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Every Democratic Administration since
World War II has gone out of office with a foreign
policy crisis. Harry Truman was involved in the
hopeless, draining Korean War when his Administration
ended in January of 1953.
The Truman Administration got us into the Korean
War in 1950. Then the Democrats do what they've
always done since World War II. After getting us
into the war, they refused to fight the war seriously,
so the Korean War bogged down into bloody hopelessness.
The Democrats were thrown out of office in 1952,
losing the White House and BOTH Houses of Congress.
It was left to Truman's Republican successor, Dwight
Eisenhower, to bring the Korean War to an end.
The Democrats got the White House back in 1961.
The Democratic Administrations of Kennedy and Johnson
got us into the Vietnam War in the early 1960's.
Once again, liberal Democrats got us into a war
with the Communists and then refused to fight it
seriously. Vietnam, like Korea, became an exercise
in bloody hopelessness.
So in 1968, the Republican Richard Nixon won the
presidential election and Republicans took over
the White House again.
It was not until 1977 that the Democrats took the
White House back under Jimmy Carter. Carter promptly
got the United States into another foreign policy
disaster.
In 1979, Iranians seized the United States Embassy
and took its staff hostage. They held on to them
until January, 1981, when another Republican, Ronald
Reagan, took over the presidency.
Since World War II, we have had three Democratic
Administrations, and each of them went out of office
in a major foreign policy crisis.
Since I lived through the history I have just recited,
I have been waiting for Clinton to get himself into
a foreign policy disaster he couldn't get out of.
Haiti should have been the catastrophe, but Jimmy
Carter pulled that out of the fire for him. If Clinton
had actually got into a serious war with Saddam,
it would probably have proved a hopeless draw. But
Saddam kept backing down.
Clinton keeps getting into ridiculous situations,
but he keeps lucking out of them. Being an American
watching Clinton's foreign policy is a lot like
riding with a wild drunk at the wheel. Like a drunk
driver, any time he sees something really dangerous,
he swings around and heads for it.
As I have pointed out before, the two places all
sane men avoid getting into are the Middle East
and the Balkans. Kosovo is right smack dab in the
middle of the Balkans, and Clinton wants to get
American troops in there so bad he can TASTE it!
Normally, I would freely predict that our present
move to get troops on the ground in Kosovo would
be a sure disaster in the making. But I am afraid
to bet against the Clinton luck. And, frankly, I
am praying that he has a LOT of luck this time.
As I said before, the Kosovo situation has brought
us closer to a nuclear confrontation than we have
been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis
of 1962 (Please see "Observation",
March 6). What makes this situation particularly
dangerous is that, in contrast to our attitude in
1962, we are not taking the Russians seriously today.
Russia feels our contempt, and our contempt is a
major provocation to them.
The Russians may end up going to war over our treatment
of their fellow Slavs in Serbia. They have made
it very, very clear that they are totally on the
Serbian side, against the US. Add to this fact that
many Russians feel they have little to lose today,
and the fact that we are making their attitude worse
by not taking them seriously.
Further, the Russians don't have the same central
control over their missiles that they had under
the Soviet Union. Add to this the fact that the
man with his hand on the nuclear trigger is a terminally
ill alcoholic with little control over his subordinates,
even on the rare occasions when he is in good enough
condition to exercise it.
So what happens if some Russian does launch a nuclear
missile? Aren't their nuclear forces out of date?
Wouldn't we just shoot such a missile down?
No, we would not. We have no defenses against any
kind of nuclear missile.
If a maverick Russian sends a nuclear missile our
way, it will hit its target. All ten megatons of
it will explode in the United States.
What would happen next is anybody's guess.
So I am hoping our drunk-driving president has luck
once again.
Granted, if there were another Democratic foreign
policy disaster it would once again elect a Republican
president, as Democratic foreign policy disasters
have already done three times since World War II.
But I am not willing to hope for a possible nuclear
war to get Dole or Bush elected.
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Reporters are getting killed a lot
these days. CNN had a special on this rising death
rate a short time ago. Even more recently CNN announced
that another of their producers had been killed.
This is not completely new. Bill Mauldin, the famous
World War II cartoonist, was killed at the front
at the end of that war.
A foreign reporter was killed when the United States
Army enforced integration at the University of Mississippi
on the orders of President Kennedy in 1962.
But recently the death rate among reporters has
risen substantially. The Liberated Peoples, the
people we right wingers said shouldn't be running
countries, are now murdering reporters in record
numbers. Their leaders, the people us reactionaries
said were a bunch of mindless thugs, are suppressing
reporters all over the world, and jailing them,
and killing them.
During all those years we were warning against these
"emerging" leaders, the media championed
those folks. They were leftists, and the media championed
anybody on the left.
Back during World War II, the enemy was right wing,
so the press was solidly on the side of the United
States. That seemed an obvious side for them to
take, since the fascist enemy was against freedom
of the press.
But we have been told, over and over, that things
got "complicated" after World War II.
We are told, again and again, that the enemy was
no longer nearly so clear and obvious.
TRANSLATION:
Suddenly, the enemy of the United States was now
on the political LEFT.
The media could not come down so hard or so clearly
against the Communists as they had upon the fascists.
They tell us that all the time, though they don't
use those words. They just say, "After World
War II, things were no longer so simple. It was
harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys."
Hitler was bad. But Stalin was "complicated."
The post-World War II Communist enemy was just as
solidly against freedom of the press as any fascist.
All that had changed was that this enemy was on
the left. That is the only reason things were suddenly
so "complicated."
Exactly the same thing happened with the trendy
attitude toward the atomic bomb. When it was to
be used against Nazi Germany, everybody from Einstein
to Oppenheimer to Fuchs was all for it, no problem.
By the time Germany surrendered, the momentum was
there, and it was used against Japan.
Then, suddenly, Communism rather than fascism was
the enemy. Suddenly, the atomic bomb was Evil.
Once again, the media makes no secret of this.
Recently I was watching a show about Oppenheimer,
a scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb during
World War II. He switched to opposing the US having
the bomb when Communism became the enemy. He was
especially friendly to the Communists, and many
people suspected that he gave Stalin atomic secrets.
There is no doubt that his fellow scientist, Klaus
Fuchs, was in fact a Communist and did give Stalin
nuclear secrets, so there was nothing impossible
about this suspicion. Naturally, this program, like
all of them, was dedicated to proving that Oppenheimer
did not give secrets to Stalin. To demonstrate how
he resisted the temptation to give atomic secrets
to the Reds, it showed Oppenheimer at a party in
his home, being urged by his Communist friends to
give secrets to Stalin.
In order to show how patriotic Oppenheimer was,
Oppenheimer was represented as refusing to yield
to his Communist friends' open incitements to treason.
To the people producing the show, resisting your
Communist friends' demands that you commit treason
shows you are a true patriot.
I am a fellow from rural South Carolina, so this
struck me in an absolutely different way than it
did anybody who makes television shows.
My first reaction was to wonder what in the hell
a man with a top secret clearance was doing LISTENING
TO somebody who was urging him to commit treason?
Well, to the media, this was not so "simple."
This was a very "complicated" matter.
These were Communist friends, not fascists.
Translation: it's not treason, it's leftism.
I am not joking here. This is how our real national
dialogue is determined.
It is just that no one dares put it in plain English.
Any respectable conservative who put it this way
would quickly cease to be respectable.
And all this is the policy of the American press.
They sanction enemies of freedom of the press, provided
those enemies are on the left. And, in the world
they have created, a lot of media people get killed.
As a South Carolina boy who has no reverence at
all, I am not that upset that the media is getting
what it gave the rest of us. They have never shown
any outrage when Americans were killed or betrayed
by their pets on the political left.
When the third world masses and their thugs took
over and suppressed freedom and killed people and
seized American property, the media said that
was just fine. But now that they are killing media
people, too, it is suddenly horrible and disastrous.
Or it may be simply a case of what goes around comes
around.
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