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1984
in 2003? The civil libertarians rarely acknowledge the costs of legal laxity: Restrictions on intelligence gathering may well have impeded the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker," before 9/11. David Cole, one of the movement's favorite law professors, goes so far as to lament that U.S. law makes "mere membership in a terrorist group grounds for exclusion and deportation." Moreover, while civil libertarians may scant the value of Patriot, terrorists do not. Jeffrey Battle, an accused member of a terrorist cell in Portland, complained about Patriot in a recorded phone call that was recently released in court. People were less willing to provide financial support, he said, now that they were more likely to be punished for it.
"Everyone in Cuba likes [Castro]," Turner told the Washington Post in 2001. That's clearly the impression you would get from watching CNN. During the first five years of the Havana bureau's existence, ordinary Cubans interviewed by the network were six times more likely to express agreement with the regime than they were to disagree with it. That finding comes from a Media Research Center report examining all 212 prime-time news stories produced by the bureau through the first part of 2002. Other data were just as striking: For instance, Castro and his spokesmen were six times more likely than regime critics to provide soundbites for the network, and only seven of the 212 stories focused on dissidents. "CNN," the MRC report concluded, "has allowed itself to become just another component of Fidel Castro's propaganda machine."
For a nation that prides itself on being a human-rights leader, the sheer number of men raped behind bars — 240,000 a year according to the activist group Stop Prison Rape — is a black mark. A common corrections-industry estimate is 12,000 rapes per year. Even if this is the actual number, it still represents more rapes than are reported annually against women in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, San Diego, and Phoenix combined. For 18 months now, Congress has been considering the Prison Rape Reduction Act, a bipartisan bill that would take resolute though modest action to ascertain the dimensions of the nation's prison-rape problem and confront it. But despite support from leaders in both parties, and no organized opposition, the bill remains mired in committee.
Remember Henry Cisneros? Of course; he was the once-rising Democratic star who became Clinton's first secretary of housing and urban development. Here's a tougher one: Remember Linda Medlar? She was Cisneros's mistress — the woman at the center of the scandal that brought him down. Now the bonus question. Remember David Barrett? He was the independent counsel sworn in on May 24, 1995, to investigate allegations that Cisneros lied to the FBI about payments he had made to Medlar. That investigation reached its peak on September 7, 1999, when Cisneros pled guilty to a misdemeanor and agreed to pay a $10,000 fine. But what few people realize is that, nearly four years after achieving the main objective of his investigation, Barrett is still in business today. His report will likely be finished by the end of the year, a testament either to the corruption of the Clinton administration or to the lunacy of the independent-counsel law. Or, perhaps, both.
The entire story fills one with revulsion. Rosenbaum was murdered because he was a member of the same ethnic or social group as the driver of the car that killed the little boy, by someone who killed him because he, the murderer, belonged to the same ethnic group as the little boy; Nelson was acquitted because he belonged to the same ethnic group as members of the jury; members of the murdered man's ethnic group then pressed for a further trial, while the federal appeals court implicitly confirmed the principle that jurors think with their race and the colors of their skin, not with their minds. These attitudes are now so general that the results of struggles over the ethnic composition of juries are thought by lawyers to play a determining role in the outcome of trials, which is why such struggles are often so very bitter. In effect, this is the death of the citizen; it is the retribalization of society.
It was the most notorious commencement speech of the 20th century — and probably the greatest. On June 8, 1978 — 25 years ago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood up at Harvard and delivered "A World Split Apart." It featured an unsparing analysis of the West, and its spiritual health. Consider just one of the most famous — or infamous — passages in the speech: "The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, exemplified by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music." I pause over that phrase "the human soul longs for things higher . . ." It reminds me that Allan Bloom's surprise bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, was originally entitled "Souls Without Longing." As Charles Kesler was to remark in an essay, "Solzhenitsyn was arresting because he spoke of the truth as if it were true."
The 2002 elections made it clear that the third pillar of U.S. conservatism, no longer a stepchild, had been restored to a position of equality with the other two. The American Enterprise Institute's polling guru, Karlyn Bowman, points out that Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg has gathered perhaps the best statistics on that election — and the single most important reason the voters supported the GOP was the need for "the war on terrorism and a strong military." Greenberg's numbers reveal more support for liberal Democratic than conservative Republican positions on taxes and Social Security privatization; but security trumped economics. The Republicans had a 40 percent advantage (59 percent to 19 percent) over Democrats on the question of "which party does a better job" of keeping America strong. How American conservatism confronts the enemy at home and abroad will determine the nature of the new fusionism, just as the internal and external struggle against Communism formed the old fusionism that was ultimately triumphant in the Reagan coalition.
Liberals use the charge of hypocrisy as a cudgel and a gag. When Green says, "There's a compelling case to be made [against Bennett] just on the hypocrisy alone," it sounds like there's a case to be made other than hypocrisy. But there's not. That's it. Hypocrisy is the perfect weapon for liberals — first, because is it uniquely effective against conservatives. "When Hugh Hefner moved out of the Playboy mansion the better to bring up his two young sons," NR's Ramesh Ponnuru observed, "nobody accused him of not living down to his principles." Liberals claim they are not denouncing ideals, merely the false prophets of those ideals. But since we all fall short of the ideal, the two things are identical. To date, none of Bennett's enemies have successfully argued that he wasn't pointing in the right direction — just that he has no right to point that way.
Since the release of the Soviet-era Venona files began in 1995, the evidence has been clear: The Soviet Union used American Communists and their sympathizers to spy on the United States. During the New Deal, secret Communists attained high-level positions in the government and regularly passed on secrets to the Soviets. Unfortunately, McCarthy's only lasting accomplishment has been to tarnish anti-Communism's reputation. As historian Richard Gid Powers has written, he gave "the enemies of anti-Communism what they had been looking for . . . a contemporary name and face for their old stereotype of the anti-Communist fascist." McCarthy's scattershot charges and obvious bullying allowed many of those who were actually Communists or (like Alger Hiss) Soviet agents to claim that they were simply innocent victims of a witch-hunt. Eventually, it became a badge of honor to have been accused by "McCarthyites," even if the Red-baiters were right. Books,
Arts & Manners Founding Father — Michael Medved . . . The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, by David Klinghoffer Triumph of an Ideology — Carol Iannone . . . Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, by Peter Wood Picking On the Big Kid — George W. Rutler . . . The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, by Philip Jenkins Paying the Nazi Debt — Bartosz Jalowiecki . . . Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, by Stuart E. Eizenstat City Desk: Bronx Bazaar — Richard Brookhiser on New York's wholesale produce market. Sections |
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