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gotta love that French putdown of George W.: that he is the “Three-B
Man,” standing for “the Bible, baseball, and barbecue.”
What a lovely trio, that: the Bible, baseball, and barbecue. Bush
should use that as his campaign slogan in 2004: “The Bible,
baseball, and barbecue — Bush!” It has a wonderful rollicking
sound to it; and the ideas and spirit embodied therein are equally
wonderful. I like these Three B’s as much as I like “Motherhood,
apple pie, and the flag.” I like the new Three B’s as
much as I like the old ones, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
For ages, people have worn the insults hurled at them as badges
of honor. There should certainly be no ducking from the Bible, baseball,
and barbecue, as beautiful a definition of the good life as I’ve
heard in a long while.
 On
the streets of New York, people have been asking me, “Are you
a registered Democrat?” They are working for mayoral candidates,
and are collecting signatures on petitions. I try to be polite:
“No, but thank you,” is what I say when I’m at my
best. But sometimes I’m not quite at my best. I caught myself
saying the other day, “Certainly not” — definitely
a snotty thing to say, but I’m afraid it just escaped my mouth.
The candidate I and many other New Yorkers are most afraid of, of
course, is Mark Green, who is the front-runner. Green is a protégé
of — ponder it long — Ramsey Clark and Ralph Nader. He
doesn’t mention these two men much anymore; and he is very
smooth in his tactics. But I haven’t seen a ton of evidence
that he has thrown off this part of his life and thinking, and I
certainly don’t trust that he has. I’m impressed
by something that David Horowitz says: You never really leave it
— leftism, communism, whatever — until you repudiate it.
Perhaps you don’t have to pull a full Horowitz; but you should
at least acknowledge the evils that Marxism has performed all over
the world.
No, I very much fear a Mark Green mayoralty. New York post-Giuliani
is a scary-enough thought; so much that he has done can be reversed
as quickly as it was effected. But a post-Giuliani New York ruled
by Mark Green really shakes me up.
Have
you noticed that the press is trying to egg Lincoln Chafee, the
liberal Republican senator from Rhode Island, into leaving, à la
Jim Jeffords? Every time a Republican says or does something a little
bit tart, a little bit feisty, the press runs to Chafee and says,
“So, whaddya think, whaddya think, pretty bad, huh? Leavin’,
leavin’, leavin’?”
It seems that some Republicans on Capitol Hill did something fairly
rank recently: They festooned a urinal with a picture of Jeffords.
Not very nice, no — and it did the additional damage of sending
the press running to Chafee, begging him to bolt. This is
a cute game, and I don't blame liberal journalists for playing it.
But they should also feel a tiny bit of shame as they do so.
Chafee has been threatening to switch if the Republicans regain
the majority, by a single vote. My feeling is, Leave now, Lincoln,
if you're going to shaft us in the end anyway. At least that would
make you seem slightly less calculating and snarky. I’m all
for big-tentism; I’ll root for anyone with an “R”
after his name, as long as it means Jesse can be chairman of Foreign
Relations. But big-tentism is one thing, and a gun perpetually held
to the party’s head is another. No one likes the feel of being
a hostage, whose brains can be splattered at any second.
It’s for that reason that my leaning is, Get it over with,
Lincoln; just do it quick and clean. The Republican party is an
anti-statist party anyway. It’s a little strange to be a statist
in it.
Speaking
of Lincoln, when someone like John McCain says, portentously, that
the GOP is “the party of Lincoln,” we’re supposed
to feel rebuked. Why? Yes, indeed, it is the party of Lincoln, and
the spirit of free soil, free labor, free men — free pretty
much everything — still runs through it. When McCain lays Lincoln
on us, what does he mean? That he wants to re-suspend the writ of
habeas corpus? That he wants party leaders to grow beards? When
he says “party of Lincoln,” he really means: unlike today,
under you right-wing jerks.
Well, the Republican party is, by and large, the party of equal
opportunity, the party of equality under the law, and the party
of progress. It is also the party of One America, the party that
acknowledges people as people, and Americans as Americans, instead
of lumping them into races and classes and tribes. The GOP is probably
as much the party of Lincoln today as it has been since Lincoln
himself.
Next time McCain goes on about “the party of Lincoln,”
someone should simply suggest: Yeah, but we don't mean Chafee.
A final note here: McCain and Chafee were the only Republicans to
vote against George W. Bush’s tax plan, the centerpiece of
his administration. The refreshing thing about Chafee is that he
didn’t claim that he was doing it for the sake of the national
defense.
We
recall, of course, that the press, both in Europe and here at home,
savaged Ronald Reagan as much when he first went abroad as
it has done W. They were saying that Reagan was a dumb cowboy, and
not even a real cowboy, just a washed-up actor who had appeared
in some silly westerns. In the Palace of Versailles — this
was 1982, I believe — Reagan had a brilliant moment when he
slapped down the pro-Communist — I’m sorry for the shot
of seeming McCarthyism, but it’s simply true — Pierre
Trudeau. In this period, Reagan really established himself as the
unquestioned leader of the Free World. The likes of Trudeau were,
to him, as gnats. The president went on to face down the Communists
and pro-Communists in the streets, who tried to get him to retreat
on “Euromissiles.” The same bozos — there’s
a Bush the Elder word — who tried to get Reagan to quail on
the missiles (which proved critically important) are trying to get
W. to quail on antimissile defense. Didn’t work with “40”;
ain’t going to work with “43” — ain’t life
grand?
Here
is something that’s a little less grand: All of my life —
that is, all of my politically conscious life — presidential
candidates have done one thing for sure: They have sworn that, if
elected, they will move the American embassy in Israel from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem, the actual capital of the country. Then when
the candidate gets in, he soon says, “Oh, sorry, just kidding.
Can’t move the embassy after all. It’s just not the right
time.” It is, of course, never the right time.
President Bush is one of the great promise-keepers in modern politics.
But he, too, seems to have reneged on his embassy pledge. If I were
AIPAC or some other group to which candidates pander, I would say,
“Look, guys: Spare me your promises. Don’t say a word.
Just get yourself elected, assess the situation in the Middle East,
and we’ll see.”
How ’bout that?
You
don’t have to be Brent Bozell III (an invaluable man) to notice
the following bit of press mischief: Much of the time, Democratic
congressman Gary Condit, whose young friend, the intern Chandra
Levy, is missing, is identified as a “conservative.” You
can hardly read his name without seeing that he is a philosophical
conservative, unusual for the Democratic party.
Now, what should the congressman’s philosophical orientation
have to do with this story? I think, in my simple, paranoid way,
that the press isn’t crazy about the fact that this other Politician
with an Intern is also a Democrat — they want to be sure he’s
good and labeled as a conservative. As my colleague Kate O’Beirne
pointed out the other day, if this were Henry Waxman’s intern
(just for example), would the press be writing about “the liberal
California Democrat Henry Waxman?” No’m. His politics
would be irrelevant to the story anyway.
How ’bout that?
Another
media note — this one having nothing to do with bias, just
ridiculousness: Journalists, especially TV interviewers, love to
try to get potential presidential candidates to say whether they
intend to run or not. They love to try to get them to rule out a
run. The game goes something like, “Are you running for president?”
“Well, no, that would be premature at this time. I’m just
trying to be the best congressman/senator/governor I can be, and
we’ll let the rest take care…” “But will you
say here and now that you won’t run?” “Well,
as I indicated, that would be premature, but…” “So
you’re not ruling it out!” And so on. Valuable question
time is taken up with this lame little exercise.
It think it gets tiresome. I put it in the same category as the
newspaper practice of reporting that Person X, from this party,
received, by mistake, a piece of direct mail from Person Y, of this
other party, and isn’t that a hoot, a rabid Republican (say)
receiving a fundraising letter from some Democrat? No, it isn’t.
Dan
Bloom, a correspondent in Taipei, alerts us to the fact that the
Associated Press, in a story circulated on June 20, referred to
Taiwan as a “country” — three times. This seems to
be a first for the AP. Its report follows on the heels of the New
York Times’s breakthrough: It, too, described Taiwan as
a “country,” for the first time, on June 11 — but
this was merely a mistake, an accident, and the paper said it wouldn’t
do it again. No word on whether the AP will apologize or what.
It is natural for people to speak of Taiwan, a gutsy and inspiring
little democracy, as a country; and that impulse is to be applauded,
and encouraged.
Is
it just me, or does the general feeling seem to be that Timothy
McVeigh’s execution was a rush job? It seems like just yesterday
that he murdered all those people; he declined to pursue some appeals
available to him. But I was startled to be reminded recently that
the time elapsed between his crime and his execution was six
years. That isn’t exactly vengeful haste; it isn’t
exactly a howling mob hurrying to string a guy up. That the McVeigh
execution nevertheless feels like a rush job says something about
the state of our current system.
It
is an old theme, and I’ll hit it once again: There is hardly
anything more depressing than the utter racialization of our public
life. Here we go again. Audrey Anderson, lawyer for the just-executed
murderer and drug kingpin Juan Raul Garza, said, “There are
significant questions as to whether Mr. Garza was chosen for federal
capital punishment on the basis of his ethnicity.” No, there
aren’t — it’s just that modern America has taught
Ms. Anderson to talk that way.
As
we have all learned by now, the states that Bush won are the “red”
states, and the states that Gore won are the “blue” states
— that’s the way it was done on the networks’ electronic
maps. But doesn’t that seem wrong to you? Shouldn’t the
Republican/conservative states be the blue ones and the Democratic/liberal
states be the…but there I go again, with my McCarthyism.
The
National Interest is a superb publication, with endless
interesting and important things to say. For 20 years, it has been
presided over by Owen Harries, editor. Mr. Harries writes beautifully,
and always intelligently. He is retiring now, going back to Australia,
from which he came. The contribution he has made to the debates
of our time will not be forgotten.
Okay,
a little game to close with: What is the most misspelled word in
the English language? As an editor, sifting through mounds of copy,
I feel that I am rather well-positioned to pronounce on this. My
friend and ex-colleague at The Weekly Standard, Richard Starr,
used to say that desiccate was the most misspelled word in
the language. Most people spell it (when they write it at all, granted)
“dessicate.” I was reminded of this when I saw it —
misspelled — the other day, and by a very brilliant and learned
writer (and excellent speller).
I believe that at least one of the most misspelled words
is accommodate. Not very often do people do the double-m.
I see it with one m all the time, and from very distinguished
and experienced writers. Also, occurred often appears with
one r, a result, probably, of the look of occur.
But here is my champion: From roughly the middle of 1999 to a couple
of months after the new year, I saw this particular word misspelled
over and over and over again, by just about every writer in Christendom,
and beyond. The word was millennium. Almost never
did people write the double n; almost always it was just
one — “millenium.” I spent what seemed like a good
year just adding an n, in just about everything I edited.
Confusingly, some related words are, in fact, spelled with a single
n: millenarian, millenary.
So, that is my nominee: the Most Misspelled Word in the English
Language. I say this with apologies to both desiccate and
Richard, and also to accommodate, which, unlike millennium
(or desiccate), we have constantly with us.
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