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By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department. |
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Yesterday on NRO was Part I of my conversion account from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, A Cop's Damascus Road. Here is the remainder of my story.
My first thought on skimming the pages was something akin to, "Gosh, for reactionaries, these folks certainly seem to write well." Though I recall neither the precise topic nor the author, I read an article about Mr. Clinton that reinforced those first creeping suspicions about the man I had only recently experienced. I continued reading, taking the magazine with me when my flight for home at last departed. I read it from cover to cover, then took it home and hid it, as one might a copy of Penthouse when the girlfriend comes over. My curiosity bestirred, days later I went to a newsstand to purchase the next issue, a mission fraught with peril given the risk of encountering some friend, nearly any of whom would have been horrified at my selection of reading material. I might sooner have been caught with child pornography. I went home and, after pulling the blinds, read once more from cover to cover. What was happening to me? I found myself nodding and saying, "Yes, of course!" throughout the read. Through reading later issues of NR I discovered Hayek and Friedman, Kristol and Podhoretz, names which, if I had heard them at all in college, it was only in such context that allowed me easily to dismiss them, and in whose books I found so much self-evident truth I was embarrassed at my failure to recognize it sooner. I began listening to — egad! — Rush Limbaugh, and discovered he was not the monster I had been led to believe. It was done. I was a convert, and I found it increasingly difficult to hold my tongue while among my friends in show business. As I revealed myself to some of them, they looked at me as though I had announced my intention to become a woman. No, that they would have accepted more readily, probably to the point of throwing me some type of shower. I was reinforced in my conviction when I later saw, during Monica-gate, the entire Democratic apparatus collectively jump on the grenade for Mr. Clinton, whom I began to see as a pathetic, little man. For months and months we saw the likes of Ann Lewis, Paul Begala, et al, telling us, at government expense, that the president had no sexual relationship with "that woman." Their farcical denials continued even as the evidence of such a relationship accumulated to critical mass. Even the Cabinet was dispatched to aid in the deceit. But when the truth at last emerged, not a single person in the administration had the integrity to resign out of principle. The only conclusions one could draw from this were that they all were complicitous in the lies, or, equally disturbing, that the president's moral code had so leached into the souls of those in his service that they were rendered numb to the insult at being used in such a fashion. Not content with debasing the presidency, Mr. Clinton and his merry band sailed in on the other branches of government, first by repeatedly going to court and laying claim to legal propositions so far out in deepest space that only those equipped with the acutely sensitive antennae of a Lanny Davis could claim to detect them, and then by conducting that mockery of an impeachment trial in the Senate. As a young man I watched on television as Richard Nixon boarded Marine One for the last time. Like nearly everyone I knew, I was gleeful that he had been run out of office, and when he turned in the doorway of the helicopter to give his signature V-for-victory salute I mocked him. "Get on and get out," I thought at the time. But today, when I view footage of that scene from twenty-six years ago, I can see in Nixon's face the knowledge that he had disgraced himself, his office, and his country. He was ashamed, but at the urging of members of his own party he clung to what remained of his honor by resigning. What a contrast to Marine One's current passenger, who on the day of his impeachment gathered his followers for a Dale Carnegie meeting on the White House lawn, my own congressman sadly but predictably among them. How ironic that the Marines, an institution established and borne through its history by honor and duty, must have as their cargo a man so utterly devoid of either. I recognize fully the distinction between Mr. Clinton's misdeeds and double-murder, but like O.J. Simpson, Mr. Clinton and his flock have no shame, and our country will long be the poorer for their service. It was Richard Nixon who made me a Democrat, but it was Bill Clinton who made me a Republican. I thank you for welcoming me over. (*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber.) |
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f course, I was unaware
that a conversion had begun. Had I seen the man who left the magazine
behind (and I was sure it had been a man, a rich, white one at that) I
would have scorned him as a Neanderthal. But I was desperate, so with
trembling hands I picked it up and began to read. Despite my remoteness
from home and friends, I nonetheless feared that someone I knew would
come along and catch me. I was prepared to justify my possession of the
heretical rag by my dire circumstances. Further, I could claim to be conducting
"research," to see what the other side was up to.
