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Pete du Pont Should Be President
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 3, 1988
Happy New Year everybody. Why? Well, one reason is that now the non-liberals (including the conservatives) can be fore something.
That "something" is rather a some-body. He is a presidential candidate actually telling us what it is that he is for - and in an articulate way - for a change.
Pete du Pont is the former governor of Delaware with a distinguished record of accomplishment in leading his state. But elections are seldom won by distinguished accomplishments, rather they are won by promises and those usually on emotional issues around which the candidate can rally people who care and people who will work - together.
If the latter observation seems to be a contradiction in terms, at least when it comes to conservatives, you are probably correct for they seem hell-bent to stick a knife in one another's back rather than to get their stories together and unite around a common cause. But du Pont seems particularly well-suited to help overcome all this, not only for conservatives but for liberals, non-liberals and others who have become disenchanted with the establishment's status-quo. A good example which lends itself to this unusually bright, competent and caring man's leadership is the voucher system proposal for universal choice in elementary and secondary education.
In a speech more than a year ago du Pont explained the problem: "Education is one of the last government monopolies. Government tells us where we go to school, what subjects we take, what we read and what we learn. The way you break monopolies is with competition. Some insist competition will destroy our schools. I believe competition will save our students." Wow! Did you get that, my friends? He is separating the special interests in education from the students who should be our main, if not only, concern. What a switch!
Why is that a switch? Well, because the way to get elected has been historically to appeal or even sell our to the special interests. It is well-known to veteran political observers that hardly any bigger, more powerful, more wealthy and more arrogant lobby exists in Washington, D.C., than the National Education Association, which opposes vouchers with a vengeance.
Special interests always oppose ideas embracing freedom of choice as there can hardly be special interests without special privilege. That, my friends, is exactly what Insane City, D.C., is all about. If you don't believe it get yourself a list of all the lobbyists and organizations that maintain massive headquarters and huge staff of ex-politicians and ex-bureaucrats all directed to suck money from the huge honey-bucket of the U.S. government. (If you haven't noticed that bucket has not only begun to leak but its "suckers" are soon to be stung by the worker-bees.)
All this doesn't seem to scare du Pont, who advocates giving parents a greater say in where their kids go to school thus forcing schools to improve. He would begin by providing current education assistance to the needy in the form of vouchers. This just may provide the presidential candidate the emotional motivation necessary for his potential boosters to get out and get informed about vouchers and better education for their kids. This is one arena where middle-class America is likely to rise up in revolt, i.e., where their children's future is plainly at risk. It just might work.
"We need a national schooling and training bank," says the former governor. "It should have simple rules. Everybody in our country would have the opportunity to receive schooling, training, or retraining. Eighteen-year-olds could go to any college or to any vocational school where they are accepted. So could forty-year-olds. You could borrow as much money as you need, and the government would guarantee the loan. But you'd have to borrow it at market rates and pay it back yourself. The opportunity is there, but it's your responsibility because it's your future."
Pete du Pont calls himself the "damn right" candidate. The Union Leader newspaper of Manchester, N.H., next door to Vermont, which has had a successful state voucher system for decades, puts it this way: "He (du Pont) says that when he tells people in plain English what needs to be done, the people tell him, 'You're damn right!'"
The other Republican candidates merely talk about production and not raising taxes. As a working governor of Delaware Pete du Pont has done all those things and proved which ones work and should work. So indicates the famous New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper. That's why they believe that Pete's the man for the job of president. Hat's off for the non-liberal press.
That's why we can have a happy new year - and how.
Craig Standing Up for Idaho
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 10, 1988
The headline on the editorial read: "Why doesn't Craig go play with his bulldozer?" Thus began a noisy north Idaho newspaper's new year blasting Congressman Larry Craig's rather obvious skepticism. Craig doesn't like the new so-called compromise wilderness bill.
The compromise seems to be newsworthy because it arises between Idaho's Democrat governor, Cecil Andrus, and Republican U.S. Sen. James McClure who have agreed to add another 1.3 million acres to Idaho's already vast wilderness area. Craig, however, thinks most Idahoans in his district have had enough of the environmentalists' "No Trespassing - Keep of the Grass" signs already. Hence the 1st District representative comes in for a dose of editorial extremism in the north Idaho paper.
But the framework for the dialogue between the parties is hopelessly obscured by the media. It is, therefore, unfortunate that most citizens are continually confused by what many hear as only a continual hassle. What that hassle is all about, nonetheless, is tough to see through partly because there are almost no Idaho newspapers which are flaming protectors or promoters of the idea of private ownership, i.e., forests, recreation areas and grazing lands.
By way of a bit of background: (1) Idaho already has more than 20 million acres of government-owned national forest, of which almost half is roadless wilderness now. It is therefore easy to see why Craig says: "Idahoans feel they have contributed enough to the wilderness system. If, after study, this proposal promises to further restrict Idaho industry and Idaho workers I won't be able to support it." (2) Andrus said he realizes the bill will be controversial and "won't satisfy everybody." McClure says, "I don't think it will satisfy anybody." (3) Despite what the media tells you Andrus is no moderate. On so-called public lands he is pretty much a socialist. McClure, on the other hand, is increasingly mostly moderate (his number one administrative assistant in Washington is thought by some to be even more of a wimp than McClure's pal, Vice President George Bush. And don't think for a moment these career staffers don't have influence on their boss.)
Andrus' main accomplishment as secretary of the Interior was passage of the Alaska Lands Law of 1980 which stopped development of 159 million acres in that poverty-stricken state. McClure, while thought to be a friend of development-minded businessmen, has virtually no wild-eyed private property media zealots on his moderate side to offset editorialists like the one in north Idaho scolding Craig. This makes McClure's moderation a whispering voice in the wilderness.
One liberal political reporter in Boise suggests "anyone to the right of McClure or to the left of Andrus risks losing credibility with the decision-makers in Congress." Egad! McClure, himself, is the decision maker. At least for the middle-of-the-road conservatives. Editorially, then, where does this leave him? With almost no help at all. This is true especially now with even the Press-Tribune rubber stamping what amounts to the environmental extremists' one-sided compromise - for even more wilderness lock-up.
The north Idaho editor who rests rather consistently well to the left of "glasnost" says in his asinine editorial savaging Craig: "Idaho has been locked for years in a struggle between industrial, recreational and conservationist uses of the vast acreage of raw natural forest." He also called Craig "narrow-minded, lacking grace, kooky and silly." Nowhere in Idaho do McClure, Craig or Symms ever get that kind of moral support against their ultra-liberal opponents. Small wonder McClure wobbles sometimes. He could surely use some moral support from a fierce and sympathetic paper.
A less strident and less socialist editor, in the event he chose to, could have challenged north Idaho's main wet-liberal editor noting that to Idaho's "locked-in land struggle" should be added one more use. That use should be to privatize property for the sake of freedom. It was superbly stated by Catholic Pope Leo XIII in his papal encyclical Rerum Novarum around the turn of the century: "The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, would be the inviolability (holy status) of private property."
Maybe McClure, then, would have seen fit to stiffen his spine enough to have pleased at least the conservative Catholics - on principle.
Give Birchers Equal Time
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 17, 1988
The famous television talk-show star, Phil Donahue, hosted a bevy of so-called card-carrying communists last week. Without doubt the chief of these People's Republic of America suckers was Gus Hall, himself the head of the Communist Party (CP-USA), so one cannot gainsay the left-wing Donahue for not going right to the top in his quest for qualified spokesmen for the world's foremost left-wing group. These are the communists' very own representatives of CP-USA.
So far so good for NBC-TV's most popular and in all probability one of the highest paid multi-millionaires performing on TV in the world. But let's give credit where credit is due and say Donahue is showing the commies what damn liars they are when they speak about free speech and free elections. They don't have either one, of course, but they must have something pretty successful or they wouldn't have so many admitted Marxists (and no doubt many more non-admitted communist sympathizers) professing in our colleges and universities all across our own country.
Still, the U.S.S.R. representatives have freedom of speech in the U.S.A. even if they don't appreciate it and even if they put no public pressure at all on their own mother country to do likewise. Donahue perhaps helps the case that free speech works over here.
Comes now the "other side of the story" about which Donahue and many members of the media folk prattle so much. Just what do you suppose it would take to get him to invite an equal number of articulate and well-known anti-communists with equal stature to appear together on his programs? The accompanying gesture of grace and good taste, of course, would be to treat with at least equal respect those whose views are opposite to his communist guests of last Tuesday.
Donahue's not such a bad fellow you say. He might do it. He's certainly clever and not afraid of controversy. Indeed, the success of his famous program depends on it. But you might well inquire - just who would Donahue find to counter-balance Gus Hall and his communist comrades?
Good question! The answer is almost too good to be true. At least it's almost too obvious. Let me explain.
Without a doubt the policy of the Donahue programs, both stated and inferred, is to tell what appears to be both sides of big questions that are on the minds of the American public. Especially this is true of controversial matters - the more controversial the issue the more the flamboyant TV host likes to interview the players. With one rather obvious exception, that is. It is virtually a lead-pipe cinch that Donahue will not invite the John Birch Society (JBS) people to counter-balance his extreme left-wing (read, communist) guests.
Admittedly there is some precedent for not allowing the Birch folks to get proper exposure on a nationwide, high-viewership program such as the Donahue show. Almost never does the nightly news on major network TV stations interview John Birch Society representatives even though they have full-time professionals at work all over the country and have had for years. Why?
The networks, wire service reporters and other media people go to great lengths to get in-depth discussions, interviews and opinions from the communists both in this country and abroad. Donahue himself arranged a satellite TV broadcast exchange directly from communist "news" headquarters in the U.S.S.R. It was broadcast on the Donahue regular show here in the U.S.A. and presumably there was a similar TV broadcast over there in the Soviet Union. Sort of the proverbial one ant and one elephant "equal-time" deal.
My point is simply that Donahue and his producers lean over backward (or should I say, left-ward) to be fair to our bitter worst enemies, the communists and their "civilian" spokesmen. But their obvious counterpart, the anti-communist John Birch Society, gets almost no recognition at all. Why?
It is also true that when the Soviet Union shot down KAL-007, an unarmed, civilian airliner killing more than 250 innocent passengers, they also killed the president of the world's best-known and most famous anti-communist organization. He was the John Birch's very own Larry McDonald, also at that time a sitting member of the Congress of the U.S.A. Yet, not one single major network TV interview was held with that organization about their fallen leader. An obvious omission! Why?
Now then, I have never been a member of the John Birch Society. My own "anti-communist" efforts, and they are considerable, consist mostly of an attempt to show how free market capitalism, properly understood, makes for the best, most free and most humane system in the world. Still, I want otherwise popular, influential and powerful programs like Donahue's to recognize an obligation, i.e., to allow their viewers legitimate hearings from one of the most decent, honorable, God and family and country loving, intelligent and patriotic groups in America - the JBS.
Even if and when they, too, might be wrong, just as Donahue is, about 50 percent of the time.
GOP Tosses High, Hard One
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 24, 1988
An editorial in the Idaho Statesman, an enthusiastic cheerleader for extreme liberal Gov. Cecil Andrus, literally screamed for the Senate Republicans to confirm a controversial appointee by Andrus.
It was to fill a vacancy on the state Tax Commission which required a Republican, so Andrus chose one who bolted the GOP last year in order to support him (Democrat Andrus) for governor. A neat little caper, of course, but Sen. Rachel Gilbert, R-Boise, and others, took exception to rewarding former state Rep. Larry Jackson of Boise for publicly supporting his party's chief political enemy.
It wasn't that they challenged Jackson's right to support whomsoever he wanted for governor. It was more that they thought (1) such a "sell-out" Republican should not be actually rewarded by appointment to an influential state tax policy-making commission and (2) that Andrus, whose appointments to high-ranking posts ever since he became governor have been mostly way left of center, hence should be challenged. It's called playing "hardball" and virtually every successful politician for generations has done it, at least whenever they can get away with it.
Gilbert got on the phone when the word first got out that Andrus was paying off his friend Jackson for such obviously political reasons. Again, it is one's political philosophy on tax policy, economics and regulation that have profound effects on jobs, growth, property rights, etc. in the state. These are issues Democrats and Republicans have fought about historically, oft-times spilling lots of ideological "blood" thereby. (Interestingly, all the while they both steadfastly decry a philosophical contest of ideas.)
Two statements in the Statesman's editorial are particularly asinine regarding Jackson's rather substantial defeat for confirmation by the Senate: (1) This will assure Andrus "won't appoint a David Leroy Republican to the commission if Mr. Jackson is rejected." Sufferin' succotash! Of course he won't. He wouldn't have to, especially with such weak-sister competition. As I said, it's called hardball. Andrus plays it for all it's worth, all the time. What are the GOP stalwarts to do? Roll over and play dead? Nuts!
The silk-stocking liberals in Boise hold sway on most policy-making matters anyway, but when they masquerade as "moderates" in the Republican Party it is, well, at best intellectually dishonest. Politics is long on the latter, but it's all the more disgusting when it's applauded by a newspaper claiming to keep 'em honest.
Comes now the editorials' point No. 2. They correctly anticipated Jackson's rejection for the Tax Commission post, so their first paragraph was fodder for the TV program That's Incredible. This comes about because, of course, like Andrus and Co., they tend to endorse all politicians who want more government, more taxes and more regulation, thus the editorialist warned: "The Republican senators who vote on Mr. Jackson's nomination should ask themselves: Are they going to put the state of Idaho first or the Republican Party? The answer should be obvious." It is. It is indeed obvious. But the paper cannot see anything obvious past their typically extreme liberal nose.
The GOP senators always put the state of Idaho first. That's why they claim to be Republicans. Except, of course, those who are in it for the power-kick only, often caring less about which party's so-called principles and policies are the best. Boise's full of 'em. But so do the Democrats see it the same way - only they advocate other policies and/or other people.
That's why we have two political parties. At least that's why we claim we have two parties. They used to enumerate their principles. Remember?
All of which brings me to the punch line. If David Leroy had not tried to be a George Bush wimp, i.e., be all things to all people, put his finger in his mouth then held it up to see which way the pragmatic wind was blowing - he would no doubt have been elected governor. He came close as it was, but Andrus "out-principled" him, so to speak. The Democrat's socialist leanings were at least less obscure, hence less offensive to voters than Leroy's whispering whimpers.
Still, lots of voters were scared stiff of the likelihood Andrus would appoint left-wingers to most every important post - which he has.
What then does this say for Jackson? It says two things. (1) Maybe Jackson was right to not support Leroy, but (2) was he right to support his party's chief political enemy? Or, is there yet a third question: Is there really a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties, after all? Especially in Boise?
The spunky, articulate and intelligent female state senator, Rachel Gilbert, thinks there probably is a dime's worth. But whether a dime or a dollar, she evidently wasn't about to let the government-loving Andrus both call the shots and set the price for what few principles her chosen party may have left. (Pun intended.)
Some More Roses and Raspberries
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 31, 1988
There is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us that is illbehooves the rest of us to say anything but - roses and raspberries, so:
Roses for that great human being and news commentator, Paul Harvey, who brings us some good news along with the bad. Thursday he said that public charity was down, but private charity was up. "
For example," he noted last Thursday, "private welfare for the past six years was up 77 percent." And while the major media was both consumed and pre-occupied with divorce, adultery, or the likes of philanderers Sen. Gary Hart and TV preacher Jim Bakker (whatever happened to Teddy? Ho, ho, ho) Harvey tosses a bouquet of roses almost every day to some husband and wife's 50, 60 or 70 years "on their way to forever together." How come these are so seldom newsworthy to Dan Rather and Company
Raspberries to state Sen. John Peavey, D-Carey, a former Republican now turned Democrat. Last week on the government TV (Channel 4) he scolded the GOPers whom he himself abandoned to join the more left-wing of the two parties. Peavey thought Larry Jackson, former Republican "moderate" (media euphemism for liberal), whom Gov. Cecil Andrus picked to fill a vacancy on the powerful state Tax Commission, should have been confirmed by the Senate. The position requires Andrus to appoint a Republican so he found one who headed up a statewide "Republicans for Andrus" committee. It almost worked.
The governor was just paying off his political debts as he has in several other similar cases. Peavey claimed Jackson was "well-qualified." But he was not. He failed the litmus test. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what politics is all about - in spite of how both the pundits and the politicians lie about it.
Roses for the Nampa Chamber of Commerce which last week hosted one of the sharpest, most articulate and outspoken state senators in all of Idaho, Sen. Rachel Gilbert, Boise. She spoke to a packed house, as is always the case when she comes to Nampa, says that organization's spokesperson. The peppery politician told the group "You cannot give that Legislature enough money. They never, ever, have enough. Then they give 75 percent of it to government schools. Where are the spokesmen for two of the states' top private colleges who should be protesting such absurd and unfair competition against their two fine schools?" She meant, of course, Northwest Nazarene College (Nampa) and the College of Idaho (Caldwell).
Apparently the "floor-covering" in the chicken house is made of the same material covering the books in the halls of ivy hereabouts. Both schools struggle to keep their private doors open while big business, especially in Boise, screams for more money for the government schools. They want them to teach more vo-tech workers who in the opinion of many should be financed by their employers instead of at government expense.
Gilbert explained something the teacher's union i.e., the Idaho Education Association (IEA), never tells us: "They say Idaho teachers are paid 17 percent below the national average. But the even poorer taxpayer in Idaho," noted the Boise senator, "has to pay bills from an income that is 25 percent below the national average. Why isn't this, also, newsworthy?" A former teacher of many years herself, Gilbert says, "So don't give me this foolish kind of name-calling that I'm somehow against education. Nobody, but nobody, is against education!"
Roses, too, for Nampa farmer Maurice Clements, former two-term legislator and co-founder of the Caldwell free enterprise Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA) who asked Gilbert how she and her colleagues who turned down Jackson's Andrus appointment "go about defining a Republican as different from a Democrat?" Gilbert flinched, saying, "I won't put my foot in that trap."
Clements told his writer afterward he didn't question their refusing Jackson per se. He was rather trying to show that the GOP had even bigger spenders, bigger statists and bigger advocates of more government than the "too liberal" Jackson.
Unfortunately, Gilbert misunderstood the thrust of the unusually perceptive Clements who later opined to me, "Where could we find a Canyon County legislator who could or even would give a speech half as good as Rachel's?" Gilbert apparently thought Clements was trying to corner her in what the media put down as a litmus test often used to embarrass politicos who try to be intellectually honest. Still, she missed a great chance to expose the GOP's Achilles' heel: "Democrats in sheeps' clothing."
Little Books, Big Messages
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 7, 1988
In the mall last week came an unusual small book the title of which struck me as quite welcome, and rare, too. While I have merely browsed the little booklet (106 pages) I read enough to feel comfortable saying hats off to Pacific Press Publishing Association (PPPA), the propaganda arm (i.e., in the good sense of the word) of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The title of the little paperback is What I Like About ... The Lutherans, The Baptists, The Methodist, The Charismatics, The Catholics, Our Jewish (sic) Friends (can't just say Jews?) The Adventists.
It is authored by George I. Vandeman whom we can see on his Sunday morning TV program, It is Written. Vandeman is as soft-spoken and low-key as Jim and Tammy Bakker are effusive and flamboyant. He also tends to give almost as much credibility to televangelism as the Bakker scandal has tended to take away, for whatever that's worth, one's own religious doctrine to the contrary notwithstanding.
The most fun part of the neat little book was of a wholly different order. I found out my copy was one of 387,000 copies mailed all over southern Idaho from the Wyoming line to Burns, John Day, Ore., and from Nevada to north of McCall as part of a huge $75,000 project. Wow! Wahddaya know? A real live church actually saying something nice about a few of their competitors. The PPPA book even gives a name and address where each of the other churches could be contacted. Egad, religious bigotry may never be the same again.
Comes now another little book (76 pages) on quite a different, although inter-related, subject-financial planning, economics and believe it or not - freedom and responsibility.
Book No. 2 entitled Fall Notes comes to me by the way of my good and faithful friend, Harry Langenberg, a successful broker and freedom fighter at the financial firm of Newhard, Cook and Co., of St. Louis, Mo., with whom I do no business at all but about whom there is much to say. Too much to cover but lightly here.
Doubtless my copy of Langenberg's little book is one of a tiny number that may find their way into the hands of a few of Harry's friends in Idaho, but in some important ways it is as unorthodox in financial circles as the PPPA book is in church circles. Here's why.
Fall Notes (1987) now in its 43rd year is "... an approach applying the economic principles of the Austrian School (of economic theory) to the 'world of affairs,' in an effort to improve (financial) interpretations and investment results."
Chapter II begins, "The Economic Decline (1966-68 to 1987); Unrecognized But Factual." Other sub-headings read:
"Federal Surplus or Deficit, Money Supply and Credit Growth, The Bond Market, The Stock Market," along with better than most but similar graphs and charts, etc., much as you'd expect in an investment book. But now wait until you see the non-similar parts of Langenberg's once-a-year message to his friends, customers and what he calls the "world of affairs." It's in the form of commentary but also an advocacy absolutely unheard of in most monetary publications. Here are a few examples:
"The reader of course should recognize throughout Fall Notes the strong biases and opinions in favor of a limited government with a commensurate increase in individual freedom and restoration of traditional moral and cultural standards." Raising the standards, he says, can't help but improve both sides. Wow! Would your broker be half so bold?
"The major issue facing our society today, whether or not we recognize it, is collectivism - socialism versus individualism - free enterprise. The battle is for men's minds." Blockbustingly true!
"The continued progress of civilization would therefore depend on the successful demarcation between private enterprise (i.e., laissez-faire economics) and traditional spiritual and moral values. It must be remembered that the individual has two sides - material and spiritual. At different times, the individual may be more spiritually motivated than materialistically and vice versa - a factor which (for financial planning) cannot always be determined in advance."
There you have it my friends: two caring, if rare, and unorthodox little books right here at home. Each with a timely and wonderfully controversial message.
What She Really Wants Is In
By Ralph Smith
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 14, 1988
The late, great, if controversial, Sigmund Freud (rhymes with Floyd), he undisputed father of psychoanalysis, had this to say about women: "Despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, I have not yet been able to answer the great question that has never been answered: "What does a woman want?"
Well, Dr. Freud never met north Idaho state Sen. Marti Calabretta, D-Kellogg, who knows exactly what she wants, at least when it comes to restricted membership in perhaps Boise's most exclusive men's club founded in 1890, the same year Idaho became a state. According to press reports, the Arid Club members recently voted to continue their 100-year-old ban on women having lunch at their swank new clubhouse on the Boise River.
Calabretta called on her Senate colleagues to boycott the club's new facility when, and one supposes, if, asked to attend meetings in their official capacity. The militant feminine legislator, in a rather spirited interview on the government Tv (Channel 4) and in an Associated Press story, said: "I would hope we would not have to have a legislative remedy," citing last year's U.S. Supreme Court decision that forced other all-male bastions like the Rotary Club to open membership to women.
She called the club's new facility "a shiny new cancer (sic) that sits along the Boise River. The Arid Club should understand it is eliminating half of the talent in this state," Calabretta said.
Now then, one could make a whole lot of observations both pro and con about the lady politician and the tycoons, but first of all this writer doubts very seriously there are any "official" meetings held in the exclusive men's club. Certainly no "official" group whose legislative membership included one or more female politicians ever need be scheduled there.
In the unlikely event such a thing were to be scheduled it might be an obvious error and if so could be easily corrected. The legislators, even those leaning toward a little male chauvinism, are not against lady legislators, per se, and furthermore, luncheon meeting rooms in Boise are not all that scarce anyway. So what's the problem, you ask?
Well, the problem is that somewhere along the way our public affairs have slid out from under the umbrella of individual liberties and rights of free association into a kind of forced egalitarianism. One wonders about the Womens Club of Boise or the giant international PEO Sisterhood (organized 1869) which is so secret that the initials' actual meaning are not even known to Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson or Rick Coffman. Are these and others soon to become victims of the victimless crime of our alleged "apartheid?" Or should free association actually be on the way out in America as many have been predicting for years.
In his powerful new book, A World Without Heroes, George Roche, president of Hillsdale College, tells us about anti-heroism. "Militant egalitarianism, for one: that obsessive urge all about us to deny all individuality and reduce everyone to 'social units' of statistically identical condition. Wages are to be equalized, school classes levelled to the rate of the slowest child, the successful or the rich humbled. A collectivist bent is certain anti-heroism. The anti-hero, like the adolescent, is the perpetual sucker for 'group information,' and attributes mystical qualities to the group. 'Peer pressure' and the voice of the mob reduce his guilty feelings. Like a child he thinks history began at his birth." (Of course, "his" applies to both sexes.)
Anyone who cannot see that women are sometimes discriminated against just has to have poor eyesight, and that in many cases it is poor judgement. But to suggest the government - that greatest, most arrogant discriminator of all time - might be called in, even maybe, to "have a legislative remedy" as one simply must infer from Calabretta is, well, scary. It is scary especially coming from one of the power-brokers herself. Egad, shades of Orwell's 1984.
In a buttinsky editorial denouncing the Arid Club's policy (women and children are banned until after 5 p.m.) the Idaho Statesman quoted the club's charter definition as one of "business and professional men uniformly congenial to one another as nearly as may be (and to) exclude therefrom bigots, propagandists, boosters, go-getters, uplifters, reformers and snobs." Hardly a threat to the proletariat, wouldn't you say?
Still elsewhere the lady legislator claims (undue) influence, one assumes of a political nature, is bought, sold or exchanged by men over their exclusive club's luncheon tables and, maybe, even smoke-filled rooms. Well, maybe so. Maybe not. But to the extent it may be so, Calabretta, in typical power-broker fashion, doesn't want to reduce said political "influence."
She just wants in on it.
If J. R. Simplot Needed a License
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 21, 1988
It may very well be too bad that freedom does not have any enemies. Surprised? Oh, it gets abused all right, even beaten up and sometimes actually destroyed in the process. But if freedom had enemies we could all gang up and destroy the destroyers, then live happily ever after.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Freedom is something like shaving in that each morning when you look in the mirror you have to do it all over again. That's the way it is.
A beautiful case in point is the compulsory realtor education law on which hearings were held last week in Boise. With a few notable exceptions the vast majority of real estate merchants testified at that hearing begging the legislators to pass a law making compulsory (they called it "continuing") education mandatory in order to get or keep a real estate license. Balderdash! A few of us were there to say just that. Here's why:
The great Adam Smith, said to be the father of capitalism and author of the second most influential book ever written, had this to say about businessmen: "Rarely do they ever get together even for wine and merriment except they conspire to restrain the competition." Well, they were at it again at the Legislature last week, to "restrain the competition" with yet another requirement to restrict free entry into their market. What follows is part of this writer's testimony at that hearing.
"I come to testify today in the name of a more practical version of consumer advocacy. My main interest is in the proper function of free enterprise or a market economy. Further, I wonder if I am luckiest because I am not a real estate merchant facing yet another layer of bureaucracy proposed, believe it or not, by my colleagues or am I more fortunate not being a politician such as yourselves who is constantly, if sincerely, asked to play God in everybody's life more and more every day.
"It is my opinion, as well as the opinion of at least four recent Nobel Prize winning economists, that the consumer will not, indeed cannot, win unless he can freely exercise his rights (his freedom of choice) in a market free from excessive political and regulatory harassment.
"The idea of a market economy could be called 'capitalism' or 'free enterprise' but the problem with these words is not in their use but in their misuses and misunderstanding. In the spirit of George Orwell's 'newspeak' or 'double-speak' many of the politicians and real estate merchants claim that capitalism and free enterprise are failing and that therefore we need yet another layer of bureaucracy to further restrain competition and entry into their market. Many of these same people will proclaim that in fact they themselves are capitalists and believe in free enterprise, yet they assault not only our intelligence but our language. They beg your permission to use the state's police power to destroy or at least maim free enterprise in the name of free enterprise by stopping its essential function of free entry.
"so what's this to do with compulsory schooling at a government's (or real estate board's) approved school for realtors? It has everything to do with it. You are being asked to infringe on my right to vote (read, choose) in the market and I vigorously protest it. It is my right as a consumer to decide what knowledge or schooling I think is necessary for someone to accomplish the task I have to be performed. As political leaders I hope that you will consider my requests as those of the consumer and above those of these businessmen asking for more regulation because it is competition and free entry into the market - not bureaucracy - that protects the consumer. And it does this every day rather than only when the Legislature is in session or the bureaucrats are in motion.
"To the extent there are indeed some problems in the real estate business let's look to the real estate merchants of good reputation and good training freely acquired. If you legislators feel you must 'protect' the consumer - by law, then make access to the courts easier, better, less intellectually constipated and not so horrendously expensive for the small citizen. Then to require a simple malpractice bond would be more effective than all the laws you could ever pass and do so on a competitively level playing field, as well.
"As an interesting aside, one wonders, had you lawmakers been in session some years ago and required so-called minimum schooling for food processors if Jack Simplot would have made it. Bless his heart, his eighth-grade education has allowed him to support many college professors who now support compulsory education."
Compare These Berries to Your Rose
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 28, 1988
A rose is a rose is a rose, so it is said, but without a raspberry for comparison one has only to remember the smell. Something else good to remember is just what a raspberry is. It is made by sticking one's tongue out, then pursing the lips tightly around the tongue, then vigorously exhausting a blast of breath.
The resulting unlady-like and unsophisticated noise is not only familiar to all, but puts one immediately in mind of much of what goes on in politics these days by ladies as well as men. So:
Raspberries for Rep. Kitty Guernsey, R-Boise (read, moderate Republican, of course) whose super-inquisitive and buttinski concern with the address of the legal residence of fellow Rep. Liz Allan-Hodge, R-Middleton, (read, conservative, of course) reminds us of the typical liberal Boise establishment: "You people in Canyon County should get down off your fuss of principle. Just send us the votes and the money - we'll make the decisions."
A similarly unfounded residence flap was pursued by Canyon County liberals seeking to rid themselves of the peppery bus pesky and articulate conservative a year or two ago. Allan-Hodge can be a real pain to so-called GOP moderates whose utopian egg she too often points at on their face.
Raspberries also to Sen. Ann Rydalch, R-Idaho Falls, who chairs the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee. Her committee heard testimony both pro and con about the bill proposed by the real estate association (wouldn't you know?) asking to use the state's police power to force the real estate merchants to conform.
By way of this they propose yet another law making their competition to suffer a prescribed number of hurdles in order to gain entry into the market of real estate sales. Rydalch, who is rumored to favor the proposed new law, even refused fellow Sen. Rachel Gilbert, R-Boise, permission to testify before her committee on the controversial, special interest bill.
Gilbert, also a peppery and articulate conservative, is a super-well-educated, competent and long-time real estate merchant herself, and is vigorously opposed to the compulsory "continuing education" bill. For whatever it may be worth, rumor also has it that some Republican politicos are quietly trying to get Gilbert to run for governor against incumbent Cecil Andrus.
The latter's membership in what Gilbert calls the male chauvinist pig's exclusive Arid Club only adds to her disdain and irreverence for the left-wing chief of state's leadership. He steadfastly refuses to denounce his club's right to exclude females.
Roses for Boise's new "conservative alternative" newspaper, Idaho This Week, a weekly tabloid formerly entitled Boise This Week. It is a welcome (to conservatives) effort to stem the tide and virtual monopoly on news and commentary now held by the super-statist and liberal daily Idaho Statesman. While the editor of Idaho This Week allowed his wife to scold this writer in last week's issue he has some off-setting good qualities; namely, he is a good writer, reporter and carries Ralph Smeed's commentary each week, so he can't be all bad.
He also embarrassed the governor's political supporter-advisers, Ripley and Associates, whose efforts to push the governor's agenda apparently constituted lobbying. Since the Ripley organization was not legally registered it faced both fine and imprisonment. Next day after Idaho This Week hit the streets Ripley was in the secretary state's office to register his disclosure. Ho, ho, ho.
Raspberries to Ms. Dotty Christensen of the Idaho Commission on the Arts whose liberal commitment to super-liberal causes is, well, well-known. She is reliably reported to have gathered up the entire pile of Idaho This Week copies left in the foyer of the House and Senate chambers. The little paper along with most of the state's other newspapers are stacked there for use by the politicians. Wife of a state fish and game commissioner, Fred Christensen, Ms. Dotty apparently deemed Idaho This Week a bad influence and not in the best interest of an "artful" presentation of Idaho's freedom of the press - or wanted paper to wrap around an Idaho trout.
Roses for U.S. Sen. Steve Symms who ran too fast last week for the Senate's sergeant-at-arms police squad. Unlike U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Oregon, who was bodily carried into the Senate chambers against his will and forced to vote, Symms escaped. He and Packwood were boycotting a Senate compulsory vote on an incumbent-entrenching bill promoted by the Democrats.
The GOP was filibustering the bill and refusing to attend the session. Symms, who often runs in jogging marathons for 10 to 20 miles, was thus able successfully to escape and follow a precedent set by Abraham Lincoln years ago. Lincoln actually jumped out a window to avoid a similar confrontation when he was in Congress.
Using Government as a Billy Club
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 6, 1988
Now then, it is obvious that Democrats don't have blind faith in Republicans and Republicans do not have blind faith in Democrats, but both parties tend to have blind faith in government if and when they are in control of it. It is this control upon which we must refocus our attention and about which we must somehow gather a great deal more skepticism.
The broad definition of such a goal is called freedom. Both political parties agree it is a good word and a good goal, but both groups claim the other party is the bad guy who is taking our freedoms away. "Just vote for me and my party," they tend to say, "and we will give freedom back to you." They do this, you see, usually by taking freedom away or promising something no one can confirm. But it almost always results in more control.
To his everlasting credit U.S. Sen. Jim McClure, R-Idaho, then a congressman speaking at the College of Idaho years ago said, "No, politicians are not elected on their record. In fact quite the opposite. They are elected upon their promises."
What brings all this to my mind are two female Idaho state senators. One vigorously debated against more government by opposing the state's police power being used to force Idaho's real estate merchants into a scheme of compulsory attendance laws. "Continuing education" the real estate association lobby called it. Like whiskey prohibition laws in olden days the lobbyists claimed the new law would prohibit stupidity. Egad. How inane. Still the bill passed the Senate. I explained to the senator who lost: "Don't feel bad. The issue was lost before the debate. It was lost in the schools and in the news media, both of which tend to have blind faith in government."
The other lady senator begged her government-loving colleagues to fight discrimination (against her person, one supposes) because she is not allowed entrance into an exclusively men's club in Boise wherein women and children are allowed only after 5 p.m. To decry such exclusivity was certainly the lady politician's right, but she didn't stop her crusade there - unfortunately.
The state compels anyone wanting to sell liquor by the drink to pay tribute to the state's power by purchasing a work permit. It is also called a liquor license. Remember now, the state compels the men's club to get a license to serve booze. Nothing new you say? Well, maybe so.
But the female senator, a Democrat (the other, a dissenting realtor, is a Republican, for whatever it's worth and it isn't worth much anymore) wanted to use the state as a billy club. She tries to pass a bill, believe it or not, to the effect: "Now that the government has done you men a favor by 'giving' you a license - we've gotcha! You must reciprocate by letting women in your club."
Gosh! The lady has an even more exclusive club of her own. It's called the state. The government, she must think as do so many these days, should be used as a club. Yeah, a policeman's club.
Well, now, don't just poo-poo this asinine guilt-trip which so many state lawmakers try more and more to foist upon us to further their own ends. The feds do it, too.
Consider the Berlin Wall in Germany. Oh, it's not the same, but it concerns our government spending $300 billion to $400 billion each year on the paraphernalia of force to stop the communists from their discrimination. The government also has a "continuing education" campaign presumably against the communists. Consider the Soviets have to build a wall to keep people in. We are having to consider a wall (of sorts) keep people out.
Yet government can't even sell that simple idea of freedom. God bless America? Well, perhaps, but instead we seem hell bent for God to bless government. They ain't the same. Believe me, they really are not. And if some airhead tells you that we who want fewer laws are anarchists just tell him his story makes even less sense than saying he and his ilk are communists - because they want more laws (There's truth in this jest, by the way.)
A 1987 Gallup study found that 71 percent of the American people have an unfavorable opinion of the Soviet Union and that 70 percent strongly identify as anti-communists. Yet judging by other recent surveys, few Americans seem able to explain just how the Soviet system differs from ours. Indeed, the message conveyed by much of the media and in many of our schools is that the U.S. and Soviet states are roughly equivalent.
If one judges from the Idaho lawmakers' governmentality nowadays that's "roughly" what we are getting.
Campaign '88 Putting Me to Sleep
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 13, 1988
Super Tuesday has come and gone leaving the political pathway strewn with - you guess it - roses and raspberries, so;
Roses to the two politicians most everybody knew would win, i.e., Michael Dukakis for the Democrats and George Bush for the Republicans. That's no news, but now who can say "no news is good news?" The whole spectrum of both parties' candidates were about as exciting as holding your sister's gentle horse on a hot summer day. Yet there tended to be two exceptions. One in each party in fact. So:
Raspberries to most of the media, especially the network anchor persons. It's interesting that when their interviewers had the Rev. Pat up to bat they really bored in on just why and how and even if he was qualified for president of the U.S. Yet when they had the Rev. Jesse in the cross-hairs of their TV gun the bullets (mostly rubber ones at that) seldom made it out the end of the TV gun barrel. "Robertson only came in third," they said softly, virtually hoping against hope that nobody would ask how come Jackson got the endorsement of the Communist Party U.S.A. You don't hear that on network TV.
Raspberries for the faint-hearted GOPers who watched and read with rapt attention so as to ape the media punditry such as ABC's Sam Donaldson who called Robertson "nutty." The latter had claimed informants revealed to him that there were communist missiles in Cuba today. "Pooh, pooh," they said. Well, maybe so, but that's almost exactly what President John F. Kennedy's crowd said in the 1960s until sometime later when he was shown the actual missile photographs. Incidentally, JFK's subsequent "abortion," the psuedo-invasion of Cuba which followed later, was perhaps the single most disastrous event in the history of the defense of Western civilization. Still it received less stinging criticism from the whole media than did President Reagan's successful "invasion" or liberation of communist Grenada. Ask your favorite newsman why.
Raspberries again for the GOPers who pooh-poohed Robertson's allegation that Bush forces had bushwhacked him by timing a news story exposing evangelist Jimmy Swaggart to appear just prior to an important primary election. If Bush had to declare the worth to him in dollars of the in-kind free network TV publicity adverse to Robertson so far he (Bush) would be in clear violation of all the laws to limit campaign spending. Also let's not forget Bush's phony labelling of Reagan's economy proposals as "voo-doo economics" - as his 1980 campaign heated up.
Roses to Caldwell's private Gem State Academy which schools students through grade 12. Their principal, Kelly Bock, testified before a kind of stacked deck committee of the House of Representatives recently to oppose yet more government meddling into affairs which are none of their dang business. While Bock put it more politely, he testified to an overflow crowd as well as to the House committee that his school did not need yet another layer of government, vis-a-vis a work permit. Government lovers call it a license.
Bock says his school should be exempted. Unfortunately this fine school's record which is exemplary indeed isn't enough to assuage the politician's zeal to meddle and control. But it's unfortunate in the extreme that the few if growing number of private educators see it as merely minding their own business when they ignore other business and professional persons who are made to suffer, struggle and beg the government for a work permit.
To his credit, however, Bock did say that his school offered a Christian alternative to the "disastrous secular humanism" so often found in government schools today. Some government school officials also privately decry the situation, but are mostly precluded by law from doing much about it.
Roses to two distaff members of the Idaho Legislature who, along with some other not so outspoken members, gave vocal opposition to an effort to add, believe it or not, another responsibility to the Idaho Housing Authority. Sen. Rachel Gilbert, R-Boise, and Rep. Liz Allan-Hodge, R-Middleton, opposed adding a banking function to the agency. Earlier inquiry of the bank lobby disclosed no opposition, but a few did oppose the bill in the final stage. Small wonder. The banks get the money (interest) and the taxpayers get the risk. (They guarantee the loans.)
Lobbying for Common Sense
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 30, 1988
The Idaho Legislature is collectively hard at it trying for the taxpayers to cut spending and trying for the special interests to increase spending. Sort of like trying to suck and blow in the same breath.
The current mood or fad all across the country is to spend more money for education. Education now accounts for 75 percent of the state's entire budget. So the political witch-doctors wanting to be popular are teamed up with the academic witch-doctors (in several cases they are one and the same person) wanting to serve their own special interests and hoping nobody will notice what has been taking place.
How? Well, remember the old proverb, "Is the emperor wearing his beautiful new clothes?" Everybody thought he was until a little boy peeked - whereupon he exclaimed: "Why, the emperor has no clothes at all." They had been hoodwinked.
In this vein I suggest to one of the big shots in state education that they use their financial dilemma this year as a good and opportune reason to abandon the state's vast vocational education bureaucracy. "Good gosh, Ralph," I was told, "vo-ed is the most popular department we've got. And besides, who would teach the students how to make a living?"
Aside from the "emperor has no clothes" parable or what if the government were to give up its monopoly, I reminded the educator that Thomas Jefferson's idea was to teach the three R's and, furthermore, most qualified educators said liberal arts was by far the most important part of education. "True," they said, "but parents, students and teachers don't agree."
Well, if customers (parents and students) are to decide then why do government schools have to be compulsory? Of course there's no response to such a question except the old story that almost no one is for the free market for him or herself. They want it for others, but "my profession or job is different, i.e., deserving of a special no-compete status." Heaven help us if the government schools were half so gung-ho to teach free market theory as they now seem to be to teach evolution theory. Only that would be too controversial, I suppose.
But wait. If they hired exciting teachers to teach about freedom and the free market - gosh, they'd find themselves in the awkward position of having to question the state's compulsory attendance scene. Wow! That might open a Pandora's box of home schoolers and private competition, maybe even some education entrepreneurs. Egad.
My big shot friend in the state education bureaucracy did pose one good question: "Who would teach vo-ed and where would the money come from?" I replied that it'd come from the same place it comes from now - free enterprise. In other words, on-the-job training. But it would be voluntary and could be financed by abandoning the minimum wage law and let students earn while they learn. Unless, of course, one thinks taxpayers should continue to subsidize big business' "need" for skilled workers. Ho, ho, ho.
Educators are divided on this issue, but they tend to love liberal authors so let me quote the famous social scientist and educator, Dr. Paul Goodman, whose path-breaking book Compulsory Mis-Education may have the key. He cites no less a brain truster than the great Albert Einstein who sums it up wonderfully:
"It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern (he could have said government) methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, for this delicate little plant stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake," said the great scientist, "to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."
There you have it, my friends, Goodman the educator and Einstein the scientist on "Compulsory mis-education" and common sense. Except perhaps for one reason. The educators and the legislators, no matter how sincere and conscientious they probably intend, have only three "tools" to solve their problems: politics, bureaucracy and special interests. Incidentally, these are too often all one "tool" these days.
Unfortunately, the great scientist failed to tell us the connection between these three tools - and common sense.
Then again, maybe he didn't fail. Maybe there isn't any connection.
Ivy League-Style Intolerance
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 27, 1988
"Ronald Reagan may have carried 49 states in the 1984 election, but he didn't carry the nation's colleges. The years of Mr. Reagan's presidency have corresponded with frequent, virulent expressions of intolerance against conservatives on campus."
So began an editorial in the Wall Street Journal a fortnight ago. While it concerned a disagreeable confrontation between four conservative students at Ivy League Dartmouth College of Hanover, N.H., in particular, it also touched a sad condition generally prevailing on campuses all over America. The condition is an insufferably and overwhelming liberal bias. (Not unfamiliar on Idaho campuses too, by the way.)
Some Ivy League students decided to do something about it a few years ago and have organized a campus newspaper to tell the other side of the story, i.e., the conservative side. The paper is called the Dartmouth Review and got headlines in the national media especially a few years ago when one of the college administration people actually bit one of the conservative students. But most of the flaps were about the liberal bias on policy matters generally prevailing on campus including, even, a rather fanatic effort to prevent well-qualified conservative alumni from serving on the Dartmouth board of trustees.
Well, the paper survived and is in business today still trying to get what conservative students there feel is a decent hearing for non-liberal values, ideas and personnel. One suspects it survives partly because of a book one of the graduates published a while back entitled Poisoned Ivy. Authored by Benjamin Hart and boasting a forward by the famous William F. Buckley Jr., the book created a small storm of interest causing Buckley to suggest it would no doubt be compared to his own book on academic bias, God and Man at Yale. Reports vary, but a consensus exists that not a lot has since improved at either school.
Comes now a story in the Review describing Music 2 taught by a liberal, professor, William Cole, headlined: "Bill Cole, in His Own Words - Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing." It quoted Cole saying that sexism keeps women out of jazz, discoursed on nuclear waste and said, "all you guys are (white) honkies," according to the WSJ editorial. Professor Cole, who is black, objected, hollering at the conservative student reporters and calling them "white boy racists." The professor of music (believe it or not) used street language including the usual low class, if all-too-familiar, expletive deleteds.
Well, the students remembered Cole having sued the Review for some prior criticism of his teaching methods so on advice of counsel they handed him a letter offering equal time in their paper for a rebuttal. A violent and verbal exchange followed.
Fortunately the students took along a tape recorder with which they recorded the uproarious and ridiculously low class meeting and after which the school authorities "investigated." The result? a closed meeting. They charged the students with harassment, disorderly conduct and violation of Cole's privacy - after class, mind you, in a college classroom. So much for the liberal's double standard on freedom of speech.
Typically such freedom has been denied on campus for many famous persons especially for those representing conservative policies of the Reagan administration - not to mention the few conservative professors and students in American colleges and universities.
So what about the so-called music professors' indefensible behavior toward dissenting students? They had to start their own campus newspaper. Of the four students involved three got suspended for up to 18 months. The WSJ said that suspicion will persist against Dartmouth for "there have been so many incidents in the U.S. (schools) attesting to it that a pretext has been found here (at Dartmouth) to rid the school of some conservatives whose opinions are indeed vexations - nagging, annoying disturbing and often irritating."
So there it is again folks, academic bias documented once more on yet another campus. And hardly a single politician or big business tycoon here in Idaho has had the guts to even question what our state superintendent of public instruction, Jerry Evans, intends to do with the state's higher education philosophy. Unfortunately, so far as he's concerned, Evans' philosophy seems to be like the late labor chief Samuel Gompers'. Asked what his goal was for organized labor, the old union leader replied, "More!"
Evans doesn't seem to recognize that - Dirty old private schools need love, too. But they (private schools) can get neither their love nor their money by raising taxes.
Decline and Fall of America
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 3, 1988
"There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us."
That old saying has been around for so many generations that nobody knows just who said it, but news media people would soon go out of business if they (or we?) had to stop talking about "the rest of us."
Yet, one supposes, that is mostly what sells newspapers. Still, it should not be forgotten that it is not while the Idaho Legislature is in session that "no man is secure in his person nor his possessions," but rather - after the Legislature has adjourned and the new laws come into effect. It is only then we realize somebody goofed.
Much could be said about the Idaho legislative session just over and I hope it will, but what this writer fears is the lack of historical context within which the session's laws and repeal of laws will be looked upon and analyzed or criticized.
Unfortunately, most of today's media are not much interested in anything older than last week's scandal, yet some of them might make a little effort in that direction if we'd applaud those few media types who do try from time to time to offer some perspective within which to evaluate the political scene.
The last day of the Legislature, Thursday, saw what was easily the most heated and controversial issue of the session. Though there were others, the contractor's licensing law was the most skillfully lobbied, the most strenuously and heatedly pursued by organized contractors who were also legislators themselves. One has to wonder if special interest has now been given a new dimension.
The question has often been raised about teachers who are also legislators voting to increase their own salaries and benefits, but government education has become such a sacred cow that the media sees fit to present mostly only one side.
However, not having such sacred cow status the contractor's effort to saddle small contractors and individual entrepreneurs with more bureaucracy didn't succeed this time. But it will be back, no doubt, next year because the political zeal to regulate others through the religion called government is both alive and vigorous.
Clearly there are sincere people who want to protect the public from abuses of those few builders who do shoddy work and even lie to their customers. But the real question is which system does the best job overall for consumers, i.e., more bureaucracy or more free entry into the construction market - especially for the little guy.
It boils down to legislating morals. Whether or not they admit it the well-meaning politicians and the purveyors of special interest both want to legislate morality. Having made a religion of government, can it be done?
Comes now the place for some historical context within which we could gain insight into some of our more serious problems facing Idahoans and America today about public policy.
Remember the symptoms leading up to the collapse of the mighty Roman Empire? The American Record of Hagerstown, Ind., reminded us recently about the great Edward Gibbons' classic study of the mighty Roman governmental machine, its failure and its final fall after so many years of success.
He cited five primary causes for that fatal fall of the Roman Empire, some of whose leaders and scholars are even today considered superior to our own. It is only to be hoped they will furnish the proper context for judging our own public policy. They are: "The rapid increase in divorce and the undermining of the sanctity of the home; (2) the spiraling rise of taxes and extravagant spending; (3) the mounting craze of pleasure and the brutalization of sports; (4) the building of gigantic armaments and the failure to realize that the real enemy lay within the gates of the empire, in the moral decay of its people; and (5) the decay of religion and the fading of faith into a mere form, leaving the people without a guide."
The American Record asks: "Are these five fingers of death gripping the throat of American today?" I say they are, my friends, and that there is a direct connection between them and the mentality, both well-meaning and ill, hovering over many of the forces in the Capitol building of the state of Idaho.
Some added status for history and a historical perspective might help us and the media to see those connections. This might help warn us before the decline and fall of our own roaming empire.
Put Some Reason in Your Life
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 10, 1988
This year marks the 20th anniversary of what may very well be the most important magazine in the world. No, it is not Time, Newsweek, nor Life, nor National Geographic even with all their great pictorial presentations of what's going on around the world.
There are magazines of slightly more conservative persuasion, too, such as U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, Fortune and a few others catering to what business people like to hear, but seldom does one appear on the national scene having to do with ideas.
Yes, you heard it right, a magazine dealing almost entirely with ideas, i.e., ideas about freedom as opposed to conformity, statism, collectivism, utopianism, the welfare-warfare state and the whole governmentality state of mind that not only threatens to engulf the U.S. but the rest of the Western world as well. (The Eastern world already has it - in spades.)
This ever-so-interesting journal published in Santa Monica, Calif., was started back in 1968 by a Boston University journalism student, Lanny Friedlander, whose little mimeographed magazine started it all in the first couple of those 20 years.
"Inspired by the writings of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand," says present publisher Robert Poole, Jr., "and seeking to uphold the standards of learning and rationality proper to a university - and the freedom of thought and action on which they are based - he called the publication REASON.
"Rather than simply criticizing the actions of the SDS (Students for Democratic Society) and its allies, he took aim at their principles. While opposing the war and the draft and the corporate state, REASON raised the banner of individualism in opposition to SDS collectivism, of free markets in opposition to SDS socialism. Neither left-wing nor right-wing, REASON was presciently, libertarian."
If you think it's overblown to characterize REASON as possibly the most important magazine in the world, please let me explain. There are, of course, several ways to measure "importance" of a publication. Notice I did not say it was the most powerful or influential - except in the arena of ideas. I mean ideas concerning freedom and away from government intervention. Too abstract you say? Maybe.
But don't be too quick to judge Bob Poole whose devotion, passion and downright slavish hard work have made his intelligence, cleverness and perception shine through the fog of government, academia and, believe it or not, even a few businessmen.
Poole believes what the great Richard Weaver said in his famous Ideas Have Consequences book but he didn't stop there. He put his cleverness and perceptions of what ideas could do if people were left free - together with his quite adequate and agile brain to come up with a magazine of magnitude to sell freedom. His journal's slogan is "Free Minds and Free Markets," and does he do it? You bet!
Poole knew his freedom rhetoric would be no match for the left-leaning and super-interventionist FOREIGN AFFAIRS, the magazine of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and said to be the most influential magazine in the world. So he reasoned he would influence the influencers. He presents well the many divergent ideas on free markets, private ownership ad limited government through a rare and unique attitude on his part.
Ego is an occupational super-hazard in the field of intellectual persuasion, but somehow Poole has been able to rise above this trap. Using writers all the way from Nobel Prize-winning economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman clear down to a sharp, witty and communicative college student, for example, Poole has assembled a coterie of the best and brightest in his pursuit of excellence with ideas.
If you think for a moment that economics is the "dismal science," that all political scientists love only government policies and bureaucratic regulation and if you feel that people who think are stuffy, dull and uninteresting and impractical then read some reason back into your life - get some copies of REASON magazine and you'll be pleasantly surprised.
There is too much about optimism, new potential solutions and direction in REASON to list here, but one good summation comes from their book review editor, Lynn Scarlett: "And what about individual liberty? It is back on the political agenda, though mostly in rhetoric. Big government is bigger than ever. (So) Don't look to the politicians for liberty. Look to our poets and artists, our musicians and writers, our entrepreneurial mavericks, our mothers and fathers, and to the corner grocer."
She could have added: Like REASON has been doing for 20 years.
Standing Up for Freedom
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 17, 1988
The FALL NOTES 1987 is a once-a-year publication from the stock brokerage firm of Newhard Cook and Co. of St. Louis. What a rare style and approach is in this 75 page wrap-up of the past year's financial progress and regress.
Orthodox in some ways, of course, else no one would know what the business of stocks, bonds and money markets were saying, but the author of this booklet is himself a rare bird, i.e., he adds a new dimension to the investment world - freedom for individuals. Believe it or not, folks, the idea of freedom of choice being exalted and its loss warned about in a monetary booklet is rather big news. Maybe things are looking up for "2 plus 2 equals 4 economics" after all.
Consider what FALL NOTES author Harry Langenberg has to say in the first part of this unusual publication: "The reader should recognize throughout the strong biases and opinions in favor of a limited government with a commensurate increase in individual freedom and a restoration of traditional moral and cultural standards."
And that ain't all, either. He doesn't want his readers and investors to think he is merely mouthing platitudes so he frequently intersperses his financial observations with some meaty phrases. Onto the above quote he adds the why: "The author believes there is a close relationship between economic progress and moral and cultural progress. Raise the standards of either side and both sides can't help but improve. Most (financial and intellectual) sources treat the declines separately, whereas the attempt here is to interrelate them."
But this super-bright financial wizard of 42 years' advising and publishing experience sticks his neck out all the way and utters the unutterable, in financial journals, for his reader to relate to the real world of ideas: "The major issue facing our society today, whether or not we recognize it, is collectivism - socialism versus individualism - 'free enterprise.' The battle is for men's minds." So there you have it my friends.
Now ask your kids' favorite teachers or school principal how often those questions are even posed in their textbooks, not to mention explained favorably in terms of market capitalism.
There's more, of course, in FALL NOTES, quite a lot in fact, related mostly to the Austrian school of economic theory, but it isn't the only piece of good news for common people and common sense.
Comes now, better late than never, one supposes, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) based in Sacramento. I say "better late than never" because members of the liberal/left-wing persuasion tend to be (1) in the forefront of change, (2) much more supportive of their left-of-center comrades than are most conservatives to theirs, (3) more committed to ideas, concepts and change (they read more and write more books) and, perhaps for that reason, (4) tend to be more articulate when explaining and pushing their ideas.
There's more to it than this, of course, but as an aside and quite pertinent to this contest of ideas is the old saw defining conservatives as: "Those people who come down out of the hills after the battle and shoot their wounded."
Having a legal advocate helps avoid this.
The PLF is a public affairs advocate operating something like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) but in a mostly opposite direction especially concerning private property rights and limited government. The ACLU has been around for decades promoting, many say, permissiveness, promiscuity and what they like to call individual liberties. Often at odds with most highly-visible conservative advocacy groups the ACLU has sometimes given legal help to ever-so-few conservative causes.
Still, some accusations persist that no small amount of government funds have found their way into ACLU's liberal pocket. If they don't it would be a surprise because liberals excel at pumping juice from "Uncle Sap's" money tree.
In any event this is PLF's 15th anniversary and I say hallelujah, hat's off and a big bouquet of roses to them for they pocket no government funds, for sure. Want to know why? Fifteen years ago a dedicated group not unlike our founding fathers founded an organization also dedicated to "protecting and defending individual rights and freedoms. With a chair, a phone and an incredibly strong desire to provide a voice for the American taxpayer, PLF was begun."
1987 was their most successful year. The vision has become a reality even if long overdue. Like their counterpart (ACLU) they operate mostly in courtrooms and as friends of the court. Now they are the oldest, largest and most prominent public interest law firm in the nation dedicated to restoring and protecting not only individual freedoms but economic freedoms as well. They do this by "lawsuiting" in support of free enterprise, private property rights and concepts of limited government.
Now, here's why I am so sure PLF gets no government money? Believe it or not, the single factor that most distinguishes our country from Soviet Russia is the right to own and control private property - a fact our government tends to hate.
Roses for Professor Steve Shaw
by Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 24, 1988
"A rose by any other name would smell just the same." Of course, but my raspberries don't smell at all - they just sound bad - but they're fun to "pick" so:
Roses to Press-Tribune columnist and left-of-center political science professor Steve Shaw for getting some of the irate letter-to-the-editor writers off this writer's back. Shaw attacks "the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his like" for their many conservative efforts, etc. I don't often agree with Shaw, but guys like him need to be heard.
Raspberries to Northwest Nazarene College for not having an equally gutsy, articulate, intelligent and vocal professor cheering publicly for non-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market, private-property and limited-government ideas.
Roses to Idaho Secretary of State Pete Cenarrusa for being such a conservative nice guy. The popular Basque has been around for decades and everybody in his party (the GOP) loves him partly because he never makes anybody mad - publicly. They sometimes make him angry, as the news media did recently by spiking a good, if partisan, story he gave them. Had it been to the benefit of his political and liberal adversary, Democrat Gov. Cecil Andrus, explains Pete, it would have been front page. Andrus is also popular, but he has the ever-present liberal media to fend for him.
Raspberries for Cenarrusa, however, for what is otherwise an understandably alarming fund-raising letter recently signed and sent out for the GOP. "I'm afraid," he writes, "because the Democrats may seize control of our state Senate this year ... if only six more Democrats are elected they will have a majority." And, Cenarrusa concludes, that is what Andrus and his crowd are out to do. Moreover they're raising a lot of money to do just that. That's bad news.
What the kindly, concerned and conscientious GOP politician didn't tell us was - just why Democrats, Andrus and others are such bad news. Did Pete say they tend to be socialists? No! Did he say Andrus has joined hands with big business? No! Did he say Albertson's giant grocery-store chain was one of Andrus' biggest boosters? No! Did he say that the huge Idaho Power monopoly and their vice president for government affairs, Logan Lanham, had given Andrus money, moral and political support without which the latter could not have been elected to the state's highest office? No! Why? All these people and others have been big-shot Republicans for years and years. At least that's the generally accepted line.
Former Idahoan and super-big business tycoon Bill Agee, one-time CEO of Bendix Corp. which merged with the giant Martin Marietta Corp. a few years ago, said, "What this country needs is more partnerships between government and business."
Baloney! Well these businessmen may still claim to be Republicans, but something has changed. Do they now support the left-leaning Andrus as one of the early stages of "more partnerships between government and business?"
There's more, of course, much more that the affable and faithful GOP secretary of state could have told us, but pragmatically speaking, such things just aren't said out loud. "It wouldn't sound good," I've been told. "People wouldn't understand." Well, indeed they wouldn't. That'd be rocking the boat and GOPers are said to be the party of business and business - especially big business - doesn't like boatrockers, especially in the Republican Party to whom, it is said, go most of their political donations.
But if that were ever true, it's changing. Is Marvin Olasky's new book Patterns In Corporate Philanthropy, recently published by Capitol Research Center, he notes that "seven out of 10 dollars of corporate donations go to left-of-center organizations." If the Democrats in Idaho are not all left of center (and they are not) Andrus certainly is. But Cenarrusa says very little about this.
Why? Well, partly because he'd no doubt be asked to explain those in his own party who also love big government and big spending. Too bad, too. One reason it's too bad is that most of the Democrat, left-of-center support in Idaho comes from the teachers' union (IEA). They are the liberals in Idaho's government schools to whom most of the Boise GOP tycoons are falling all over themselves to give even more taxpayer money. All this in a never-ending, sacred cow, monopolistic, money-guzzling, orgy euphemistically called "economic development." It, too, is run by the government.
Roses for state Sen. Phil Batt who told the Caldwell Chamber of Commerce luncheon last week (1) that education was not virtually starving to death and (2) there was no direct connection between more tax money and quality education and (3) that massive amounts of tax funds being dumped into the government schools were wreaking havoc on private schools which, because of this, were unnecessarily hard-pressed to compete.
Raspberries for the media present to hear Batt's Caldwell speech and neglecting to note his third item, which he emphasized.
Risch Abuses His Power
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 1, 1988
Is it really true that state Sen. Jim Risch, R-Boise, is the power-mongering "Darth Vader" of the Idaho Senate? Is the president pro tem really evil, especially if a senator crosses him? maybe so.
In a recent display of the power he holds in his grip on the state Senate Risch came out swinging and arm-twisting to get his GOP crew to vote for the Associated General Contractors (AGC) special interest bill demanding all contractors must get a "work permit" in order to do business. This one was labelled "licensing" in the tradition of George Orwell's famous book 1984 in which he coined the word "newspeak." The word describes the euphemisms often used when public leaders want to avoid public awareness to what the purveyors of special interest are really up to. And they are often up to no good.
It has been said (ho hum) that politics make strange bedfellows. But there is a much better saying these modern days, namely, that: "Bedfellows make strange politics." The latter seems to be what is taking place all too often anyway in the Senate where Risch's leadership or power-mongering, i.e., depending whether one talks to his enemies or to his friends.
While it is nothing new to use power, even abuse power, in politics it is most certainly new when GOP political leaders such as Risch come out publicly in favor of a new inexperienced opponent in a primary race. (By the way, the election is soon, May 24.) He is publicly trying to install his own map in a GOP primary.
Sen. Phil Batt, R-Wilder, challenged Risch's pro tem post in 1986, but fell short a few votes. When one party tends to dominate a state legislature it is often inside the party where the real competitive bloodshedding goes on, but unfortunately the media is both shy and short on reporting these antics due in part to some understandable party loyalties and shy because the power mongers can share or stop stories the media loves to know about.
But Batt isn't the only state senator to buck up to Risch. Comes now Sen. Rachel Gilbert, R-Boise, an articulate, well-known and well-respected conservative Republican of many years' seniority in the Legislature. She is a well-known Boise real estate merchant whose frequent and gutsy stands on what she sees as points of principle gets her in hot water with the Boise big-shot business establishment as well as big shot Republicans. Nor is Gilbert's opposing Risch on his AGC special interest bill (it's designed to keep the small contractors out of the market) the only time she has challenged him. She does it all the time.
Why? It is reliably reported that he makes more money by being in the Legislature than any other single politician.
This income is said to run well into the substantial six figures, both directly and indirectly from the tremendous power he is able to exert on his fellow senators. For example, he enjoyed a rather substantial retainer from one of the horse racing groups when Gilbert suggested he had a big conflict of interest in a certain horse racing bill. But he refused to abstain, so lobbied and voted his "conflict" nonetheless in spite of the lady senator's protest.
Risch's power in the Senate is said by many to approach the awesome. This is done in many ways, but one former senators from Nampa when opposing Risch on something was called into his office to receive one of the pro tem's famous tongue lashings. Soon afterward the scolded senator was seen descending the steps of the Capitol building with tears in his eyes. I submit that a politician simply must worship that "job" in order to put up with such abuse. Yet the Nampan is said to harbor serious aspirations to run again. Egad!
But not Gilbert. The peppery senator not only refuses to take the guff so often put out by Risch that it has become his trademark, but she is right up front about it. Such audacity presents something of a dilemma for what many see as Risch's arrogance and overbearing dictatorial operation. If he is challenged too often then others who go to him for favors almost certainly will decide he has lost his "leadership." Unfortunately, that is still what it's called, but proper leadership is earned by respect and admiration - not mere raw power.
But power is the bottom line today. The media are in the same mode, so they tend to love it. Thus too often they write as though it is merely par for the course. Now Risch comes out publicly in the primary for Gilbert's green opponent. This breaks a long-established GOP precedent when a "leader" like Risch now portends to squelch the outspoken and competent Gilbert with his own personal choice, Gordon Trounsen.
How does Risch get away with this? Well, Canyon County people can ask their retiring senator, Phil Batt, or the other three senators, Atwell Parry, Jerry Thorne and Skip Smyser, about Risch's operation. If they are honest and up front they'll tell you he's bad news. If they refuse to take sides publicly, then you will know how Risch continues to get away with it.
Extra! Ralph 'Raspberries' Himself
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 8, 1988
If a dog bites a man it's not news, but if a man bites a dog - that is news! If Smeed gets a rose, well, he doubtless deserves it. If he gets a raspberry - Egad! But first:
Roses to fellow columnist and newsman (he gets to have it both ways) Sam Lang of the Press-Tribune for pointing out with great glee, at last, what he sees as an egregious error on the part of another member of the media. That other member was, unfortunately, me. Lang referred to this writer's chiding unnamed "members of the media present" to hear former Sen. Phil Batt (R-Wilder). Batt told an April 18 meeting of the Caldwell Chamber of Commerce that the state's education issue was somewhat overblown and that the government school's tremendous financial weight was proving to be too much of a burden to the state's private schools. The latter were thus desperately trying to compete with extremely limited non-government funds, and not too successfully, either. (One supposes this is aggravated by the nefarious certification requirements of the government's strangle-hold on education.) Although I didn't know it at the time, Lang turned out to be the newsman who reported on the senator's said speech. I complained that the story neglected to note one of Batt's major points critical to government schools "... which he emphasized." Lang says he did not neglect it. For the sake of friendly argument I'll give that one to Sam.
Raspberries, then, to Smeed for being in error, if indeed he was in error, on Lang's emphasis on part of Batt's message. And now a "strawberry" to Smeed (for grasping at straws?) Why? Well, my "usually reliable source" at which I grasped for my observation was no straw. It was none other than the one many see as the county's favorite politician, and the ex-senator Phil Batt, himself. I neglected to quote him directly. I would have. Although I must admit I love to take credit for bashing the media whenever I can, since they so richly (so often) deserve it, i.e., except that nice Sam Lang, of course, and my boss Rick Coffman.
Raspberries for Smeed and I do mean to apologize without tongue in cheek. Last week this column said Sen. Jim Risch, R-Boise, pro tem of the senate enjoyed a substantial retainer from "one of the horse-racing groups." It was the Fair Board instead. The context concerned what Sen. Rachel Gilbert, R-Boise, said was a conflict of interest on a bill then being pushed by Risch because he was on a retainer by the Fair Board. Thus, since it was their special-interest bill he had no business "lobbying" for it while sitting in judgment and being on their "payroll" at the same time. Rather than take Gilbert's advice to stop his conflict(s) of interest, Risch has broken a big GOP precedent. He has come out publicly to defeat the outspoken lady senator in the primary with his own hand-picked candidate, Gordon Trounsen, claiming Gilbert is too apt to be defeated next November. Ho, ho, ho.
Raspberries for Northwest Nazarene College, which has censored its popular political science professor cum-columnist Steve Shaw. The flap over which NNC censored the Press-Tribune columnist arose from his controversial left-wing remarks denouncing conservatives such as "... Rev. Falwell and his like," presumably for the latter's denouncing of the government's asinine meddling in the Grove City College case. Extreme liberals tend to favor the government's (i.e., Congress') side and reasonable conservatives favor Grove City College's (Reagan's) side.
Shaw almost always comes down on the ultra-liberal side, much to my dismay, but the censorship comes in when this very liberal guy tends to offend the college's supporters. So NNC demanded the controversial columnist remove the college's name from his identification sentence at the end of his regular Sunday columns. Outrageous! If NNC is proud to have Shaw teach their students, then what do they have to hide?
The fact is that most college professors are far to the left of center, all over the country. Shaw is at least honest enough to speak his mind - publicly. And my hat's off to him for it. Too bad the anti-communist and pro-capitalist professors at our colleges don't likewise write their ideas - publicly. It wouldn't cost much. Their entire candor could all be printed on the back of a postage stamp and they could hold their membership meetings in any nearby telephone booth.
Roses, however, to those supporters of NNC, presumably the financial ones anyway, who "cared enough to send their very best" (apologies to Hallmark) greetings to President Gordon Wetmore to "shut up that Shaw - or else we won't give any more money." But:
Raspberries to those same "private sector" supporters of education not only of NNC, but C of I, BSU, ISU, U of I (et al), many of whom have neither the guts nor the brains to declare their own ideology for frequent public scrutiny as do both Lang and Shaw.
Or, for that matter, as does the Rev. Jerry Falwell who probably has more brains and guts than any of us. His Liberty University (5,500 students) recently gave an honorary Ph.D. to private citizen Ollie North, former assistant to the president of the United States.
We Don't Kill Our Critics
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 15, 1988
There may have been some raspberries in the diary of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Adoph Hitler, but there was at least one rose. It says to us something about the current rash of books coming out of our "conservative" White House. That notorious German told us in 1943, "Not every item of news should be published: Rather must those who control news make every item of news serve a certain purpose."
Well, our knee-jerk liberal media is, of course, doing with the news just what Goebbels said it should, i.e., make it "serve a certain purpose." That purpose is to serve the media's typical agenda, namely, to bash conservatives. Unfortunately these conservatives seem to have it coming, all of which fans the media sharks into a feeding frenzy swarming around that goldfish bowl called the Reagan White House.
But notice something that most folks tend to miss. The liberal Dan Rathers, Sam Donaldsons, Phil Donahues and others of their left-loving ilk (apologies to Steve Shaw) who comprise more than 90 percent of Big Media USA confine the current discussion to unnecessarily narrow limits. One can understand the absolute glee with which the media pounces upon "Mr. Conservative," the most popular president in modern times, but what they leave out is more interesting.
Perhaps they leave it out because it doesn't serve their "certain purpose," but they are also on both a power trip and an ego trip. Reagan not only has more power than they do but, unlike theirs, his arrogance and ego are almost non-existent. This is why the people love him and hate the media.
Former Reagan Chief of Staff Donald Regan's controversial book For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington is a classic case, but it's only the sixth or seventh book in a long line not exactly praising The Gipper. Even worse is the front page story (May 9, 1988) of the Los Angeles Times. It was 44 column inches of knives in Reagan's back or in his wife Nancy's but not one word of reference to the former chief of staff's comment that Reagan will go down in history as one of this country's greatest presidents.
True enough, Regan is mad as a wet hen at his former boss, yet he's even more angry with Nancy who had him fired from one of the most prestigious jobs in the whole world. And brutally done, too, after a long series of hassles with the first lady. One wonders just who was (is) running the White House anyway - Ron or Nancy? Did she expect all the card-carrying conservatives to just lay down?
What the media is either too stupid, too lazy or too malicious to tell you is that Nancy is a big liberal and has for years tried to push the Oval Office into a more leftward tilt than that which catapulted her husband into two of the most conservative mandates this country has ever seen in national presidential elections.
Why? Well, Nancy doesn't like many conservatives. For example, she couldn't stand one of the most popular conservative White House communication chiefs of this decade, Pat Buchanan. She also agitated consistently ever since 1980 to get a more liberal staff close to her husband's side.
One of the best kept open secrets of "her administration" is the first lady's super-big friendship with ever-so-big business magnate Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum. Hammer is one of the biggest communist sympathizers in the Western world (no kidding) and rides his own jet airplane into the Soviet Union's airports, it is said, without so much as even a visa or passport. His first name basis with Gorbachev and all the other communist leaders dates back at least as far as Joseph Stalin who gave Hammer's father an exclusive monopoly to sell pencils, paper and other hard to get "capitalistic" materials to the U.S.S.R. This is how his family got so fabulously rich.
Now then, this writer would not have had Regan publish his book had he been asked. But to those bleeding heart liberals and the don't-rock-the-boat conservatives who think Reagan will be disgraced now that he is soon to meet Gorbachev in Moscow, I say - poppycock. This is a great opportunity.
Reagan should tell his too-liberal wife, who is too lippy and too lobby-minded, to shut up and leave him and his conservative cronies to run the White House. She's already given conservatism a bad name - a la Reagan's (moderate-to-left) Revolution.
This most popular conservative president should stride proudly down the ramp at the Moscow airport come the May 29 summit and shake hands with the Soviet Union's Gorbachev saying, "Hello Gorby. Now you see how freedom of speech works in a free society. I don't like these kiss-and-tell artists and I don't recommend them, but I've surrounded myself with my wife's liberals and my own conservatives. I admit that it has caused a lot of confusion, too. But neither her pals nor mine will now be shot as they would be in your country.
"Happy gulag! Now let's play ball."
Dorothy Should Be Ashamed
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 22, 1988
A severely disappointing letter from Rep. Dorothy Reynolds, R-Canyon, Caldwell, seeking re-election in the coming May 24 primary brings to mind a statement from the great French genius Alexis de Tocqueville: "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
I will explain, but first a little background. Dorothy is a sweet, kind, educated, caring and fun person; an ex-school teacher who has been in office 12 years, some as a Democrat and some as a Republican. I must admit I liked her even when she was a Democrat, but I was not too surprised last year when some research I did after that legislative session showed her as this district's second-biggest spender right after Rep. Janet Hay, R-Nampa.
Like many politicians, after they hold office for several years they tend to become paranoid just before election time.
Now then, Reynolds has just about the same chance of being defeated by her current opponent as does Gov. Cecil Andrus when he runs next time and partly for the same reasons, i.e., both have the state's most powerful and best-financed labor union fully behind them. Both are card-carrying liberals, and both promise plenty.
She is opposed in this primary race by Tim Cayler, a young conservative of Nampa who works for Priest Electric in Caldwell as a motorwinder. Like Reynolds, he is a kind, sincere and caring person whose conservatism would tend to reverse the Legislature's recent shift to the left. But Cayler is new to the political scene and although he is working feverishly to bring himself up to speed in the private-sector, free-market side of politics, his lack of name familiarity alone poses a virtual David-against-Goliath task.
Miracles do happen, though, even in politics, so Reynolds is not "going to sleep," she says. She, too, is working feverishly. But not wanting to give Cayler any free name familiarity she has rather chosen a strawman opponent to run against, at least in the above-mentioned letter.
The strawman is Bob Forrey of Nampa, a conservative leader, former Republican representative and super-articulate foe of the very liberal Idaho Education Association, the teacher's union. Forrey was defeated in the last primary election after the IEA had given his opponent probably the largest political donation in the history of Canyon County. Forrey is not running for anything in this election.
But one cannot glean that from Reynolds' letter appealing for re-election salvation from the real evil. Not her opponent, mind you, but from "Forrey's PAC-5 organization." The latter is supposed to be "orchestrating" against what Reynolds calls "those of us in the House Republican Caucus." A shift of only a handful of votes, she says, would enable "these hard-right opponents of public education to elect a more conservative speaker."
Gosh! Sort of reminds us of George Orwell's famous book, Animal Farm, wherein the sinister pig, Napoleon, blamed everything that went wrong on his former compatriot pig, Snowball. But her name-calling by innuendo of her opponent as "opponents of education," even "hard-right," calls to mind a better term. That term is irrational.
I have never in my life met a person who is opposed to education. There is a growing number who oppose today's government-school monopoly and some of the obvious censorship they use to promote, for example, evolution theory. There are others who oppose different facets of government's compulsory attendance laws, etc., but they are not "opposed" to education. Egad!
Reynolds' letter beats Forrey about his conservative head and shoulders with the term "right-wing." Aided by the media, of course, we are almost never treated with the term left-wing. Even the term liberal, which could be worn proudly by Reynolds, is denied us by the press's love for the euphemism "moderate." Tut, tut.
Reynolds even cites the recent local highway district election (biggest in county history) which put Forrey in for commissioner as an example of "... so few voting the right-wing (there's that word again) Forrey was able to return to public office." Well, shades of Orwell's 1984. Whatever happened to the real freedom of discussion in America? All Forrey ever asked for was equal time. Such name-calling is beneath the dignity of the delightful Reynolds I used to know. She should be embarrassed.
True, Forrey is also a good friend of mine - a fine man. But here's what he says he worries about: A teacher at a church-sponsored school is found to be a drug addict, although he hides his cocaine problem well. The school fires him as an unfit role model. He sues for discrimination and wins because drug addition is a "handicap" under federal law. Holy smoke!
Now, I wonder if Dorothy would say that was right-wing of left-wing; conservative or liberal, excuse me, "moderate"?
Hollywood Libs Gang Up on Bork
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 29, 1988
You may have known how important the following Hollywood celebrities were to the defeat of Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork. I mean that Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Joan Woodward, Ed Asner and Jack Lemmon took an active part in defeating not only Bork but also Contra aid to the anti-communists in Nicaragua as well, according to the Daily News Digest of Phoenix, Ariz.
But I'll bet you didn't know that both Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston were eagerly awaiting the word from the White House to put together pro-Bork TV commercials in response to the knee-jerk liberal celebrities. "Whoever was running things (in the White House) never put it together," explained Heston.
A letter Heston wrote to Sen. Ted Kennedy, says the Digest, gives an indication as to how powerful such a commercial might have been: "Your malevolent character assassination (of Judge Bork) reeks of the worst excesses of the McCarthy era," he wrote. "I ask you to consider the value of decency, moderation, and justice. Has it occurred to you that your life leaves you ill-qualified to pass judgment on another man's character?"
Wow! Who said no one but the left-wing liberals in the Hollywood set are willing to stand up publicly and be counted? There was more in the Digest story, much more, most of which one is not likely to find reported in the regular media, but we cannot fault the liberal press on this one.
If you thought the liberal media leaned over backward in their fawning all over themselves applauding moderate Howard Baker's elevation to the number two spot in the White House then you were, of course, quite right. But this one can't be blamed on anyone but President Reagan himself assuming, of course, that his aides in the Oval Office are telling him who his conservative friends are in Hollywood.
Now then, some of you may wonder why it's appropriate now to bring up the matter of the Reagan nominee's defeat for a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. One might say the Bork story is history. True enough. But Americans do not learn anything much from history; thus we keep repeating the mistakes over and over.
Aside from the fact that most anti-Bork activists were sympathetic to many collectivist causes (which tells us a little something, though not necessarily about each one) one thing is certain; namely, that the Constitution was a plan to limit government, not expand it. Note also that most Bork fighters tend to love more government, not less.
The Constitution, the 200th anniversary of which we celebrated last year, says exactly what the Supreme Court says it says. So like it or not, then, if we want more government in our lives (shades of Orwell's 1984) we had best have a court that says so.
If, on the other hand, we want to limit government in our lives, we had better see to it that justices of the highest court in the land say to Big Brother government: "Slow down, big fellows, you're going too far too fast."
It may come as a surprise to Idaho observers of higher education that there are private institutions of higher learning which emphasize such a limited government philosophy. In fact, Lino A. Graglia, distinguished professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, was lecturing at Michigan's Hillsdale College recently. Speaking as a former attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, the famous law teacher said of the Bork case:
"Constitutional interpretation ... has been given a particular relevance and immediacy by the extraordinary debate over President Reagan's recently defeated nomination of Judge Robert Bork as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Judge Bork was clearly the most qualified person in the country to be a Supreme Court justice. He served for four years as the solicitor general of the U.S., in essence the highest legal job in the country.
" ... the crux of the battle about Judge Bork - is that the Supreme Court's controversial constitutional decisions have not been random in their political effect. They have, without exception and on the contrary, served a single point of view, the view of those on the far left of the American political spectrum." Egad!
Idahoans interested in the other side of the liberal's left-wing war against Bork may write to Hillsdale College at Hillsdale, Mich. (49242) for a copy of the distinguished professor's speech. Heaven knows they are not likely to hear it publicly from either of those two vaunted vestiges of so-called private sector education in Idaho, namely, the College of Idaho and Northwest Nazarene College.
Getting Our Message Across
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 5, 1988
During a book-review session held recently, among the members of a book club to which I belong, one member born in Europe posed a terrific question. He asked, "Why do you suppose the communists are so much more committed than we are?" He meant, of course, to their ideas and ideals as compared to our dedication to our own.
The book was a rare departure for review by our club because we are organized, albeit very loosely, for the main purpose of helping us understand the philosophy of freedom, free markets, private ownership, etc., and their moral and spiritual antecedents. But it was thought that we should depart from our own books for a change and take a look at America's No. 1 ideological "enemy." We chose, wisely I think, The Communist Manifesto, easily one of the world's most influential books.
The book club member was born in one of the European countries first occupied by Hitler's Germany and lived there under the notorious dictator as a young adult for five years. Unlike the rest of us this member knew one important dimension of freedom much better than we did, namely, what it's like to lose it. His colorful foreign accent tended only to heighten the penetration of his sincere and ever-so-pertinent question.
Nonetheless, from the 20 or so club members in attendance came such a wide variety of responses as to make them impossible to cover in the short space of this column. One, however, was so unusual I'd like to touch upon it here. One person thought perhaps that it only seemed as though the communists, left-wing socialists, welfare statists and wet liberals are more committed because they are obviously so much more "communicative" than we are. They are, indeed.
They're succeeding at communicating their group-think ideas far better than we are here at home with our so-called individualism. One has only to look at the type of thinking held in highest regard on campus-U.S.A. And, by the way, this includes most of our very own campuses, however sincere they may be, right here in Idaho.
This huge communication gap (no pun) just may be changing a bit. In a brand new, attractive tabloid size newspaper entitled USSA TODAY complete with accompanying "hammer and sickle" emblems there is a strange front page story. But first I should tell you that all around the paper's masthead is: "Amerika's Newspaper. Via Underground Press. 60 cents US/35 Kopecks USSR."
There's more, but suffice it to say this colorful, interesting, but orthodox looking paper surely gets one's attention.
One major headline reads: "Conservatives Pushed from Office." In smaller type: "Purge nearly complete." Here's the story's text:
"Bill Casey is dead. Lynn Nofziger is headed for jail, Jim Watt has been laughed into obscurity, Ollie North is out, and Bork never got in.
"Dropping a bomb down the White House chimney could scarcely have caused more damage. Other missing persons are U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick; Communications Director Patrick Buchanan; SDI backer Richard Perle; Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan; NSC Director Robert McFarlane; Rear Adm. John Poindexter; EPA Director Ann Gorsuch; Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle; Judge William Clark; NSC Director Richard Allen; Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger; Navy Secretary John Lehman; and Ed Meese is barely hanging on.
"The awesome coincidence in all this is that these officials all just happen to be conservatives - and almost all were replaced with liberals. Figure the odds."
It happened to several more, gentle reader, including some of my own friends, e.g., Dr. Steve Hanke, senior economist on Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers who resigned in dismay. But I think you begin to get the new newspaper's clever and insightful message. It is not strident or hysterical, nor carping. It is rather bold, one must admit, but above all - it's interestingly communicative.
The paper, although completely serious in intent, is a bit of a spoof on the ever-present, usually Eastern, liberal establishment newspapers. It is published by the McAlvaney Intelligence Advisor, Phoenix, Ariz. Hooray for them!
Who knows? With a little luck the conservatives' "commitment" to communicating just may be catching up with their collectivist adversaries.
Congrats to Caldwell High Grads
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 12, 1988
If there is one group of people in America who have achieved great prominence, if not downright adulation in public affairs, it is the educators. This group is not only prominent, they are also powerful, having what many political observers deem the most powerful and richest labor union in the world, i.e., the National Education Association. They do this in many ways, but mostly by means of politics and propaganda as opposed to competition and superior end-product.
Comes now a superior local educator who brings to the public a welcome if different slant to the above scene. Darrel Deide, superintendent of schools of the Caldwell School District, proudly handed me his program of the CHS commencement held May 26. Inside this program was on insert upon which was printed a story easily understandable as a just reason for the superintendent's pride.
On the insert was printed the names of 70 (out of 209) graduating students to whom were given scholarships and awards the total value of which the school chief says was in excess of $800,000. Wow, that's a lotta loot any way you slice it. So, hats off to Deide and his district including, of course, his teachers, administrators and support personnel. The school's sincere and dedicated board of trustees, too, should come in there for applause in serious and important ways I'm sure.
Even Dr. Arthur Palrang, the ascerbic doctor of medicine (surgery) whose "knife" has not infrequently drawn "blood" from those who deigned to disagree with his admitted omniscence, deserves a pat on the back. In his words, "trying to bring about some change turned out to be much harder" than he thought. But whatever one thinks about Palrang (he had two opponents this last election which usually assures re-election to an incumbent, but didn't in his case) he was not beholden to the education establishment and hence was not afraid to express his frequent disagreement with anybody including, believe it or not, this writer.
A cursory examination of the unusually long list of student scholarships and awards, while laudatory and long, doesn't tell us too much about the actual content or philosophy of either the scholarships or the school's courses. Still, a few friendly observations might be made in addition to the list's quantity, as compared to quality, aspects: (1) Almost 30 percent of the CHS students got at least a single award; one received 15. (2) More than half (42) received what the list termed a "Presidential Academic Fitness Award." One must guess; but it seems reasonable to assume, the award has to do with academics rather than the over-worship of athletics. Oh, oh, there went the jock vote out the door.
No! Wait! I, too, applaud sports in school. Why? Well, in many schools that subject is the only one to which most students are exposed, at least in any depth, that treats competition as though it were a reasonable and proper function of a social system.
Even State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jerry Evans, in voicing his super-skepticism of a privatization system for choice in education, cites the current flap over the Boise school system's poorly maintained but privately owned and operated bus system. He sees it as a bad element of privatization (read, private competitive enterprise) in general. Egad! No wonder the private sector shrivels while the government sector bloats and swells with each new generation of graduates.
Yet Evans is sincere and not all bad either, a product largely of Caldwell's schools where he was for years the district's chief, and still is to a large extent a hero of the affable and usually open-minded Deide. But wait! Deide isn't completely open either, i.e., like Evans he rejects the voucher system. At least he won't advocate it. And he most assuredly embraces the sinful compulsory attendance laws which furnish his system with a secure supply of customers - whether those paying the bill protest or not. In other words, he won't allow them to "vote with their feet," as the refugees call it.
Nonetheless, until Marva Collins, the black grade school teacher from Chicago thought by many to be the greatest teacher of the 20th century, comes to Caldwell I'll support Deide. I like him. At least he gives some lip service to the free market, private property and limited government. So, you see, he has more than a modicum of courage.
Further, for example, he introduced me with dignity and respect when I was in his office to the new school trustee, and ex-teacher, Dorothy Kidd, who recently deposed veteran Palrang from the board. Thus said she with a polite smile: "Oh, I remember ... and keep up on you. I (often) read your column - and turn green."
While her "green" was with distinct emphasis I somehow got the impression she did not mean green with envy. Nor did it mean, I'm afraid, that reading my column has persuaded her to turn her traffic light of education on "green" for capitalism.
Making a Buck Makes Things Happen
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 19, 1988
You've all heard the sad story: "25 percent voter turnout in Idaho." Well, the conventional wisdom wobbles. Knowing what we all know to be going on in politics it is indeed amazing so many actually did turn out to vote.
But voter turnout is only one way to take the temperature of public affairs, especially in a small city such as Caldwell, to see if the "fever" is on the way up or on the way down. Another way is to watch what the leadership is doing or - trying to do. Political "leadership" is, of course, only one of the indicators to watch. You can also watch what the entrepreneurs are doing - or trying to do.
A case in point is downtown Main Street in Caldwell and in this single instance, it happens to be political. In an attempt to do something to help downtown's "high button shoes" syndrome the city has purchased the old Cimmaron Bar building, part of which, I'm told will be used for an eight-foot wide sidewalk passageway connecting Main Street (between 7th and 8th avenues) with the paved parking lot next to the railroad.
I say hats off to the city officials, whichever of them are responsible for the decision. So far as I know it is the first actual deed on the part of the city government to do something to update Main Street and, even at this late date, it's probably worth the money.
What brings this to my mind just now is that City Council President Jack Raymond was getting some criticism recently for the city's having paid $35,000 for "something that Ralph Smeed tried to give the city" several years ago when he and an associate owned the building right next door.
"Oh, you're mistaken," said the affable young councilman. "Smeed has never been known to offer to give anything away. The actual story was that he (Smeed) merely offered to buy half the paint to cover the back side of the two blocks of buildings facing the railroad parking lots between 7th and 9th avenues way back when he rented a downtown office. He offered to do this if the Junior Chamber of Commerce would make it part of their annual 'Clean-up, Paint-up Week' project." They declined, but more's to tell.
So, I straightened Raymond out on the error of this story. I indicated that I had indeed made such an offer of a sidewalk "giveaway" to the then city officials, the Chamber of Commerce and several miscellaneous persons doing business downtown. It's an old but interesting tale, so let me explain a few details - just for the record.
Gale Burns, then manager of M.H. Kind's store which still operates in the same location a block and a half away, heard about my proffered plan: "Gosh, Ralph, I think you have a great idea. If I got the downtown business committee together for lunch would you give them a pitch for it?" I agreed. He did, and I did.
I said we would deed to the city an eight-foot sidewalk through the building, then build a couple of small shops alongside to take advantage of what we hoped would be some added foot traffic. It was clearly the profit motive, i.e., we were trying to make a buck. But we'd also help a decaying downtown in the process.
Well, the proposition for which we would obviously need the enthusiastic support of the merchants' association went over like a lead balloon. Their eyes simply glazed over. One could just see the skeptical look on those gentlemen's faces: "Why in blazes should we put ourselves out to help that guy make money?"
Maybe I was just a poor salesman. Or, maybe the merchants had grown attached to our old burned-out building where formerly the Coast-to-Coast store had been gutted by the fire, after which they moved across the street to new quarters.
It's hard to say for sure why the plan fizzled. Burns was severely disappointed. The then mayor, Al McCluskey, was saddened, he said, but he had already been castigated by downtown forces for allegedly "packing water for Ralph Smeed's North 21st Avenue extension." Thus he understandably backed away a bit from trying very hard to promote yet another Smeed project even if it would help the city. Criticism has its place, no doubt about it, but when mixed with envy it can also be very destructive.
Unfortunately, it may still be with us, for it was only recently reported to me, reliably I think that a councilwoman opined relative to my old proposition and the city's current renewal of the plan: "Oh, yeah, Smeed has a lot of good ideas all right, but he always wants to do them for the wrong reasons - greed." Well, if indeed that's what she thinks she will no doubt have a lot of pleasant company, for such a naive view of economic freedom and entrepreneurship is consuming America, especially in her (America's colleges and universities.
While personal references admittedly leave something to be desired, this writer now hopes that the current flap over downtown Caldwell's attempt to acquire property next to the police station will not be killed merely because of somebody trying - quite openly I'm told - to make a buck.
Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 26, 1988
Roses to the late H.L. Mencken the man who was once labelled by the New York Times as the most influential man in America. He told us, "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere - may be happy." He also spoke almost prophetically about today's successful and self-righteous politicians. So:
Roses to that same Mencken telling us, "The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars. The men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." So let us seek out in the up-coming election the men (or women) who embody these concepts. Let us see if they are "admired" extravagantly or if they are "detested" for trying to tell us the truth.
Raspberries for the black liberal newspaper columnist Carl T. Rowan who is one of the nation's loudest critics of the citizen's right to keep and bear handguns. Recently some big teenagers were swimming (one report said skinny dipping) in Rowan's pool without permission. The time was almost 2 a.m. when Rowan was awakened whereupon he took a hand gun and shot one of the teenagers in the wrist. Presumably the gun was one of those which he had been advocating that the government outlaw (read, ban altogether.) What a laugh!
Roses to Time magazine (June 27, 1988) for quoting "National Rifle Association (NRA) Spokesman Wayne LaPierre, who plans to use the (Rowan) incident for promotion." And then:
Roses: for Idaho's U.S. Senator Steve Symms who, according to the same Time magazine article, "... (Symms) went a step further. After taking out an NRA membership for Rowan, he (Symms) sent the columnist a pithy telegram: "YOUR ACTIONS HAVE SPOKEN LOUDER THAN YOUR WORDS."
Roses then for Symms' press secretary Bob Jarrell whose predecessors in the Washington office seldom achieved applause like that for getting their boss in the national news media. In fact, most of them have confided to this writer that to even get mediocre coverage in Idaho papers is extremely tough, especially in Boise's liberal Idaho Statesman. But in fairness, one must admit conservatives are not exactly famous for making newsworthy copy. Particularly is this true, I'm told by some of his former press aides, with Symms' Chief of Staff Phil Reberger in Boise. He exercises iron-fisted censorship over the Washington office's press releases. Result? Press pablum. Said press copy therefore only on rare occasion sounds like the colorful and conservative Symms himself. Oft-times Symms' speeches get covered in the Eastern liberal press, but not very enthusiastically here in Idaho.
Thanks, at least, in part to the over-protective chief Reberger. Oh well, maybe he too is just trying to "stay in office."
Roses to the Frenchman Pascal Salin, professor of economics at the University of Paris-IX-Dauphine. In a Wall Street Journal article last week he said, "In democracies ... people get the government they deserve. In France, a longer-term perspective indicates that socialism is unavoidable because minds are mostly socialist-oriented. Political transformation always begins in the intellectual sphere. (Isn't he saying: thanks to our college professors?) He notes they have not discovered the (conservative) connection "... among firm ethical values, free-market principles and high-incentive tax structure."
later on in his insightful, if slightly too European thus a bit obscure, article Salin establishes himself exactly as one of Mencken's political "men they detest ... who try to tell them the truth." It is a great observation for us to note Salin's parallels in America's political consensus: "The rejection of any and all ideologies - the failure to pose differing ideas against one another - in favor of pragmatism is nothing but a refusal to think."
The French professor referred to this as a sort of eclecticism "... implying that an idea and its contrary can both be true at the same time, gives direct rise to the centralist, pragmatic tendency." He explained that ideology was the "only perspective that merits consideration ... thus the center cannot exist.
"There are two conflicting views of society," says Salin, "a collective one and an individualist one, and not a third one. Centralism is a purely political proposition to sway the uncertain voter." Reminds us of liberals who masquerades as "moderates."
Raspberries to Idaho's big businessmen who think their left-leaning, pied piper Gov. Cecil Andrus can pull the socialists' economic mule out of the mud when the French master-socialist President Franciois Mitterand could not. It just puzzles one. So maybe the late, great U.S. Sen. William E. Borah of Idaho deserves our biggest bouquet of...
Roses for his: The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments." And shouldn't we add - "aided and abetted by big business?"
Don't Take 4th For Granted
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 3, 1988
Tomorrow is the 4th of July, an occasion which many of us tend to take too much for granted. When things are taken for granted, especially when those "things" are concepts or ideas, we ease off our appreciation and then our respect. Next, we lose them.
Good taste is usually the first to go, followed soon by good manners. Notice if you will the frequency with which one sees little courtesies and gestures among individuals disappear. Of course, some of these are merely a traditional observance none of which constitute particularly bad manners in and of itself. But, taken together, their disappearance tends to escalate people's lack of respect for one another. From this lack of respect for individuals and, by extension, their property and, yes, their borders it is not long before violence erupts.
In recent decades must of said regard for others has been turned over to government, more each year, with the resulting loss of individual responsibility: i.e., a sort of replacement of personal responsibility with collective responsibility. My guess is that this phenomenon may well account for more of our country's rather obvious drift toward collectivism (if not communism itself) than rather conspiracy perpetrated and controlled directly by Soviet Russia.
But some justification does exist for a reasonable amount of government when tasks cannot be handled by individuals. Such an example has been ever so neatly outlined by America's Future, Inc. (514 Main St. New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801.) This organization, which by the way also reviews school textbooks from a conservative and scholarly standpoint, reminds us of some needed perspective with which to view today's hijacking, hostage-taking and international terrorism. It's relevance for appreciating our 4th of July is breathtaking:
"History is littered with the ruins of once proud nations and societies that tried to appease terrorist aggressors rather than resist. The U.S. learned the hard way not long after its creation more than 200 years ago. In July, 1785, the (pirate-like) rulers of North Africa, known then as the Barbary Coast, seized two American sailing ships, the Maria and the Dauphin, and took 21 of their seamen hostage.
"Three of our founding fathers - John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson - were commissioned by the Continental Congress to negotiate with Algiers for their release. The U.S. offered $200 a head, but the Barbara chieftans demanded $60,000 or more than $2,800 for each American prisoner. The bargaining went on for ELEVEN YEARS before the surviving crewmen of the Maria and Cauphin finally were freed. This only emboldened the Barbara pirates to demand ever larger booty and blackmail. For years, the British, French, Dutch - and now the Americans surrendered not only cash but military material and even entire warships as the price of sailing off the Mediterranean coast near what is now Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.
"In 1794, Congress appropriated $1 million - nearly half the entire federal budget for that year - to placate the Barbara warlords. But by 1797, the futility of paying ransom and tribute finally dawned on Congress and it voted $2.5 million to commission and maintain three heavily-armed frigates, the UNITED STATES, THE CONSTITUTION and the CONSTELLATION.
"In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson declared war on Tripoli, the dominant Barbara regime, and sent the fleet. It helped for a time, but as American resolve wavered amid pre-occupation over domestic matters, the pirates renewed their depredations and collection of ransom. After the war of 1812, however, U.S. patience finally wore out and president James Madison asked Congress for an act of war. He got approval for a naval force under Stephen Decatur to subdue the Barbary pirates once and for all. By 1815, the worst of the terrorism was over and ships were free to sail the Mediterranean again.
"It had taken 30 years for our young nation - and for Europe as well - to learn that lasting freedom cannot be bought with blackmail or ransom, but only with courage and resolve."
So let's resolve this 4th of July to catch up on our history and learn how to take courageous and intelligent stands laced with proper good taste and manners. Then perhaps we won't take too much for granted the "right stuff" over which our star spangled banner still waves.
Boycotting 1st Amendment
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 17, 1988
"The trouble with the news media," said George Bernard Shaw, "is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the fall of Western civilization." A somewhat parallel problem seems to have infected some of our local media recently concerning the subject of homosexuals.
It seems the host of KIDO radio's program, Morning Line, had as guests a homosexual couple, whereupon he proceeded to interview them, so I'm told, with great courtesy and near-admiration seeking thus to "educate" his listeners in high fashion.
Now I cannot attest to the exact dialogue which took place, but I looked into the matter somewhat and I don't have too much quarrel with either the radio station, the talk show's liberal host, Tom Alibrandi, or Mrs. Barbara Forrey, one of the show's listeners who mounted a successful one-woman inspired advertiser boycott of the station as a protest.
It worked, Mrs. Forrey, a conservative activist, taped part of the talk show interview with the homosexuals and mailed a letter to several of the show's sponsors together with a copy of the tape. Two of the sponsors apparently thus were so shocked at the oddball interview they cancelled their radio advertising. I'm told they later returned.
Generally speaking, conservatives tend to take a very dim view of the whole range of homosexuals and the behavior usually associated therewith. Much of the back-up to support their opposition comes from the Christian's Holy Bible. Other sources include, but are not necessarily limited to, the laws of the land.
For example, these expressly forbid the act of sodomy which is clearly against the law, they point out and it is furthermore one of the principal acts by which the dreaded AIDs disease is communicated. Other acts identified as part and parcel of homosexual lifestyle are also a major means by which the most certainly fatal disease is transmitted. Small wonder conservatives, many of whom are tied hand and foot to traditional modes of behavior, are offended by pro-homo folks.
Liberals, on the other hand, are not so hide-bound by tradition. Alibrandi himself is, if one listens at all to his talk show, liberal and almost on this fact alone he hangs his hat of "entertainment" for his listeners. In fact he frequently rants and raves with great gusto at what he sees as a sad condition, i.e., that this sector of Idaho is "so conservative."
Still, one has to admit that most other liberals also tend to see homosexuality as merely another alternative lifestyle. Thus one cannot gainsay the ascorbic (especially to conservatives) talk show host as the only media person who, in the words of Mrs. Forrey, "extols these people and their lifestyle on the air." The media all across the nation, liberals for the most part, are also very supportive of homosexuals.
So, as I said before, I've no particular beef with any of the above antagonists in their respective freedoms to choose. But I do find the double-standard invoked, most often I believe, by the liberals, to be a richly virulent and lousy habit. Here's what I mean:
Alibrandi cried "censorship" at Forrey's successful boycott of his show. His station manager alleged "blackmail" in an otherwise fairly earnest letter (I thought) replying to the conservative lady boycott leader.
But aside from bastardizing the language in using the term "censorship" when outside government's coercive power and "blackmail" when it is plainly in public view, indeed it depends on public view, the cry is, well, silly. Understandable maybe, but carrying little weight especially in light of the famous economic boycotts of Dr. Martin Luther King's style.
Yet, best of all perhaps was a homosexual editor's note in a recent issue of the Idaho homosexuals' very own newspaper (dated Feb. 3, 1988) urging their readers to boycott the valley's conservative newspaper Idaho This Week (at that time called Boise This Week.) The newspaper in typical conservative fashion had denounced homosexuality, hence the homo paper's editor called for support of said boycott protest.
In fairness, I admit to somewhat of a bias in favor of Forrey's freedom to boycott and agitate, if for different reasons. Yet I know also Alibrandi must agitate to hold his audience.
Still, one wonders - wouldn't it have been fun to agitate his "loving and sensitive" homosexual guests asking them why their pals prefer the conservative lifestyle of "censorship and blackmail?"
Chance to Meet Honest Candidate
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 24, 1988
Idahoans, and in particular I mean those of us in this end of the Treasure Valley, are in for a treat. Dr. Ron Paul, a medical doctor from Lake Jackson, Texas, and a former three-term congressman from that state, will be speaking in Caldwell Monday evening at the Ste. Chapelle Winery on Sunny Slope.
Paul is the national Libertarian Party's candidate for president of the United States. The Libertarian Party is the third largest political party in America, believe it or not.
In spite of the fact that the media gives huge play and "news" coverage to a tiny band of political nobodies in north Idaho, the Aryan Nations, the national Libertarian Party has fielded a legitimate candidate for the chief executive office of the U.S. for each of the last five elections. However, if one judges from the amount of news coverage given to the Libertarian Party, the party of ideas and more intellectual honesty than both Democrats and Republicans put together, a rather desperate communications gap exists.
Paul is in town to help fill this gap. Hosted by Dan and Linda Symms, the former Republican congressman will be featured at a $25 per plate fund-raising buffet, 7:30 p.m., Monday evening, July 25, at the Ste. Chapelle Winery in an effort to inject some intelligent light on philosophic and political principles.
If he succeeds it will come as a welcome and long overdue relief to all the gushing and kissy-face the liberal media has been lavishing on the left-wing Rev. Jesse Jackson's Democrat extravaganza down in Atlanta all last week.
Many of us have been turned off at all the business-as-usual politicians and monkey-business electioneering last week, but the GOPers will be at it next three weeks from now. However, theirs cannot be expected to be half so exciting as the Democrats since the liberal national media won't be half so supportive. Furthermore, the GOPs George Bush is about as exciting as holding your sister's horse on a hot day.
So just what is it that sets Ron Paul apart from Jackson, Dukakis, Bush and the balance of the politicos of both traditional parties? Well, space prohibits telling much or even doing partial justice to the Libertarian's presidential standard bearer, but here's a brief overview.
In the forward to his book, The Case for Gold, perhaps the most cogent case made for sound money in many a year, he says: "... (we) cannot make paper money work. Whenever governments are granted power to purchase their own debt, they never fail to do so, eventually destroying the value of the currency. Political money always fails because free people eventually reject it.
"Governments can fool people for a while with paper money, but it's inevitable that trust in the money - something absolutely required for it to serve as a medium of exchange and to allow economic calculation - will be lost. Governments have power to declare paper (money) to be legal tender, but they do not have power to make it trustworthy." Wow! Small wonder the liberal media refuses to make him newsworthy.
Consider what Dr. Gary North, his former legislative aide and now editor of a successful national newsletter said about Paul's first term: "... he made lots of headlines, something which mid-term unknown, freshman congressman don't do very often. He fought against abortion, gun control, inflation and higher taxes, yet he confounded the conservative wing by fighting the B-1 bomber in favor of the cruise missile and the atomic submarine program.
"He opposed federal guarantees to the atomic power industry, another vote that astounded both liberals and conservatives. He baffled them all, simply because he voted small government, start to finish. No one in Washington - I repeat, no one - does that on a consistent basis."
Apparently that final statement above includes Idaho's junior United States senator, Steve Symms (himself a personal friend of Ron Paul), at least in the mind of the senator's son, Dan. The latter has long thought his father has become a "moderate of sorts" since 1972. He's trying to do something about it - through Ron Paul. Come see for yourself.
Give Chase Credit for Some Courage
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 31, 1988
Let's give a round of applause to Larry Chase, general manager of the Nampa ABC-TV station (Channel 6). He calls his the "community involved station." Of course, the slogan is a bit overblown just as most of the stuff one sees today on all the boob-tubes.
But, unlike the others, Chase has been sticking his neck out and taking sides editorially. For a TV station that in itself is newsworthy. Given the almost absolutely superficial, if not stupid, nature and style of most stations today I say hooray for Chase.
Recently the innovative manager came out swinging in support of decriminalizing, or legalizing drugs. Of course Chase is against drug abuse. He just thinks the government is failing miserably at preventing it. And, given the religious-like worship of government that his national media comrades lavish upon their viewers night after night, month after month, year in and year out, Chase's editorial stand on getting the government out of the drug business is not only intelligent but courageous.
As many of you may know, each of his editorials is followed by, "That's our opinion; we'd like to hear yours." But the reply offer, while sincere enough, is not all that easy. They allow you only 50 to 55 seconds for your response which is tough enough, and then you must travel to the station in Nampa at an appointed hour to record your "editorial." The staff is quite competent, cooperative and gracious all of which helps, but as the bareback bronc rider said, "It ain't no cinch." But some people do it.
Comes now U.S. Attorney Maurice Ellsworth, the government's law man from Boise. He challenged Chase with the same old worn out argument against drugs: They are awful and dangerous and bad, etc., etc. No doubt sincere, Ellsworth opined that Chase didn't know what he was talking about whereupon he (Ellsworth) opted for more money, more guns, more policeman and, or course, more government.
This writer, countered Ellsworth on KIVI's Channel 6 a week or so later with 53 seconds (boy, what a challenge) saying Chase was indeed right. I went on to point out that "we need to remove the fantastic profit-incentive of several thousand percent to push and sell drugs. All government can do is push up the prices and furnish a full employment living for the lawyers." It just won't work.
These TV exchanges are great, but not yet a substitute for newspaper columnists, editorialists and writers who still for the most part set the patterns for thinking-activists and opinion leaders. The great Vermont Royster, editor emeritus of the Wall Street Journal, shows us why in a recent column quoted in the Daily News Digest of Phoenix, Ariz.:
"Back in my collegiate days (1920s) marijuana wasn't illegal; you could buy it, sell it, keep it in your house, even grow it if you wished in your back yard or window box, and, of course, smoke it. What was illegal, even unconstitutional, was liquor. Even beer was a no-no unless it was less than 3.2 percent alcohol.
"So it may surprise younger readers to learn that on campus in those days the students weren't into smoking pot or using dope, cocaine, crack, and all that stuff. What was consumed in great quantity was liquor in all its forms, home-brewed beer, bathtub gin, local corn likker, and when there was a little money available, some allegedly imported scotch 'right off the boat.'
"I don't think Prohibition cut into national drinking habits, except to accustom folks to poorer quality. What it did do was introduce some new phrases into the national vocabulary: 'rum-runners', 'bootleggers' and, of course, 'organized crime.'
"Slowly, people began to realize the NOBLE EXPERIMENT was a notable failure. In 1928, Al Smith, the Democrat, lost the presidential race for many reasons, but one of them was that he was a premature 'wet', proposing to (repeal Prohibition); the country wasn't yet ready for that. Four years later we got Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, and with him repeal.
"The country celebrated wildly, but I'm not convinced there was any more drinking after repeal than during Prohibition. What proved lasting, however, was organized crime. Repeal took away its main source of income, but it shifted to other (illegal) fields such as prostitution and gambling; not as profitable, but a man has to make a living."
And, as I said on Channel 6, the lawyers are doing just that - in spades.
Some Perestroika in Idaho
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 4, 1988
Last Thursday readers of this editorial page were treated to an unusually perceptive editorial under "Other Editors" entitled: "Sound Familiar?" It was from the great Washington Times, a welcome alternative daily to the knee-jerk liberal Washington Post. Both are in Washington, D.C.
I mention the editorial here for two reasons: (1) Its timeliness and healthy skepticism (2) herald a parallel problem of a scary and insufferable bureaucratic problem going on right here in Caldwell. But we will come back to that in a moment.
The editorial concerns the well-known but little understood dictator Mikhail Gorbachev's apparently new Soviet Union policy "perestroika," or restructuring, and "glasnost" which is roughly translated to mean openness.
Now then, all thoughtful and peace-loving Americans are properly heartened by Gorbachev's new reforms, both promised and performed, but the suggestion that these are new ideas is simply not so, according to the Times editorial:
"Rational, pragmatic solutions are being proposed in place of the old, hidebound ideology. Talk of change, reform and openness permeates the society. The new Russia emerges from the old.
"Astute readers will realize this is a description of Peter the Great's Russia. All the talk about a new Russia is a rerun of Peter's program. There is also the same cynicism on the part of ordinary Russians, who know that this ruler, too, will pass and that sometimes a czar's brave new ideas will pass even before he does.
"By the end of his reign, Peter would prove as ruthless and autocratic as any of his predecessors. Science, technology and anything that increased his empire's power were welcome; any kind of intellectual activity that undermined his personal rule remained suspect.
"Each of these rulers is associated with his own catch phrases. Peter the Great is identified with 'pereverot', or a change of direction, and Mr. Gorbachev with 'perestroika', restructuring.
"The Soviet writers union is rehabilitating authors safely dead - like Boris Pasternak - but not a live one like Alexander Solzhenitsyn ... introducing democracy by decree has its contradiction. One might as well try to introduce the free market without freedom.
"To quote one informed observer, Russia's ruler is powerless against the bureaucratic body: He can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them or against their will. On every decree of his they have a tacit veto, by merely refraining from carrying it out."
The insightful editor of the Times, himself a world class newsman of the major U.S. media for decades, even quotes Winston Churchill who asserted: "I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war."
"Watching Gorbachev ordering his countrymen to be free (one suspects) he does not want freedom but only the fruits of freedom.
"So far, 'glasnost' has produced mainly contradictions. It hasn't yet occurred to Gorbachev that what he seeks is communism without communism. Or if he has he knows better than to say it."
Now then, it's too bad we can't reprint the entire editorial again, but I want to emphasize that part about their bureaucracy and how it can block even a dictator in the U.S.S.R., if it is so chooses, because there is a lesson here for America, i.e., our bureaucrats whose numbers increase each year are of the same mentality if not quite so muscle-bound and violently arrogant - yet.
So what about Caldwell? Well, a young farm couple, Mark and Sheryl Hickman who live just east of town, are being fined $150 for violation of OSHA regulations under the U.S. Department of Labor. But wait! Before you sigh and think the fine is small please note what our bureaucrats tell the Hickmans their violation is: "The employer neglected to inform the employees each day of the importance of each of the following good hygiene practices to: (1) Use the water and facilities provided for drinking, hand-washing and elimination. (2) Drink water frequently and especially on hot days. (3) Urinate as frequently as necessary. (4) Wash hands both before and after using the toilet. (5) Wash hands before eating and smoking."
The Hickmans, understandably, are frightened at what this writer calls a U.S.A. "perestroika," restructuring. I wonder who's next.
See you in the gulag.
Let's Spell ... P-H-O-N-I-C-S
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 11, 1988
Two events, both involving knee-jerk liberal media persons, recently caused me to reflect on the problem of functional illiteracy: (1) A Phil Donahue program on the subject; (2) a John Corlett Idaho Statesman article about that Donahue show.
Donahue interviewed several functional illiterates. (An illiterate is one who cannot read. A functional illiterate is one who has gone through school, but cannot read well enough to fill out a job application, balance a checking account, etc.)
One guest was a millionaire developer who graduated from college, even taught grade school for several years, all the while himself a functional illiterate. He was still furious at not being able to read.
In any event Corlett expressed shock at this condition. Said he of this Donahue program: "I thought I heard (there are) 60 million (functional illiterates) and I couldn't believe it."
He went on to say, "A 1980 Idaho study (most recent made) showed an estimated 244,000 functional illiterates in this state. Unbelievable! That's one in four persons."
I, too, saw the show and unfortunately Donahue did not deal at all with the cause of illiteracy. Nor did Corlett, to whom the problem seemed quite unfamiliar. It is a typical liberal blind spot, of course.
OK then, what is the cause? Well, the "educrats" are teaching reading - the wrong way.
I have copies of letters from parents who are teaching their own children to read. Get this: "In six months we taught our five year old daughter, Meghan, to read. When our son, Christian, was 4 1/2 we started him on this learn-to-read manual. Eight months later he is reading the King James Bible at 70 words per minute and understanding it."
Another tells of a 7-year-old who is being taught by a tutor in Grants Pass, Ore. His 3-year-old brother listened in and the boys reviewed the lessons together when they got home. The tutor writes: "Between early November and June, Andrew (7) taught his brother a fair amount of phonics. When they came back to my school in September, Peter (3) was reading on his own."
This writer has seen other such information on the system. It's called "systematic, intensive phonics." This is compared to what is usually used in most government schools called "whole word" or "look-say" reading instruction. Intensive phonics works very well even for untrained parents, but with "look-say" as much as one-third of our public (government) school students come away functional illiterates. So, where can interested citizens learn more about curing the reading problem?
The systematic, intensive phonics referred to in the above two letters came from the book Alpha Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers by Samuel Blumenfeld of Boston. Interestingly, it is published by a Boise firm and distributed from there throughout America.
My simple way of describing the difference between the two methods is that phonics deals with the irreducible speech sounds (about 44 in English) used to "decode" new words. The student is taught to "sound out" words. Oddly enough, Blumenfeld, an educator and author of several other fine books on education, uses no pictures at all in his Alpha Phonics.
"Look-say" seems best described as a pictographic, or ideographic system in which the students are taught to recognize the shapes of words with actual pictures being extensively used as aides in recognition. For example, the child is shown a picture of a horse and then the letters: h-o-r-s-e.
I hope the educrats, most of whom are well-meaning, won't jump on me if my descriptions of the two methods are less than perfect. But the reality is that until the 1930s phonics was the dominant system and we had probably the most literate population in all history.
What happened? Systematic, intensive phonics was replaced with "look-say" which is now the dominant method all across the country. Could it be mere coincidence that literacy has plummeted since then? I think not.
Why the changeover? Books have been written on the reasons. At least two of these books are by Blumenfeld himself, but one key must unmistakably be that education is government education now.
And just what other government effort is successfully managed today? Why should government do any better managing the teaching of reading than it has with the post office, Amtrak, welfare, the deficit, the budget, foreign aid, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua to name but a few?
And - lest we forget - government education's "new math" with the national debt at $2.3 trillion and rising fast.
Libs Can't Resist Temptation
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press Tribune
August 18, 1988
The controversial movie called The Last Temptation of Christ, scheduled to open last Friday at Boise's Egyptian theater, has done for the Christians (i.e., many of them) what importing small foreign automobiles into the United States has done to America's Big Three. Some good, some not so good.
Competition does strange and sometimes wonderful things to people especially where it's to the other (repeat, other) fellow. Still, one wonders if there isn't something more at issue here than mere competition or, forgive me, mere temptation.
For example, in the current (Sept. 16) issue of the National Review magazine, the Cadillac of conservative journals edited by the famous "gentleman of the right" and star of PBS's Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr., there is a super-critical commentary on this hotly contested movie:
"Anyone could see what was likely to happen. The two sides have faced off like the lines of two opposing football teams waiting for the snap - except that in this game both lines have jumped offsides and brawled."
We'll come back to said column in a moment, but I should add that the author of this particular piece is Joseph Sobran under the section aptly called Holy Wars. The headline is "Jesus, We Hardly Knew Ye." And if you'll pardon the pun, its commentary is quite revealing:
"The most famous scene shows Jesus mounting Mary Magdalene in their marriage bed. It doesn't 'really' happen; it's only a vision, a temptation Jesus undergoes on the cross. But the story doesn't 'really' happen either. The movie begins with a disclaimer to the effect that any resemblance to real persons - living, dead, or resurrected - is purely coincidental:
"The story is based on (Nikos) Kazantzakis' novel, not the Gospels. But the scene doesn't occur in the novel either. Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Paul Schrader, added it." Bear with me, my friends, it gets even better. Now get this:
"Everyone connected with the film seems to be affecting surprise that so many Christians are outraged. Last Temptation is being piously touted as a "religious experience." Scorsese calls it "our way" of worshipping Jesus. Universal executives, liberal theologians, and friendly critics and pundits are attacking the film's attackers for attacking it without having seen it."
But author Sobran, one of the country's truly card-carrying tell-it-like-it-is conservatives gives the film's vociferous critics a real and I think more effective weapon of reason against the film than the noisy ones we've been hearing. While it is true that the Christians claim their story is to be taken on faith rather than reason, certainly the latter has its place, especially in the secular marketplace where this battle is raging. He explains with a timely observation:
"Attackers, among them Patrick Buchanan, reached for obvious analogies to suggest the indignation many Christians felt. What if someone were to make a similar movie about Martin Luther King Jr. or (the Jewish) Ann Frank? These examples showed a sure sense of the current cultural pecking order. Liberals would oppose suppressing any such movie, but there would be a difference: they would feel compelled to express sympathy with the anger of black and Jewish protesters.
"In the case of Last Temptation, they expressed very little sympathy for the anger of Christians. Instead, they professed scorn for the Christians' intolerance and accused them of wanting to control what other people watched."
In my opinion the above is a glaring example, albeit a typical one, of the liberal's egregious double-standard with which they beat over the heads conservatives who are bound by the traditional standards that held sway only yesterday.
It is these guidelines through which we read and study our main "road map" on the complicated journey to tomorrow. And even more importantly perhaps to the Christians, these standards are in many ways actually their keys to the Kingdom.
Small wonder they tend to be upset.
A Little vs. a Lot More Government
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 21, 1988
Ten days ago this writer phoned several friends to suggest that if Vice President George Bush called them for advice to please recommend he change his first name to Anhauser (as in beer) then we could call him "Bush-Lite."
And, better yet, if he happened to choose Sen. Dan Quayle for his vice-presidential running mate, then we could all go "quail" hunting with "silver bullets." At least Coors Brewing Co. would get some free advertising for all their many years of outspoken support for genuinely conservative and mostly Republican causes.
Well, Bush surprised us and did indeed pick Dan Quayle for his running mate. This involved some risk, too, on Bush's part, since the Indiana senator is both quite young and quite conservative, so maybe this choice will herald a welcome departure from Bush's tag with which, so far, he seems forever plagued. Let's hope so anyway because his image up to this point has been about as exciting as holding your sister's gentle horse after the rodeo.
All joking and poking fun aside, Bush will need to risk several more unorthodox ploys between now and election day if he is to overcome the bias of the super-liberal media anchor people whose zeal for left-wingers such as Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson is becoming even more obvious each week.
News commentator Paul Harvey reported last Thursday that all three major television networks switched off their cameras, so to speak, during the principal speech of Jeane Kirkpatrick last Wednesday night.
The former ambassador to the United Nations and top-level spokesman for the Reagan administration was one of the few peppery and intelligent anti-communist conservatives to address the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. She seldom sits still for the Mickey Mouse and one-sided questions so often offered up by most of the national media hotshots; hence, this is probably their way of evening up the score.
Harvey went on to say that all three network teams preferred instead to interview one another in that time slot rather than let their viewers see and hear Mrs. Kirkpatrick. As an interesting aside, one wonders whether another world class great lady of conservative politics, Britain's Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, could have led her country out of their socialist quagmire if she had had a news media even half so keenly hostile and arrogant as the one that Reagan-Bush have had in America these past eight years.
Well then, what are we to glean from the first big decision of George Bush by himself, and how are his prospects looking? A few come easily to mind even though it's far too early to know. But: (1) He has Dukakis going for him! The extreme liberal former governor of Massachusetts, the single most liberal state in the nation, is both extreme and liberal. (2) So far as intellectual honesty is concerned, if that is at all a factor in politics, the choice of Quayle makes two fairly conservative standard-bearers for the GOP. That's fairly honest.
Contrast this, if you will, with the extreme liberal Dukakis choosing Lloyd Bentsen, who is perhaps the most conservative, if not the oldest, conservative Democrat in the whole Senate. True, it's been done before. But is it honest? The real choice seems to be a little more government vs. a lot more.
If elder statesman Barry Goldwater was correct in saying that Americans are overwhelmingly conservative, then Bush has an overwhelmingly effective potential secret weapon. The problem is that the GOP usually does its darndest to keep it that way, i.e., secret.
Goldwater was right back in 1964, but the so-called moderates in the party virtually destroyed him saying he was too conservative.
Well, we will never know what the debates would have produced if John F. Kennedy had lived so as to have given rise, in all probability, to more or less rational debates about ideas concerning America's future. Kennedy's liberal ideas and Goldwater's conservative ones back when words had some meaning. But now, Dukakis' ideas, if indeed he has anything but statism to offer, tend to make the late JFK's ideas look like the John Birch Society's.
Whatever one may think of the personalities of the candidates today one thing seems clear - the game they play is mostly a personality cult with political chants which the politicians hope will somehow catch on. And so far the Democrats have the best chant. It is: "Where was George?"
Bush's biggest problem is clearly that he's simply dull. His biggest asset, then, just may lie in the answer to where George was. Namely, that he was home, sober, dry and sleeping with his own wife.
Now then, if the bright, young and obscenely handsome Sen. Quayle with his classic Norman Rockwell-like family can somehow make that fashionable again - Bush just might make it.
Methinks She Exaggerateth
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 25, 1988
The great Ralph Waldo Emerson whose writings were at one time featured in most of the schools in America, but not so much any more, expressed great and helpful insight about the news media. Said he:
"Proportion in human nature is almost impossible. Everyone exaggerates." He could have added that some cases of exaggeration are certainly more extreme than others."
A case in point is the news release last week of Canyon County Democrat Chairwoman Cheryl Pleak. In an almost hysterical outcry claiming there may be some libertarian wolves in sheeps' (i.e., Republican) clothing, her press release's logic was littered with almost total irrationality.
In her attack on the two Republicans, who she claims may really be closet libertarians in disguise, she says: "They have taken our trust and used it for their own interest and that of the Libertarian Party." One can only assume by "our trust" that she means the Canyon County Democrats she leads.
So the question is obvious, namely, why is the matter of Republican "purity" so upsetting to Democrats? The answer also is rather obvious. For years the Democrats in Idaho in general and Canyon County in particular have been running and getting elected as Republicans. Reps. "Liz" Allan-Hodge and Robert Shaffer, the two Republicans that Pleak is charging with betraying the Republican Party, are merely not coming from the philosophical position(s) of the liberal Democrats. A welcome switch.
As an interesting aside, the former governor of Idaho, John Evans, said only a few short years ago to the effect: "The socialists need not mount a separate political party (any more) because there is plenty of room for them in the Democrat Party." Well, he could have chosen, like Pleak, to speak for the Republicans, by saying that there was little need for the Democrats to mount a party of their own since there was plenty of room for them in the Republican Party.
But then such candor in politics these days can hardly be counted upon. Too bad, too, for then our political "tower of Babel" in both parties could be more easily understood.
Speaking as an admitted friend of the Libertarian Party, I should emphasize a more serious problem with Pleak's statement if it goes unchallenged. In her emotional news release, she states that "the Libertarian Party advocates less government," which is true. But she goes on to equate the libertarian philosophy with "ultra-conservative" which is not true, then even further to state that, "History has taught us a lot about what happens when ultra-conservatives are in power. It taught us about persecution and pain, being thrown to the lions and (into) Hitler's gas chambers." Egad!
It is simply amazing how Pleak can complain about those trying to limit the powers and abuses of too much government as themselves having too much government as themselves having too much power. George Orwell in his famous book 1984 would label such words as "double-speak."
It is true, Cheryl, too much government can indeed be horrible as history clearly tells us, but you need to understand that a free society stems from limiting government, not increasing it. The libertarian story - exactly. You should try it. You might like it.
My final concern is perhaps the greatest. Political campaigns may tend to promote hysterical news releases filled with "double-speak," but where in the heck are the news media with their questioning and proper concern for the truth? Thoreau said long ago: "If words were invented to conceal thought, I think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention." Now, with today's TV stars it's even worse.
Maybe it is unfortunate that this writer, too, sincerely believes in less government. If such were not the case, then I could help pass a law (forgive me) that required the news media to display a warning label on their masthead or TV screen: "Warning: Believing Anything You See or Read in This Medium May Be Hazardous To Your Mental Health."
Some Heroes and Zeroes
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 28, 1988
We hear a great deal nowadays telling us over and over not to be negative. In fact to be negative about anything at all, however bad the results might be, would seem certain to involve risking one's actual life-sustaining social status. So better be ware.
Still we remember that the Ten Commandments, although we tend to hear less and less about them these days, are mostly negative. So even if their negativism is not honored it is good to remember that for every positive there must be a negative, i.e., for every rose - a raspberry. And it's often hard to tell which is most important. So:
Roses for the Caldwell School District's courageous decision to start a course in sex education. But:
Raspberries for the Idaho Press-Tribune. An editorial last week giving high marks for the school board's path-breaking decision said: "Information and education on sexuality can't be harmful." Balderdash! Of course it can be. It can also be helpful. Depends on the teachers, the students, the subject matter, the textbooks, the class atmosphere, etc., ad infinitum.
Maybe the school should also initiate a course in television watching - how to watch or what to watch. Time was not so long ago when they couldn't show a pregnant girl on television. Now they frequently show how she got that way. So:
Roses for the same Press-Tribune editorial which notes, "The Caldwell program begins with the premise that abstinence is the best policy. (But) Like it or not, students engaging in sex is a reality. That means young people should learn about and discuss options and consequences. The Caldwell program asks kids to abstain from sex until they are married. How realistic that is we're not sure."
Roses for Nampa's KIVI-TV manager Larry Chase whose editorial last week was a welcome switch, calling, more or less, for the media to get off U.S. Sen. Dan Quayle's back. The vice-presidential candidate is rather obviously taking a beating with another one of the press's double standard inquisitions. Said Chase, "The whole affair boils down to too many reporters with not enough to do."
Roses to conservative columnist Pat Buchanan appearing on TV's Nightline last week. He charged the media with using a double-standard on Quayle saying the liberal press was, "strangely silent about candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson's alleged hanky panky with some girlfriends." While Jackson's military record was also left out, a Los Angeles Times reporter replied on the same Nightline program with this feeble excuse: "Well, Jackson was not on anybody's ticket." (i.e., so nobody pursued the matter.) Ho ho ho. Buchanan could have come back exclaiming: Hogwash, Jackson virtually heads up a ticket of his own, namely, the media's knee-jerk racism ticket.
Roses for Idaho's Adjutant Gen. Darrell Manning, a well-known Democrat. Said he: "The idea of the Republican vice-presidential nominee's service in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War being somehow tainted is an insult." Good for Manning. Too bad other Democrats who share his sentiments don't have his guts.
Roses for South Africa's President Botha and the Reuter's worldwide wire service which carried the story: "Botha accused the U.S. of double standards concerning the shooting down of an Iranian airliner and offering only a haphazard apology while branding South Africa as a terrorist state." Then note the silence on the U.S.S.R.'s real terrorism.
Raspberries for Sam Lang, political reporter for Idaho Press-Tribune. In a column last week entitled "Quayle mars Bush's finest hour." Lang again restates the obvious. What is obvious? Well, the entire liberal media has descended on the young Indiana conservative in an attempt to make something out of nothing. And now Lang. Himself a former college professor, Lang opines Quayle's C-average grades "may have given him some trouble getting into law school."
But Lang forgot that Winston Churchill's school record was abominable and that former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, first a practicing lawyer, had to take the bar exam several times before passing. And Walter Lippman, the intellectual guru of that era, was not impressed with FDR, a "kind of amiable Boy Scout who just doesn't happen to have a very good mind."
So much for Lang's knowing - or not knowing - when and about whom to be negative. And how often his peers can see nothing else.
Watkin's Golden Silence
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press Tribune
October 2, 1988
"Conservatives are those people who come down out of the hills after the battle and shoot their wounded." This description, often used by conservative activists nationwide when things go awry, may not be 100 percent true, but it's sure the way to bet. It happens here at home, too.
In the arena of public affairs especially there are bound to be honest differences of opinion, differences of sensitivity, awareness, perception and emphasis. These, however, are too often met with a simple-minded and hateful response in public forums of one kind or another. But what of silence itself as a response? Is silence golden? Or is it merely yellow in color?
The fact is, of course, that it can be all of these or perhaps none, but a case in point stems from the recent allegations, accusations and half-truths used publicly by Canyon County Democrat Chairwoman Cheryl Pleak. She charged that Rep. Robert Shaefer and Liz Allan-Hodge were really libertarians only masquerading as members of the Republican Party.
The charges pressed by Pleak went on to say that such beliefs are not typical of Republicans and thus reflect discredit upon the Republicans. All this and more was said by the Democrat chieftess, not by some stalwart of the party of Abe Lincoln, mind you, but from a bitter competitor. What gives?
Well, Mrs. Pleak wants to elect Democrats, so how better to do this than set up a straw man and beat him to death. It's the oldest ploy in the history of competing ideas going back for centuries. So why get all out of join, then, if this is merely an age-old political trick? Because of the ensuing silence from Republicans - and all but a few libertarians.
Aside from the extremism of Democrat Pleak in her references to "betraying the Republican Party ... persecution and pain ... when ultra-conservatives are in power ... Hitler's gas chambers," etc., etc., ad nauseum, the Republican Party officials are most remarkably silent.
Here is a great opportunity for Idaho state chairman of the GOP, Blake Hall, to explain the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. He could and, of course, should tell the public of the Libertarian Party ideas, how they differ and how he thinks they are inferior to those of the GOP. But the silence is a thunder.
So, too, is the silence from Canyon County GOP Chairman Dr. Wilfred Watkins of Nampa. Recently elected to head the county political group Watkins is no newcomer to the Republican scene. Said to harbor something of an aspiration to higher political office himself someday, the affable medical doctor has worked hard for such ideologically diverse Republicans as Rep. Janet Hay, a liberal, and U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, a conservative.
This writer, an admitted long-time friend and critic of both libertarians and Republicans, asked Watkins to come out publicly against Pleak's innuendo and extremely misleading statements. But to no avail.
Too bad, too, since Press-Tribune columnist Erwin Schwiebert, whose familiar rhetoric against what he calls "extremism," seldom includes any criticism of left-wingers. Indeed, the long-time political activist, College of Idaho development executive and former politician has virtually made a life-work out of an alleged plea for what he pleases to call "moderation," but is really a thinly disguised support for his left-liberalism.
Watkins is the obvious choice to educate the voters as to his opponent's distortion and extremism but, alas, his silence is golden. I say golden, so far, because he's new in his political office.
Still, if this fun-loving and community-minded GOP leader does indeed aspire to higher political office someday, he must find a way to take sides publicly and make his position(s) palatable to the voters. Just because his political pal Rep. Janet Hay was Canyon County's biggest spender in the 1986-87 Legislature and Rep. Liz Allan-Hodge (who was a target of Pleak's attack) was that year's smallest spender (no pun intended) is no excuse for Watkins' thunderous silence.
But it tends to reveal a myth, namely, that the Idaho Legislature has for decades been under the "control" of Republicans. One needs to note, perhaps, that there is, in many ways, a more lively competition between the two factions within the GOP than between the two traditional parties - Democrat and Republican.
Watkins' personality and charm are ideally suited to lead both factions of his party to see what libertarianism is all about.
But I admit it's a risky route to higher office.
Some Roses, Raspberries
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 9, 1988
Well this year's raspberries are about gone - from the bush, that is. Fortunately there's still a good supply of raspberries in this column. But first a big bouquet of:
Roses for the editorial in last Wednesday's Press-Tribune denouncing the glaring hypocrisy at the Olympic games in Seoul, Korea. It is true that it's been going on for decades, but it is seldom one gets to hear about it in the major news media. Said the Press-Tribune:
"With that (double) standard in mind we must ask why the South Africans are banned from Olympic competition. The answer, of course, is apartheid, that country's despicable white/black segregation policy. It's a matter of human rights, insist (their detractors).
"Human rights? If (so) then tell us why Iran, Russia, East Germany, China, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, for examples, were allowed to compete in Seoul? We'll tell you why: hypocrisy."
Raspberries for the people who are all up in arms about what Paul Harvey told us last week, namely, that it is estimated only 18 percent of America's eligible voters will elect the next president of the U.S. This writer suggests that that very well may be good news - not bad news. There is a big possibility less than that percentage of either Democrats, Republicans or independents have enough interest and healthy skepticism to cast a very informed vote, i.e., a big turnout isn't necessarily a good turnout.
All of which tends to shore up the Press-Tribune editorial and the silly-putty mentality it portends to treat. So for a final paragraph another bouquet of:
Roses for above editorial: "Kicking South Africa around is an 'in' thing. For some unfathomable reason (there is) a wall in Berlin keeping East Germans in, (and how come) the gulags and the persecution of Jews in Russia and infanticide in China aren't human rights violations?
"The Olympics were great. It's the hypocrisy we could do without."
Roses for the editorial page and the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal (Unfortunately WSJ's news pages are quite similar to the liberal New York Times.) In a recent WSJ op-ed column former Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon takes after the so-called free enterprise businessmen.
"The American business community all too often goes AWOL in the struggle to defend freedom here it is under siege every day - not just in Congress, but in the academic institutions of this country.
"For many years Stanford University has waged war on the quasi-independent Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, finding its scholarly balance out of place at a school now dedicated to a narrow creed of collectivism and pacifism."
The outspoken ex-treasury chief actually made that stinging indictment of Stanford University. But he included elsewhere in the story examples of similarly stupid leftist bias at Harvard, Berkeley, Smith, University of Minnesota, Barnard, Dartmouth, Lafayette and doubtless could have named many more institutions of "higher" learning.
He went on to punch his punch-line, however, in a most unusual way - especially for a businessman:
"I have always believed, but never more than now, that we in the American business community have a right and a responsibility to steer our gifts to institutions committed to maintaining freedom.
"For too long, alumni have avoided facing these unpleasant facts."
Raspberries in a loud and long manner for most American big businesses listed as Forbes magazine's 100 biggest corporations.
In a study by the Capital Research Center last year entitled "Patterns In Corporate Philanthropy," it was reported that seven out of each 10 dollars these corporations give away go to "left-of-center organizations." Egad!
So thank heaven for a few newspapers whose editorial pages tell at least part of the non-liberal story. And:
Roses for the first paper whose editorial adds: "Capitalism was great. It's the corporate hypocrisy we could do without."
Pleak's Mischievous Ploys
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 16, 1988
Ordinarily this writer would not respond to a letter to the editor nor a guest opinion such as those in this newspaper last Thursday. So much hysterical ranting and self-serving exaggeration often surfaces during political campaigns, hence it is much ado about nothing and can usually best be treated by no response at all.
But Canyon County Democrat Chairwoman Cheryl Pleak's recent guest opinion presents something of a good opportunity to clear the air of much misinformation, disinformation, ignorance and downright political mischief that I am going to try to explain.
Pleak's major purpose as opposition leader of two Democrat nobodies who were dredged up to oppose Reps. Bob Shaffer and Liz Allan-Hodge, both Canyon County Republicans, is typical and more or less understandable since her Democrat candidates have little to offer the voters and have utterly no chance to win unless they can blow sufficient confusion into the picture to scare or confuse the voters.
First of all she claims, "... silence has become golden to the Republican party." One assumes her relentless attack alleging Shaffer and Allan-Hodge's are not loyal to the GOP is in her opinion a good and clever ploy to sow doubt, but Republican Chairman Dr. Wilford Watkins' silence as to Pleak's knee-jerk concern over the other party's loyalty is scant proof of anything. Anything, that is, except that that is the Republican's typical way of responding to anything unpleasant. Ignore it. Maybe it'll go away.
It is true. Watkins so far has chosen to keep his mouth shut, partly because he has bigger and confusing differences between some of his party's so-called moderates and conservatives than exist between many Democrats and Republicans. But his silence begs the question of just what the real thrust of difference between the two parties is.
On this particular matter both he and Pleak should be ashamed, i.e., Watkins for his unwillingness to state publicly that Shaffer and Allan-Hodge's positions hardly deviate at all from the GOP's official platform. And Pleak's shame should be for her insult to the intelligence of thoughtful observers and voters who can see right through her old-fashion ploy to sow the seeds of doubt with a phony straw-man label foisted on two conservative GOPers. If her fanatic and false labelling can frighten or confuse enough voters then her Democrats may have a chance.
Now, as to the labels that Pleak uses as a kind of name-calling ploy. These may be merely a form of ignorance or they may indeed by stupid or even malicious. In any event it makes little difference, since the result is the same. Her job is to get rid of two strong TOP stalwart conservatives who admittedly want less government, then substitute her Democrat nobodies in their place.
I would wish Allan-Hodge and Shaffer were indeed libertarian sympathizers more often than they are, because I'm happy to report that this country had founding fathers whose sympathies and principles were greatly, if not absolutely, libertarian, limited-government men.
But Pleak bastardizes the political atmosphere by alleging Shaffer and Allan-Hodge are against any government at all. She even intimates they are against social security "... from our senior citizens, etc., etc.," What hogwash. I know both these conservatives and neither of them advocate such far-out measures.
It is true that many (not all) Libertarian party members do advocate far less government than regular GOP conservatives, but Pleak's ploy is not to enlighten, but to inflame - and confuse.
Yet phoniest of all the charges is the Democrat chairwoman's claim to concern over Allan-Hodge's loyalty to the Republicans. It is true that Libertarian Party candidate for president of the U.S. Ron Paul is a good friend of Liz Allan-Hodge. Paul, a respected and competent medical doctor from Lake Lackson, Texas, is also a good friend of mine. A Texas congressman for three terms, Paul is also a good friend of U.S. Sen. Steve Symms. Does that suggest Symms, too, isn't loyal to the GOP?
I have been trying to get Pleak to come on my radio talk show on KIDO in Boise, but she told my producer she "felt more comfortable" on that station's Allibrandi show.
To those of you who have listened on the radio to my knee-jerk liberal friend Allibrandi (does said friendship make me disloyal to the libertarians, Cheryl?), it may tell you a lot about Pleak.
Some Roses, Raspberries
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 23, 1988
Roses are getting harder to come by as the "frost" of the political (read, silly) season gets colder and closer, but there's one bouquet of:
Roses for U.S. Sen. Steve Symms who has been named "Guardian of Small Business" by the nations' largest small business advocacy group, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). Of their 500,000 members, 7,200 live in Idaho.
"Without Symms' help in Washington the struggle to keep government and big labor from overwhelming small business would be very difficult."
Raspberries for NFIB and Symms, however, for not also blowing the whistle on big business who, according to a recent study, puts seven out of every 10 dollars of their philanthropy to left-of-center organizations.
Raspberries for Northwest Nazarene College who fired their assistant coach last week because, believe it or not, his Mormon religion did not agree with theirs. It was OK with NNC that the coach was a key player for two years on the school's winning basketball team just before being hired as assistant coach.
Roses for what still remains of sovereign rights for privately-owned organizations such as NNC. That's what freedom is all about, one supposes, which is the right to be wrong. However, this writer guesses we have not heard the last of the unfortunate little episode.
Raspberries for Press-Tribune columnist Ralph Smeed who called the Democrat opponents of Rep. Robert Schaefer and "Liz" Allan-Hodge "political nobodies." Democrat Chairwoman Cheryl Pleak, in a frantic effort to gain at least some attention for her young Democrat challengers, has been pulling her hair with public worry about the incumbents' loyalty to - now get this - the Republican Party. She claims Schaefer and Allan-Hodge vote too often for not enough government. Instead of "nobodies" Smeed should have called Pleak's new young candidates "rubber stamps."
Raspberries for Dr. Wilford Watkins of Nampa. The fun-loving urologist is Canyon County Republican chairman whose ideologically divergent political flock causes him no small amount of sweat. Pressed by several young GOPers and some not so young to stand up publicly and defend the honor of Allan-Hodge and Schaefer the doctor has steadfastly gone retromingent (look it up, it's a fitting and stainless description for a politician, especially one in Watkins' medical category.)
Roses for Vice President George Bush who maintains a position generally well to the right of his left-wing opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis. While such a "rightward" stance is admittedly not difficult it is great fun to see the Democrats almost panic each time Bush calls Dukakis a liberal.
Raspberries for the national media anchor-persons who deplore Bush's labeling as "name calling." Well, they oughtta know. Ho, ho, ho.
Roses for one of the nation's top newspaper critics of Massachusetts Gov. Dukakis. Washington Times columnist and author Warren Brooks tells us that that state under Dukakis has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs since June 1984, more than any other state in both absolute and relative terms. Interesting how nationally newsworthy this ain't - except in the Daily News Digest.
Roses for Dr. Anthony Sutton whose September newsletter "The Phoenix Letter" interviewed Trevor Constable, who developed a rain-making technology in the U.S. but thereafter took it all to Singapore, where it is being successfully used. He wouldn't use it in the U.S. because he couldn't comply with all the laws in the U.S. concerning this matter. Sutton notes that it is sad that hundreds of new technologies developed in the U.S. are "stifled by a greedy elitist establishment and a corrupt legal system."
This writer knew Tony Sutton when he was a scholar at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace and have since kept up our friendship. His exhaustive and massive study on the U.S.S.R.'s technology published by that institution was an embarrassment to the entire foreign policy establishment in America, but it received little publicity since the study disclosed America's huge role in providing and financing the Soviet machine.
Raspberries for the liberal professors at Stanford University where Hoover is located. Many of these outspoken academics circulated a petition to oust the Hoover Institute and its $73 million endowment from their campus. Egad! No wonder we lose.
AARP an 800-Pound Gorilla
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 30, 1988
In town last week from Denver, Colo., was George Engelter, a member of the board of directors of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and Garth Reid of Boise who is their Idaho state director. But wait! And before you yawn with a long ho-hum, and who cares? you may want to take heed.
AARP may well figure much larger in your political and financial life than you might have heretofore imagined. Next to the National Education Association (NEA), the powerful teacher's union, the retirees' group is thought by man to be the most potent political force in Washington, D.C.
I interviewed both Engelter and Reid on my radio talk show program last week. I was astounded at some of the things they told me. First was their awesome size. AARP claims 30 million members which in the words of Time magazine, "is bigger than most countries." With an estimated annual cash flow of $10 billion, according to the Washington Post, it also would be, if it were a public corporation, "the largest company in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area."
While Engelter assured this writer that they were greatly concerned with fiscal integrity and watching ever so carefully to see that Social Security was in no way jeopardized nor, one assumes, reduced, the everlasting vision of the great French genius Alexis de Toqueville comes to mind. He warned us in his 19th century book Democracy in America: "As soon as Americans discover they can vote themselves largesse (money) out of the public treasury their system will fall apart." Certainly if one judges from our skyrocketing multi-trillion dollar national debt such an admonition is far more than warranted.
Washington D.C., is strewn with huge organizations, some public, some private, all more or less with a similar view, i.e., to get their share of the government loot. So gargantuan and powerful have many of these organizations become that it can be political suicide for a politician to risk challenging their special interests.
AARP is a major component of this nationwide "industry of influence." According to the Washington Post, the association is "the nation's second-largest organization, behind only the Roman Catholic Church," is "adding 14,000 members every working day;" and counts "nearly one out of every four registered voters" among its members.
Any political candidate who continues to view "the aged group as physically and often mentally feeble, politically compliant socially inert ... now risks being trampled by what one congressman sweetly calls the 800-pound gorilla," according to one national publication.
AARP is classified as tax exempt under the IRS Code, but its insurance management fees, royalties on drug and travel-related services as well as its $5 annual dues and other rather huge revenues bring its $188 million income under increasing scrutiny. Forbes magazine notes, "AARP has had a $5 million annual solid surplus every year since 1983 and last year (it) was sitting on about $30 million in cash."
Elsewhere Forbes reported that Jack Carlson, former executive director of AARP, was fired at least partly for "his insistence that AARP rely more heavily on dues and less on commercial fees to finance its work." Fortune magazine also noted Carlson's view that "private solutions should come first and public programs second," was "too far to the right for AARP."
The last word behind Carlson's departure, Forbes explained, left AARP in disarray with an issue just beginning. "Members of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee on the prowl for new sources of tax revenue have begun to look at non-profit outfits like AARP which benefit from what in effect is business income. As one of the most visible non-profit organizations around, AARP may well soon collide with a social issue which it would just as soon not have to bargain with."Engelter explained on my radio program that the Gramm-Rudman bill's attempt to reduce government's wild spending habit was "a bull in a china shop" approach and thus not very responsible.
What he said may well be true and true also is that retired folks are indeed getting the shaft and deserve better at the hands of an increasingly profligate and ill-mannered government. But according to Fortune magazine AARP's publication, Modern Maturity magazine brings in annual advertising revenues of about $27 million, and Forbes reports it brought in about $40 million in 1987. So, hooray for entrepreneurship, I'd normally say.
However, according to the Washington Post, AARP "has never paid taxes on its magazine revenue."
So much for the terms "non-profit" and "tax-exempt," which I never did like. Now I have yet another reason.
Famous Black Opts for GOP
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 6, 1988
Perhaps once a year a letter or some piece of writing shows up in print which, like a colorful little desert flower in the wake of a warm spring rain, blossoms forth only to disappear after just a day or two - never to be seen again.
Some of these tiny flowers come out with such a beautiful, delicate and expressive glow one can scarcely resist plucking it and hurrying home to share it with someone as though it carried some sort of "message" that might otherwise be lost forever.
Well, I've just discovered one such beautiful blossom or, if you like, piece of writing, and I can hardly wait to share it with you. It appeared as a letter in the great Washington Times on Sept. 7 concerning the important, super-controversial subject of race. In my opinion, it could hardly be improved upon. Here it is:
"I support the Republican Party candidates in the 1988 election and would like to urge other members of the black race to do so (too).
"I hold this position because the greatest enemy of the black race in 1988 is the white liberal. Most Republicans are not liberals. The only thing worse than a Democratic liberal is a Republican liberal - and thank heavens, there are only a few of those left. The only thing worse than a white liberal is a black liberal, and the only thing worse than a black liberal is a black opportunist - better known collectively as the black elite.
"I support the Republican Party because the key to the American dream is citizenship, with all of its rights and privileges, and all of its responsibilities and obligations. With the Republicans, full citizenship for the black race may be possible. With the white Democratic liberal policies, full citizenship can never be.
"I support Republicans because I believe that abortion is wrong.
"I support Republicans because I believe that handing out sex devices in our schools is wrong.
"I support Republicans because I believe that disinvestment in South Africa is wrong.
"I support Republicans because I believe that handing out diplomas to black Americans who have not been taught what that diploma represents is wrong.
"I support Republicans because I believe that handing out welfare checks to able-bodied men and women is wrong.
"I support Republicans because I believe that state (government) lotteries and the no-fault divorce laws are wrong and that the Republicans may be willing to change them, whereas I know that the liberal Democrats will not.
"And lastly, I support Republicans because until some 20 years ago, the lowest unemployment in America existed among young black males. This was a reality because 60 percent of all young blacks were employed in black 'mom and pop' owned businesses. The white liberals and their black elite cohorts have destroyed black businesses because they want to keep the black race in a condition of dependency.
"Why should the black race listen to me? I am the James Meredith, who was the first black man to enter the University of Mississippi, and received a degree in history and political science. In 1966, Walter Cronkite announced that I was dead from an assassin's bullet while on a 'walk against fear'. I still bear the scars and pain of the three shotgun blasts.
"During 1988 Black History Month, the white liberal-black elite coalition succeeded in getting 11 of my speaking engagements canceled at colleges and military bases. They did not want my message heard.
"I have dedicated my life to the task of finding the way to make me and my kind full citizens, complete with all the tools necessary for competitiveness. I have learned a lot, and want others to have the benefit of my knowledge."
The letter, after all its candor and clarity, was merely signed: James H. Meredith, Cincinnati, Ohio. Isn't it just rotten that Republicans running to and fro these days in search of office cannot usually be expected to be so candid and forthright as this intelligent and gutsy black man. His outspoken thoughts fly in the face of a popular, if silly, guilt-trip indulged in by most every liberal political activist in America.
Perhaps now you too can see how Meredith's letter is indeed like a beautiful, if small, flower that blooms in the spring. I hope it being reproduced here will serve to help brighten up the swamp and mud of racial bigotry into which so many political liberals seem hell-bent to wallow these days in search of a little fleeting, self-serving and self-righteous glory.
Politicians Abuse Language
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 13, 1988
A few things seem clearer now that the election is over. But this week's "golden glow" award must go to international newsletter writer Harry Schultz who saw it and said it before the election.
Writing from Zurich, Switzerland, this highest-priced consultant in the world ($2,00 per hour) said in his Oct. 16, 1988, geo-political and money newsletter: "All four candidates appear mediocre at best. Public thinks they're not up to the job, have no new ideas, afraid to face the issues, throwing excess mud. Unfortunately, SOMEONE will win. Yet VOTERS must bear 1/2 the shame. They won't support anyone who proposes anything INTELLIGENT, especially (spending) cuts ... Voters (are) hypocritical too ..." Schultz's wordsmithy is typically near genius.
While the globe-trotting Schultz is devastatingly right on target, and is one of the few socially acceptable tycoons to say so publicly, he might have told the public about a most serious problem that surfaces again and again each election only to be conveniently swept under the rug by the media. That problem is semantics, both a tool and a truncheon for politicians especially during election campaigns.
Political science professor and Press-Tribune columnist Steve Shaw wrote well about it in his last Sunday's column. I say he wrote well, but from what I thought was a rather more biased view than it could have been. It was, nevertheless, both helpful and revealing. Here's why.
Shaw, a bright and pleasant young man, teaches at Northwest Nazarene College and usually exhibits a liberal to left-wing point of view in his writings. Sometimes this is to the chagrin of his school's administration. But bias of this sort is not to be entirely condemned. In my opinion, it should be contrasted with equally articulate, publicly stated and enthusiastic views to the contrary thus affording those who are interested a chance to compare before judging. But given the bias on college campuses, this seldom obtains.
Shaw's column bashed candidate Bush for bashing candidate Dukakis with the label "liberal." Now then, if ever anyone in America deserved the label liberal since George McGovern it was Michael Dukakis. But there is, of course, a good sense of the word as well as a bad one.
Shaw, being of a liberal persuasion, quite likely voted for Dukakis, hence understandably took exception to Bush's bashing the Duke with the "L" word. We are indebted nonetheless to the NNC professor for his notations. Said he:
Bush "... painted Michael Dukakis as a liberal, a free-spending, mushy-headed, bleeding-heart liberal who, it is hoped by many, is quickly becoming the political equivalent of a prehistoric beast.
"Mr. Bush's politically expedient trashing of the word liberal bothers me, for it is as if being a liberal as akin to being some kind of pervert, definitely something one would not want one's child or friends to be."
Shaw then administers the final blow with his next observation: "... almost equally bothersome is the manner in which many people, Dukakis not totally excepted, runs from the tag liberal like a rabbit from a greyhound, as if being a liberal is not only something worthy of political and personal suspicion, but in fact borders on the un-American." Perhaps an understatement.
One is tempted to respond with: "Well, Shaw and Schwiebert, both liberals by any popular definition, ought to know." But notwithstanding the fact that Schwiebert, another Press-Tribune columnist, likes to call himself a "moderate" (clearly a bastardization of modern political comparative language in the American-English idiom) I cannot include Shaw in such a polemic. Though certainly biased his is a very useful observation as are some of his other, usually interventionist, liberal and one-sided notations.
As I said, however, one-sidedness is not the problem here. The problem at NNC, the C of I, etc., is the all too typical one-sidedness of American colleges and universities whose English language, political philosophy and sociology departments fail to have other professors who are equally intelligent, articulate, publicly outspoken and gutsy so both students and the public can understand that the words conservative and libertarian were, and are still, bastardized by political activists on campus and in the media all across the nation.
Consider the labels hung often times on conservatives: right-wing, far-right, hard-right, Neanderthal, moss-back, extreme, uncaring, greedy, materialistic, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
All Bush did was to elevate "me-too" with one of the oldest ploys in politics - semantics.
Needless to say, it can work in reverse, too.
Networks Spike Libertarians
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 20, 1988
One hears frequently these days about our society's having lost something real big. Or, said another way, we seem to be losing our middle class, thus the rich and the poor getting more and more visible as they have been for centuries in foreign countries. Too bad, too!
Why is this true? Or, to the extent our society is indeed headed that way, then why is it that today's major political parties' presidential candidates almost never speak to the problem?
Well, truth is, the media seems to think the public is too damn dumb to be "entertained" by political campaigns that depend on anything more in depth than a personality-cult contest. If the "debate" is about ideas and concepts, so goes the conventional wisdom, then the viewers, listeners and readers will go to sleep and "our ratings might fall." The public is too dull-witted they say, hence we media people, too, must follow the mob if we ourselves are to survive with our huge salaries. (Dan Rather's $3.6 million and Tom Brokaw's $2 million per year. Believe it or not.)
The media tries, all too successfully I'm afraid, to blame this admittedly gawdawful superficiality onto the politicians of both parties, but thus explained it won't fly. A particularly egregious example: All four major news networks decided to boycott in the recent presidential contest any reference whatsoever to the party of ideas, namely, the Libertarian Party of Dr. Ron Paul, a three-term formal congressman and practicing medical doctor from Texas. His vice-presidential running mate, Andre Marrou, another real no-nonsense candidate of ideas and an elected member of the Alaska Legislature was a formal member of that state's Libertarian Party.
Their national party, by the way, was this year on the ballot in every state in the nation, save two. Offbeat? Maybe. But their common sense would have been big news and brought substance to the so-called big debate.
So much for the intellectual (dis)honesty of this country's media elite. But wait! There is some hope. It's called common sense. If only we haven't already "educated" ourselves beyond the healing powers of said common sense, i.e., you ever see a college course entitled "Common sense 101"? Not likely.
Here's an example of what's missing in today's politics and formal education: A friend of mine, Dr. Gary North writes in his national newsletter Remnant Review of a New York taxi driver's common sense. Says North:
"I was being driven from La Guardia Airport into Manhattan by a 60-year-old Russian immigrant who had been here 11 years. I asked him where he was from and was treated to an earful. Yelling, gesticulating as wildly as George Bush on camera, he told me what he thought of American politics:
"You build up a war machine against the communists and then you loan them money. (Then) You send them food. Are you crazy?" North added, "This guy sounded strangely sensible." The Russian continued:
"It's the bankers. The big bankers run this country. All they want is deals with the communists." Where was he reading this stuff? asked North. Interspersed with more arguments both coherent and not so coherent the taxi driver explained what Oliver North and John Poindexter had done to Congress:
"They weren't ready for this pair. Boy, did the politicians get fooled!" Then he said: "This country is state capitalism. It's just the rich sucking the wealth of the laborer. I like capitalism, but I mean what the little guy does. What we need is entrepreneurship."
North explained, "That's the word he used: entrepreneurship ... a 60-year-old Russian immigrant who has figured out what makes this country tick and what doesn't work."
It's called common sense, my friends, (Gary) North said he thought the Russian gets some of it from the call-in talk shows on the radio, otherwise, asks North: "How did he know about the bankers and the loans? These broadcasts are aimed at the sedentary wounded, yet they do let people get access to the offbeat side of the news. Sometimes it's a lot closer to the truth than the New York Times, which I'm sure the gentleman does not read regularly."
So there you have it, my friends, "entrepreneurship" and common sense from a Russian immigrant via one of the nation's first rate newsletters and a top observer (North) of the American scene.
But if you wonder just who to believe in all these political monkeyshines, please to remember that counting noses (i.e., voting) to determine the truth may be mostly another ploy to do away with common sense and entrepreneurship - especially if you don't have a Russian tax driver to consult about American politics.
Some Folks Just Have Spirit
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 4, 1988
What is it that makes a small city a good place to live, a good place to have a job, do business or make a living? Just what is it anyway?
One doesn't have to be a genius, of course, to know that it takes more than one item, but an ever-so-precious thing it takes for sure is a good spirit among the citizens. It takes a good spirit among the business and professional people, too, especially among the entrepreneurs the essence of which seems too often to have escaped many of the city fathers (and mothers?). But more on that some other time.
There is another dimension which many of us could use, but too often have neglected in ths past several years. This "dimension" is - are you ready for this (?) - What can I do all by myself without a committee or a work permit, so to speak, from City Hall?
Well, at least one Caldwell couple has decided to assume a little individual responsibility on their own and add some real genuine spirit to the flagging atmosphere in our fair city. In fact, Mr. and Mrs. William Hedley of 1608 Idaho Ave. have been doing just that, i.e., decorating their home with lots of colorful Christmas lights for years to add to the spirit of the religious holiday season.
But this year the Hedleys have gone all out with their decorations. Thus one can hardly drive down our street (I live only a few doors away) without wanting to stop to gaze at the blaze of lights and wonder if one should turn around and go home to pick up the family camera and shoot a color photo to capture some of that infectious Hedley spirit. Why, there must be 5,000 individual lights of most colors of the rainbow.
I didn't count them, of course, but seldom have I seen in our fair little city such a plethora of pleasure in color around virtually every nook and cranny, every corner, eve, window and door on a lovely home in the middle of our little hometown, especially on Idaho Avenue. (I thought for 25 years it was a "street" until Gene Graves pounded it into my head it was an "avenue.") It almost makes one think there just may be a bit of something to that old story called the spirit of Christmas after all.
So what's the big fuss, you may ask, over one admittedly fine couple in Caldwell whose Christmas decorations stimulate some extra spirit in their part of town? After all, there are indeed some others in Caldwell who have done a nice job decorating for Christmas. True enough! Here's why:
Caldwell is sort of down in the dumps these days and this writer wanted to suggest one specific item, namely, that a substantial chunk of said "dumps" has to do with something called attitude. The Hedleys, and people like them, are doing something on their own responsibility to help that attitude - not just talk about it. Think about what might happen if it were to catch on real big! Attitude has a lot to do with competitiveness, and compete we must, or die.
Whatever one may think about Chrysler's chief, Lee Iacocca, and his efforts to revive his once-flagging company he does his dangedest to tell-it-like-he-sees-it in his latest book TALKING STRAIGHT. He tells it in speaking about America's problem of product quality, but it fits the problem of spirit so vital to our own doldrums:
"... you have to understand that quality is an attitude. It doesn't have a beginning or a middle. And it hadn't better have an end. The quality of a product, and of the process in arriving at that product, has to go on and on to become part of every employee's mind-set. It all depends on people.
"Sure we need those expensive (capital investments), but they're just tools. Quality isn't something you can buy; it's something you must attain - through people. (See what I mean by substituting Iacocca's word "quality" with my word "spirit", i.e., like the Hedleys and a few others have done.) Iacocca goes on: "The quality improvement process is just ink on paper until workers breathe some life into the process.
"This sounds corny as hell," says Iacocca, "but everybody has to believe ..."
The big automobile tycoon went on to say some other things, many of which seemed to me contradictory and even wrong-headed, but you cannot gainsay the man's sincerity, enthusiasm and, I hasten to add, zeal to tell-it-like-he-sees-it.
In fact, much of his book is downright common sense, hence I recommend it highly, especially the part about having to "believe ..."
Well, the Hedleys not only believe, but they're also breathing some life into the process - all by themselves. Let's hope something comes along to enliven that spirit. It'd be easy to kill.
City Hall, let's please take note.
Stanford Liberals after the Hoover
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 11, 1988
"Conservatives have a right to rage." So writes Dr. Howard Hurwitz, recent past president of University Professors of Academic Order (UPAO), Box Q, Corvallis, Ore. One particularly flagrant example is at Stanford University today. Hurwitz explains:
"There are so few of us occupying prestigious positions on campus that the ousting of one of us is a cause for outcry.
"Stanford's termination of W. Glenn Campbell as director of the Hoover Institution On War, Revolution, and Peace is the latest scalp to be added to the belt of Stanford's liberal marauders.
"The university, especially its social science faculty, is a stronghold of left-wingers who have long coveted the resources of The Hoover, as it is called on campus, and the power to control its scholars.
"While Hoover's 120 scholars, up from six when Campbell first took over in 1960, are not all conservative, the Institution has been a refuge for brilliant conservatives who have not been able to gain university posts, and others like (Nobel prize winner) Milton Friedman."
Now then, this writer knows personally both Hoover's Campbell and UPAO's director Carl Salser whose leadership, intelligence and tenacity have kept their respective organizations alive and growing against mind-boggling opposition from the all-too-typical academic forces of evil. These men deserve better.
While Campbell's Hoover is much larger than Salser's UPAO the latter's function is nonetheless important, especially because a general academic bias is so widespread all across America that a virtual hatred for conservatism tends to go virtually unnoticed. Hurwitz illustrates:
"Campbell, a professed friend of President Reagan, has increased the center's $2 million endowment to $110 million and its 350 titles in print command even the grudging respect of liberal academics. How is it that Campbell has been forced to step down as of April 1988?
"The fault, in an otherwise sturdy tower at the center of Stanford's campus, lies in the foundation laid by Herbert Hoover, an alumnus, who established the library ... in 1919 (providing only) for quasi-independence of the Institution. Its director is appointed by (liberal) Stanford trustees ... who have decided that (while there have been exceptions) the customary age of 65 for retirement should be rigorously applied to Campbell.
"At first, Campbell decided to resist the dictate and seek legal recourse. But (later) decided to accept a compromise grudgingly granted by the trustees. He will retain his sumptuous office and act as a 'counselor' in appointment of scholars. This he sees as better than the initial offer of 'Director Emeritus,' which he perceived as a death sentence.
"Control of a superb (more or less conservative) 'think tank,' such as the Hoover Institution, is now likely to fall into the politically stained hands of Stanford President Donald Kennedy ... who campaigned openly for leftist Rose Bird, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who was later voted off the bench.
"Stanford, dedicated to a narrow creed of collectivism and pacifism, is poised for a takeover of Hoover's legacy to scholarship. It is to be hoped that Glenn Campbell's continued presence at (The) Hoover will at least provide him with a forum for publicizing the impending perfidy."
Unfortunately, most conservatives, libertarians, and others of independent persuasion will be typically enthusiastic, i.e., merely to let Campbell and the UPAO, all by themselves, assume the responsibility to express an effective and long overdue righteous indignation concerning academic bias at Stanford. And, perhaps more importantly, on other college and university campuses - all across America.
Exposing Woodward's Lies
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 18, 1988
A good friend of mine sent me a copy of a rather spectacular letter just the other day. It was signed by Sophia Casey, wife of the late William J. Casey, who was director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under President Reagan.
So much has been said about Casey's involvement in the whole Iran-Contra affair and the stewardship of the super-important and super-secret caper that has already been beat to a pump in the liberal media so I won't bother you readers with more of the same. But I do want to note for you in passing that both Lt. Col. Oliver North's and Adm. John Poindexter's expensive defense has much to do with how one sees their proper involvement alongside Casey before the latter's timely death.
Because the whole Iran-Contra affair and the media's one-sided and biased treatment of the patriots, North and Poindexter, had so much to do with one of the most famous newspaper reporters in the nation along with the latter's alleged interview with Casey on his death bed, I want my readers to hear from Casey's wife (Sophia).
Her fascinating letter is too long to reprint entirely, but here are some salient parts of it you may appreciate. The reporter, of course, is Bob Woodward of an extremely liberal, if important, Washington, D.C., newspaper. She writes:
"When Bob Woodward of the Washington Post came out with this latest book, VEIL, I was shocked beyond belief. He claimed my late husband, William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, had granted him an interview as he lay dying from brain surgery at Georgetown University Hospital.
"He said Bill had admitted to him that he had known about the diversion of profits from the sale of arms to Iran to help fund the (anti-communist) Nicaraguan freedom fighters, saying that he did so because, 'I believed.'
"This astonishing claim was big news on TV, radio, in newspapers and in news magazines. Woodward appeared on Tv shows like 60 Minutes, Nightline, and Donahue to repeat his claims and promote his book. Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post, by the way) did a cover story about it ...
"All of this propelled Woodward's book to the top of the best-seller lists and helped him get a fat contract for the movie rights. Woodward was laughing all the way to the bank, but I was stunned and depressed.
"This famous journalist was promoting his book with a brazen fabrication (i.e., a damned lie) ... It was truly astonishing.
"Bob Woodward never set foot in Bill Casey's hospital room. He tried and was turned away by the CIA guards ... on duty 24 hours a day. After that unsuccessful effort (however) the guard was doubled.
"Even if he had gotten past the guard, he would have encountered either me or my daughter, Bernadette, in the room. We spelled each other at Bill's bedside day and night."
Mrs. Casey went on to explain that even had Woodward broken past the guards "Bill was paralyzed from the brain surgery and was suffering from what the doctors call severe aphasia, or inability to communicate. He was physically incapable of carrying on the conversation that Woodward described.
"My daughter and I were given (some) opportunities to appear on TV and point out that Woodward's story was simply false, but for some reason our exposure of the flaws in his tale did not excite the interest of Woodward's friends in the media."
Given the worldwide attention to Woodward's tale and so little given to the Casey ladies' story "... says a lot about the degradation of journalistic standards in this country," according to Mrs. Casey.
And as if the above wasn't enough - comes this information now from Brig. Gen. Harry Anderholt:
"The special prosecutor (of North and Poindexter) Lawrence Walsh, has already spent over $20 million on the hearings and in preparation for the trial proceedings. Walsh has been given an unlimited budget and at last count has 28 lawyers on the case with 10 paralegals, four U.S. Customs agents and 26 FBI agents.
"... to extract every drop of publicity from it the special prosecutor also has (now get this) three full-time press officers, and, almost unbelievably, a staff historian."
In an interesting if frightening aside Aderholt notes that Gen. Richard Secord, also under Iran-Contra prosecution, "cannot afford to defend himself against this army of (government) lawyers along." He further explained Secord has already had to sell his home to pay mounting legal expenses.
"Secord, Col. North, Adm. Poindexter and others are victims because they face financial ruin and their personal honor and integrity is being called into question by the liberals and the media," Aderholt stated.
It has been said by some foreign policy observers that small countries, if they are vigorously anti-communist, cannot afford to be friends of the U.S.A. Well, one suspects, neither can our own patriotic individuals afford to - especially if they also are vigorous anti-communists.
Give Chairman Bill a Nobel Prize
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 25, 1988
This writer first met William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968. We had corresponded once or twice before that, but the above occasion was the 70th birthday of the late, great libertarian Leonard E. Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Irvington, N.Y. The affair took place at the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.
Buckley was one of five speakers that night, two of whom, by the way, were later to win Nobel prizes in economics. To be invited even as a guest was something, but to be a speaker to that most-prestigious gathering of conservatives, libertarians and world-wide non-liberal thought leaders was, well, noteworthy. It was also an international recognition, of sorts, for his conservative pioneering National Review (NR) magazine, the leading journal of that era. For example:
Buckley's magazine may have done more to establish two little-known but path-breaking facts crucial to conservatives' survival than anything else on the intellectual front: (1) No one could now say that all conservatives were unintelligent, since Buckley was easily brilliant, if not clairvoyant, and (2) gentleman-of-the-right, as Bill was wont to label right-wingers of that day, not only had a sense of humor but could even evince such. Yeah, maybe even more importantly, for the movement at least, a publication just might inspire humor in others, thus hope. It did.
Editor Buckley's feature, NOTED and ASIDES, of this month (12/30/88) has a spectacular case in point all the while educating, cajoling and highlighting his ever-present cause. An NR reader writes: "Dear Mr. Buckley: Recently, the San Jose Mercury News asked its readers for their solutions to the "child-care crisis." Here's mine:
"Dispatch the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to Washington, D.C. Surround the headquarters of the National Education Association. Apprehend anyone found in or around the premises. Shoot those that resist. Incarcerate the survivors on Devil's Island. Supply them with all the rats, gecko lizards, old shoes, and belts they can eat in a year. Dynamite the port and the airstrip.
"Order the First Armored Division to New York. Send one battalion-strength M-1 tank column up Fifth Avenue, and another across town from Grand Central Station to the offices at Black Rock. Fire for effect until CBS headquarters is levelled. Pave the site with a 24-inch layer of asphalt. Then issue a call for a negotiated settlement.
"Deploy two batteries of 155 millimeter howitzers in Central Park facing south and neutralize ABC and NBC headquarters. Position three batteries of 8-inch howitzers in (appropriately) Battery Park to fire in a northeasterly direction and demolish the New York Times. Mop up with helicopter gunships and armored calvary units.
"Air Force FB-111 bombers from bases in England, with air-to-air refueling, can be used against the Washington Post, PBS, National Public Radio, and the Institute for Policy Studies. Precision laser-guided bombs will minimize collateral damage and reduce risk to the Airborne and other friendly forces such as the National Taxpayers Union. (He should have added Human Events and the Washington Times.)
"Harvard and Yale can be handled with naval gunfire - thank you, former Navy Secretary Lehman - and Berkeley can be taken out with submarine-launched cruise missiles.
"Note that resort to nuclear weapons is not necessary.
"Having once and for all insulated the public debate over child care from the constant blare of Agitprop, people will come to their senses and realize that there is no child-care crisis: children require as much care as they always have.
"The crisis is in the minds of mothers. If the unholy alliance of feminists, politicians, bureaucrats, and quasi-governmental parasites would get off the backs of mothers and stop making them feel worthless and inadequate if they're not out in the nine-to-five workaday world, the "mother crisis" would evaporate, and so would the "child-care crisis."
The letter was signed: "Warmest personal regards, Thomas A Holford, San Jose, Calif." Buckley replies. (And oh, how he replies):
"Dear General Halford: Can't improve on that! Cordially, WFB."
And certainly one cannot improve on that except perhaps to note in passing that one reason the venerable, pungent, brainy and vigorously anti-communist Bill Buckley has become - almost by himself, alone - a veritable institution, may be this:
Unlike so many other super-bright and talented intellectuals, Buckley's sense of humor tends to inspire in those of his conservative breed the kidney that seems to convey, "We can too, communicate. We can! In spite of the whole damned liberal establishment in the colleges and universities, the news media, the politicians and the bureaucrats, as well as the National Education Association.
And, judging from how Candidate Bush devastated Candidate Dukakis with the word "liberal" in the recent presidential campaign, Buckley was right - in more ways than one. Now then, Chairman Bill should be in line for his Nobel Prize in, you guessed it, common-sense.
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The Pragmatic Side of Principle in Pursuit of Public Policy
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