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Bob Whitaker's Weekly Articles – November 14, 1998
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November 14, 1998 –
Observation
November 14, 1998 –
IF IT'S RESPECTABLE, IT'S STEALABLE
November 14, 1998 –
EUROPEAN OPINION
The excuse for refusing to submit military action to a declaration of war is that things move too fast these days. Nobody has noticed that that is absolutely untrue. In the old days, fighting could have been going on for days or weeks before a declaration of war could be made. We are all aware that the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the War of 1812 had already ended.
The real situation is exactly the opposite. The congress can be assembled, fully informed, within the day of any incident. It is easier, not harder, to formally declare congressional support for a military action. People are used to hearing the word "faster" in connection with modern technology, so as soon as someone says this is an excuse for not consulting congress, our mindless political commentators, and our mindless people, accept the word without any thought.
It isn't true, that's all.
IF IT'S RESPECTABLE, IT'S STEALABLE
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Poor Gingrich. All his revolutionary ideas either 1) were abandoned, or 2) became Clinton programs. Get used to it. As long as conservatism is respectable, that is going to happen to every conservative leader.
Respectable conservatives are always upset because liberals, they say, steal their ideas. But the only initiatives respectable conservatives will pursue are those which do not offend liberals. If they work, and they do not offend liberals, then liberals adopt them. This seems a rather obvious conclusion.
If a conservative initiative is one liberals cannot adopt, they scare respectable conservatives away from it by declaring it unrespectable.
One of the most obvious things the new congress could have done in 1995 was to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA had financed obscenity, and, in any case, what on earth are bureaucrats doing financing what the government decides is art? If the government is allowed to define what "art" is, what can it not define for us?
The NEA is tiny, but the symbolism is important. So conservatives wanted it done away with, pronto. Note that, after two full terms with a Republican majority in congress, I refer to the NEA in the present tense.
Once the Democrats pulled out their big guns on the talk shows, Republicans backed down on the NEA. Cutting funding for the arts would make respectables look unsophisticated.
I once held a joint press conference in Washington for Boston antibusing marchers and Kanawha County anti-textbook protesters. We brought together two grass roots protests against the Washington education establishment, and several congressmen addressed us. Republicans said busing didn't end because Peter Rodino, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would not let antibusing bills reach the House floor.
Rodino has been out a long, long time, and the buses still roll.
And when proposals came up to do away with racial quotas in hiring, liberals threatened to call Republicans naziswhowanttokillsixmillionjews, "racists," and "divisive." So Republicans backed down.
So when the English-only initiatives got popular support and were put on the ballot in California, respectable conservatives were threatened with being called "divisive," "racist," and naziswhowanttokillsixmillionjews.
So Republicans backed down on the English only initiatives.
So when proposals reached the California ballot to cut illegal aliens off the public dole, liberals threatened to call conservatives "divisive," "racist," and naziswhowanttokillsixmillionjews.
So conservative respectables backed down on cutting illegal aliens off from US-taxpayer-financed benefits.
All three of these initiatives passed overwhelmingly by popular vote in California. So Republicans just lost the governorship in California. Democrats control both Houses of the legislature in California. When reapportionment takes place in California, where about an eighth of the entire US House will be elected in the next decade, Democrats will control it.
As for federally financed dirty textbooks, if the Republicans don't have the guts to challenge the bureaucrats defining "art," how could they possibly question their definition of education?
Before we condemn conservative respectables as lacking raw guts, let's look at what they had the courage to propose.
In 1992, Ross Perot won 19% of the national vote, the largest third-party vote in this century. Perot's big demand was a balanced budget.
In 1994, Republicans had the courage to formulate a novel objective: a balanced budget.
Republicans got a lot of votes demanding a balanced budget, so Clinton went along with it.
No problem.
Dole screamed bloody murder in 1996, saying Clinton had "stolen" the balanced budget. The point is, if the only thing Dole had guts enough to propose were things respectable liberals could adopt, why shouldn't Democrats adopt them?
Conservative respectability is, by definition, unable to do anything that the left cannot scare them away from or adopt itself.
Once again, during the Clinton crisis, we are being told how Europe is looking down on us. We are told that those Europeans are really sophisticated, and we're not.
Thank God.
There is a particular segment of European opinion leftists love and are always referring to this way. These are the Europeans who see themselves as fashionable and intellectual. They are almost never right about anything.
What is never mentioned is what all that sophisticated European opinion has done to Europe. It hasn't been that long since Europe was still cleaning the blood off its streets from the results of its own wisdom. Twice. European wisdom, in the form of "balance of power," gave us World War I. Then, after that bloodbath and wiping out a generation of its sons, European sophistication handled the peace so well they got World War II. At the end of the second slaughter, European intellectuals had another hero -- Joseph Stalin.
And the only reason all those brilliant European socialist intellectuals aren't standing in Communist bread lines today is because middle Americans weren't stupid enough to trust Stalin.
European "intellectuals," the most sophisticated of the sophisticated Europeans, worshipped Uncle Joe. Almost every single trendy European movie producer or university professor was either an outright Communist or a strong sympathizer. French intellectuals were famous for being Marxists.
As Communism was collapsing of its own silliness, they claimed they had been suddenly turned off on Communism because they read Solzhenitsyn. These geniuses had the Berlin Wall and walls around every Communist state to look at, but they didn't get it. But it is critical to remember that Communism, a theory so beloved of sophisticated European intellectual leaders, did not collapse because it was brutal. This idol of those smart European opinion leaders collapsed because it was SILLY!
These are the intellectual LEADERS of the geniuses we are supposed to listen to!
Those "sophisticated" Europeans are always talking about how "violent" Americans are. Look at THEIR recent history!
What could be funnier than a group of people who just finished slaughtering each other by the tens of millions - twice - whining loudly about "violence" in America! Americans will never match the sheer volume of violence Europe has had. But Europeans are like good dogs: they kill when they are told to.
That makes it all right, you see.
Killing on command even makes killing "sophisticated." Europeans are, indeed, very obedient people. They only commit violence on a horrendous scale when their betters put them in costumes, give them guns, and tell them "Go kill!"
Liberals like European opinion because it is obedient. When their European "intellectuals" told them that the economy would be efficient if the government owned all industry, the Europeans took them seriously. But nobody out in the American hinterland ever took that nonsense seriously.
When European intellectuals told them that the way to handle Communism was to reason with those reasonable people, only the rednecks and chauvinists back in the American heartland said that was nonsense.
If somebody with a college degree says it, Europeans will take anything seriously.
If you want to know what passes for opinion in Europe, just read the Boston Globe. Europeans and Canadians think like New Englanders, no matter which political persuasion they claim to be.
So now that liberal opinion has gotten too silly for Americans to repeat it, they are using Europeans.
Today, anybody who repeated the standard leftist line on American television would be laughed off the air. In the 1960s, all the "with it" people said that the economy would be efficient if the government owned and ran it.
By the 1980s, no commentator with an American accent could survive repeating that nonsense. So they got Christopher Hitchens, with his British accent, to repeat it.
For all our worship of European sophistication, we do not expect them to make sense the way we would expect an adult American to. In their desperate search for a liberal talk radio host, the media finally found an Englishman who works out on the West Coast. If he had an American accent, his listeners would tear him apart. So every time the media have talk radio people on, they include this one pitiful little Englishman.
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