Working within the System

One of the better public affairs TV programs, The McLaughlin Group, has been showing in Washington for eight months now. It features NR’s Washington editor, John McLaughlin, playing mock-stern headmaster to a small but unruly class of journalists, who argue about The Issues for half an hour every Saturday. A favorite issue, guaranteed to provoke a ten-minute quarrel, is the precarious state of the banks, the international debt balloon, the desirability of expanding IMF loans, and so on.

With monotonous regularity the two conservatives—Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak—are anti-bank and seem eager for the debt balloon to burst. But the two liberals—Morton Kondracke and Jack Germond—are the unabashed champions of bankers—those Wall Street figures who in earlier decades were lampooned by progressive cartoonists.

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Tom Bethell

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One of the better public affairs TV programs, The McLaughlin Group, has been showing in Washington for eight months now. It features NR’s Washington editor, John McLaughlin, playing mock-stern headmaster to a small but unruly class of journalists, who argue about The Issues for half an hour every Saturday. A favorite issue, guaranteed to provoke a ten-minute quarrel, is the precarious state of the banks, the international debt balloon, the desirability of expanding IMF loans, and so on.

With monotonous regularity the two conservatives—Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak—are anti-bank and seem eager for the debt balloon to burst. But the two liberals—Morton Kondracke and Jack Germond—are the unabashed champions of bankers—those Wall Street figures who in earlier decades were lampooned by progressive cartoonists.