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TELL THE TRUTH BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!


As Vice President Gore announced his tie-breaking vote for new gun-control legislation, there were two senators standing with him. One of these was the liberal Democratic from New York, Senator Charles Schumer. In New York State a woman who uses a can of mace to protect her from an attacker gets a mandatory one year in prison. The attacker usually gets probation.  New York liberals like Schumer have always been famous for, 1) freeing repeat felons, and 2) prosecuting anybody who defends himself.

The point is that Schumer supports laws that are the nightmare of   every legitimate gun owner. He is a nut. That is why we must oppose all gun legislation. This has nothing to do with the merits of the specific legislation. This has to do with the fact that we cannot discuss compromises on gun availability with people who have no intention of sticking by their compromise.

So Schumer (Democrat-New York) is ON RECORD as demanding that all honest people in New York who have guns for self-defense be sent to prison. You will never hear a word about this from Orrin Hatch (Respectable-Utah) or John McCain (Respectable-Arizona). You will never hear a word of this from pet conservative commentators on CNN. You will never hear Pat Buchanan tell a liberal that to his face.

Conservative spokesmen -- ALL conservative spokesmen -- simply refuse to make and REPEAT arguments that could wreck the liberals. I discussed this in the February 6 Whitaker Online article, "The Left repeats, So the Right Loses." Conservative spokesmen -- ALL conservative spokesmen -- are so desperate to gain liberal approval that they simply will not repeat anything that makes liberals really uncomfortable.

It wouldn't be respectable, you see.

On May 8, in "Armed Switzerland and the Colorado Shootings," I pointed out how conservatives in the media -- ALL conservatives in the media -- refuse to use and repeat effective arguments against liberals on gun control. This includes the Pat Buchanans every bit as much as it does standard respectable conservatives.

On May 15, in "Respectable Conservatives never Say 'I Don't Believe You' To A Liberal's Face," I explained that ALL conservative spokesmen refuse to point out what nut-cases liberals are when it comes to gun control. This includes the NRA and people like Buchanan just as much as anybody else.

As the pressure builds up for gun legislation over the Colorado shootings, anti-gun control spokesmen simply refuse to get serious. For them, for ALL of them, personal respectability is far, far more important than principle. Unless their spokesmen finally get serious, all gun-owners will lose. Unless gun-owners start demanding that their spokesmen get serious, they will DESERVE to lose.

With every incident, public demands for gun control increase. Each time our absolute refusal to discuss any rules on gun distribution looks more irrational. But respectable conservatives will never say what must be said about the liberal nutcases with whom we cannot compromise.

Unless we start telling the truth about our opponents, we will lose.

And we will deserve to lose.

Please write the commentators, please write your congressmen, and TELL THEM TO TELL THE TRUTH!

 

MODERATION AND OTHER DISHONESTY


My boss on Capitol Hill was John Ashbrook, who was proud to be labeled an extremist. Once he was in a committee meeting with Melvin Laird, who was then a Republican congressman. Laird was, as usual, conceding things to Democrats. John said to the microphone, in a stage whisper, "What a prostitute!"

Please note that Mr. Laird would someday lead the department which conservatives worship, the Department of Defense. Goldwater and all the others voted to confirm him to the holy post of Secretary of Defense. Those conservatives would always insist that he was a "true patriot." This "true patriot" spent his entire career giving things away to liberals.

For some reason, conservatives are always being betrayed.

Odd, isn't it?

After Hubert Humphrey died, someone in Congress proposed setting up a Humphrey Scholarship. To make it bipartisan, someone else proposed it be a Humphrey-Dirksen Memorial Fellowship. On the House floor, John Ashbrook said, "The people are not fooled. We are politicians who want to spend the public's money to honor other politicians….Everett Dirksen HAS a memorial. It is called the national debt!"

Everett Dirksen was not only a respectable conservative icon, he had also been the father of the Senate Republican Leader, Howard Baker. But he had sold out too many times, and John Ashbrook had to tell the truth about him even after he was dead.

John and his people -- including me -- were not popular with respectable conservatives. We were not nice. We were not "reasonable." But by being unreasonable extremists, we were able to accomplish minor miracles.

There are 435 congressmen. The only way that mass of people can move business through is by unanimous consent. Everything in the House requires unanimous consent. Most of the time, unanimous consent is easy to get. Everybody hates somebody who holds things up by refusing unanimous consent. It isn't nice.

But when it comes to the national welfare, a good extremist is not nice.

In 1977, the situation was desperate. Carter had taken over the White House in the 1976 election, and the Democrats had control of both Houses of Congress. A flood of liberal legislation was on the way, and every bill had extra spending and other liberal amendments tacked on.

So John and his handful of extremist buddies would deny unanimous consent until they got rid of the liberal add-ons. A lot of the stuff that had been sneaked in during the flood of business got knocked out. Republican staff hated us. They gave us endless lectures about how, if we would just be "reasonable," no one would notice the bad stuff that went through. If Ashbrook's fanatics would be reasonable, they moaned, we could all go home. Ashbrook refused.

We were wildly unpopular, scorned, insulted, and very, very happy.

This is extremism in action.

Such men as John Ashbrook do not get elected to leadership positions. Such men do not get cabinet seats.

We all know that. The conservative leadership gets along by going along with moderates, and moderates get along by going along with liberals.

Then we are all upset and mystified when we get sold out.

When conservatives do the same thing at the National Republican Convention, the whole country gets sold out.

Richard Nixon was to his party EXACTLY what William Jefferson Clinton is to his party: the Great Trimmer. He was the middle-of-the-road Republican between Rockefeller on the left and the Goldwater-Reagan group on the right. But in 1968 and 1972, all the leading respectable conservatives said, "Nixon is conservative ENOUGH."

So conservatives said they could spare a few principles to win the election, and they nominated Nixon. That is exactly the same reason liberals nominated Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Why did Nixon and Clinton both turn out to be crooks? It is because they both went in as professional moderates. Political moderation is the practice of someone who openly puts his political goals above principles.

Nixon and Clinton were both elected to be crooked.

Someone goes in on a crooked platform. He tells you he puts pragmatism over principle. When he gets into office, he has no principles. And Americans are shocked.

The only incredible sentence above is the last one.

 

 

GETTING EXACTLY WHAT YOU ASK FOR


Some time ago I was watching a Discovery Channel program about a community that had been terrorized for months by a nut who lived there. He was always harassing and following women and children. He nearly ran people down. The police would do nothing. He threatened people with death. Finally, he was just about to follow through with his threat to kill a man's family. He came after the man, and the man finally snapped and shot him, again and again.

A jury gave the man who shot this dangerous nut life in prison. His whole community was terribly upset at the sentence. They all said the psychological pressure the kook he shot had been putting on everybody was bound to make this happen.

I do not believe anybody should be allowed to terrify a community this way, so, at first, my sympathies were with the guy who did the shooting. I said AT FIRST. Then it occurred to me that the shooter got the treatment he had advocated all his life.

What occurred to me was this: what if this same man, an upper-middle class by-the-rules California guy who did the shooting, had been on that jury? I'll bet that, if the same facts were presented to him, he would have said, "Well, we can't have people taking the law into their own hands." He, like every one of the twelve upstanding citizens on the jury, would have voted the way the System told him to.

This guy's neighbors considered him a hero. They had all lived through the terror the guy he shot had wreaked on the whole community for months.

Every one of them was furious at the jury verdict.

But every one of them, if he had not experienced that terror and had been on that jury, would have voted the way the lawyers told them to. All their lives, they have championed the System. They have always voted against anyone "taking the law into his own hands." These upper-income Californians are the type of people who went "OOH!" when they were in the audience and some right winger offended Phil Donahue."

In other words, the guy who was stupid enough to stand up for them got what he had always been devoted to promoting. He got what he asked for. His community got the terror they had voted for all their lives. They were like other Americans: The System is Truth for them. Their Only True Faith is that one fatal phrase: "We cannot have people taking the law into their own hands."

Keeping the people from taking the law into their own hands was the cause thousands of British soldiers and American Loyalists died for from 1776 to 1783. You can sum up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States in these words: "WE, the People of the United States of America, Are Hereby Taking the Law Into Our Own Hands." In South Carolina in the 1950s, if someone had been distributing drugs to schoolchildren, a parent would have gone and shot him dead. No jury would have convicted a parent for it. More important, the process would not have gotten that far: Any District Attorney who would have tried to indict that parent could kiss his political career good-bye.

Today, the DA would get an indictment and the jury would convict. Then the DA would be reelected. The California DA who got the conviction we talked about will get reelected. He will be reelected by exactly the sort of person who shot the nut and got a life sentence for it. If it had been someone else who got indicted, the guy now spending life in prison would have supported that DA for reelection.

In other words, the guy spending his life in prison spent his whole political life asking for it. In the political world, you get what you ask for.

The crime rate in South Africa is out of sight and getting worse.

Surprise, surprise.

The late Alan Paton was the guy who wrote "Cry, the Beloved Country." He made a career out of being an anti-white South African. He got lots of awards and royalties for helping make South Africa what it is today.

Now Alan Paton's sister is leaving South Africa. She says crime has gotten out of control there. Oddly enough, just when things got to be exactly what she and her brother advocated, she has to get the hell out.

But what of South Africans who can't leave? Do I feel sorry for them?

Sorry, but no. They could have dumped the National Party when it started to sell them out, but, like Southern Democrats of the 1960s, they said that it was the "Party Of Their Fathers." When the National Party adopted respectable conservatism and told them to vote for black rule, they voted for black rule.

So they got what they asked for.

Democracy is a system of government where people get what they deserve.

Politics is a deadly serious business, where our entire destiny is at stake. If one treats politics as just another way to be fashionable and sound respectable, he loses everything.

And he deserves to.

 

 

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Issue: May 29, 1999
Editor: Virgil H. Huston, Jr.
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