes, "the chance to be part of such an enterprise, which could have a huge and lasting impact on the American political system, is one of the greatest privileges I can imagine...
...Here's one of the toughest critiques of Patrick Buchanan The Scrap-book has read of late, and get this: It comes not from George W. Bush or any of the Republican candidates, but from inside the Buchanan campaign, from a "senior policy adviser...
...So say what you will about George W. Bush...
...Gore's own state of Tennessee approved women's suffrage in August 1920, 79 years ago...
...recounts how an ex-aide to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis (who embodied a movement called the New Pragmatism, according to Newsweek) had assailed Dukakis for "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor...
...Once anointed by the sages of Stockholm, you can make noxious contributions to the public debate, spout claptrap about the supposed anti-cancer benefits of Vitamin C megadoses and forever be called "Nobel laureate" by polite society...
...Pat for President...
...But timing in international affairs is everything...
...how's that for an intellectual pedigree...
...Yes, opening on Oct...
...excoriated the newly elected President Jimmy Carter for trying, yes, to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the hungry and the jobless...
...Hmmm...
...It seems to have been over the years a favorite not just of liberals attacking conservatives, but of left-wing Democrats attacking other members of their party for being insufficiently pure...
...Only the 1954 Nobel for his indisputable brilliance in chemistry gained Pauling a hearing for his Vitamin C views, which would rightly have been called quackery emanating from anyone else...
...Here are some excerpts of what this adviser has written: "There have been Buchanan references to 'group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics' among Holocaust survivors, and columns about how diesel fumes could not have killed hundreds of thousands of Jews at Treblinka...
...George McGovern (ADA, McGov-ern...
...Dukakis must have taken the future congressman's criticism to heart...
...So not only was Gore's mother an uppity dreamer, she must have been an exceptionally precocious law student, too...
...On second thought, perhaps the Institute of Pathology is the perfect sponsor for this exhibit...
...A Nov...
...To paraphrase the eminent political analyst Ricky Ricardo, somebody's got some 'splaining to do...
...According to Ceci Connolly's account in the Washington Post, Gore told the audience that his "mother Pauline, celebrating her 87th birthday today, was raised at a time when 'poor girls were not supposed to dream.'" And when, exactly was that...
...Reader Herbert J. Boothroyd of Weston, Mass., alerted The Scrapbook to an even more poignant version of this uplifting parable...
...Al Gore and His Saintly Bloodline No one has yet mentioned the horrifying downside of Al Gore's having transferred his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville: Being "back home" in Tennessee only gives him that many more excuses to ponder his increasingly mythopoeic roots...
...The Scrapbook prefers to think of Pauling's genius as more specific: He was the first man to figure out that winning the Nobel prize means no one will ever take your microphone away...
...About eight years old...
...Gore—now 86 years old—earned a law degree while waiting tables for 25 cent tips...
...These criticisms are actually from a February 1992 column by Scott McConnell...
...But The Scrapbook shouldn't be too hard on George W. Bush...
...20 at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, will be an exhibit ("Linus Pauling and the Twentieth Century") devoted to honoring "the first pacifist to organize truly effective international peace campaigns," to quote the propagandistic promotional brochure...
...This was a contribution to peace, only as Moscow defined the term...
...7, 1977, Newsweek article with the prescient title "Is America Turning Right...
...in 1988, he claimed that voters should choose him and not George Bush for president, because a Dukakis administration would never "balance the budget on the backs of the poor...
...military has certainly been through some wrenching transformations since the end of the Cold War, but it's still shocking to see it hosting a hagiographical tribute to the life and work of the anti-nuclear fellow-traveler Linus Pauling...
...Way back on Feb...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 5
