The Three B’s, the mayor of New York, two very different Lincolns, &c.

June 21, 2001 9:25 a.m.

ou 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.