Singing along with Mitch, etc. (Jay Nordlinger on Hillary,Mitch McConnell,Newt Gingrich et al)

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE.COM ^ | APRIL 27, 2005 | JAY NORDLINGER

[CHARLITE]

How often do you read a statement from a politician and think, “That speaks for me”? That seldom, huh? Anyway, I felt this way when reading an excerpt from a letter sent by Sen. Mitch McConnell to the Louisville Courier-Journal:

“Why is it that whenever a Democrat speaks before a religious audience, he is ‘reaching out,’ but when a Republican does it, he is ‘divisive’? . . . I can recall many instances of Democrats visiting churches over the years, not just to speak on a policy matter but even to outright plea for votes. Either I’ve missed the angry editorials in this paper and others over those events, or there’s an astonishing double standard afoot here.”

I know which option I vote for.

Do you recall when Jesse Jackson equated Dan Quayle with Herod, at the 1992 convention? Most Democrats thought that was sort of cool, I believe.

Remember the rule: Black people are allowed to mix religion and politics, because, why, it’s just their way, and they’ve got those cute lil’ spirituals and so on. (I am expressing what I consider to be the liberal-Democratic mindset.) And the religious Left, such as it is, can participate in politics, because that is a matter of conscience. But everybody else: Butt out.

By the way, I’m not sure that Mitch McConnell is the Senate’s MVP — I’d have to do a careful study (looking hard at Kyl, Brownback, and others) — but if he’s not, no one is.

Here is Senator Leahy, on Bolton: “Even if he came to the floor, I would suspect he’d be voted down on the floor, because there are enough Republicans who express concerns about him.”

Okay, let’s test it: Allow the nomination to proceed to the floor. We’ll see.

I offer you a typically perspicacious comment from Mark Steyn: “Sinking Bolton means handing a huge psychological victory to a federal bureaucracy which so spectacularly failed America on 9/11 and to a U.N. bureaucracy eager for any distraction from its own mess.”

If I were Senator Chafee, I’d be a touch embarrassed. The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, went to Chafee’s home state, Rhode Island, to campaign against Social Security reform. (Noble effort there, Harry.) He said, “[Chafee] is a good man. He needs to be directed to do the right thing.”

Yeah, directed by the Democratic leadership. Will Chafee stand for such directing? Can he afford not to, politically? Even more basically, why is he in politics? George W. Bush wanted to do more than follow in his father’s footsteps. How about Lincoln Chafee?

What has he to say about all this?

It is said that Hillary Clinton has a “moderate” position on abortion because she has made some classically Clintonian noises — “safe, legal, and rare,” blah, blah, blah.

It should not be forgotten, amid this talk, that she is a firm supporter of abortion on demand. To my knowledge, she would not prohibit any abortion whatever — even unto partial-birth abortion.

I believe this makes her an extremist. But even if it does not do that, to call her a moderate, simply on the basis of some semi-artful rhetorical fragments, is bizarre.

Let me give you a little Newt Gingrich. It is from a white paper of his, available on his website. (If I were on the left, and a snarky jerk, I’d say, “Yeah, all his papers are white.”) I was struck by this sentence, an amazing sentence:

“Only the past has lobbyists who protect what they already have; the future is unrepresented unless citizens engage.”

Newt continues,

“. . . to rally the country to change Washington, we must follow Prime Minister Thatcher’s rule that ‘first you win the argument, then you win the vote.’”

And this very interesting parable:

“Reagan proposed welfare reform at the National Governors’ Conference in 1970. No one supported him. By 1996, polls showed that 92% of the country favored welfare reform, including 88% of the people on welfare. By then, it was virtually impossible for the Congress to avoid passing it or for President Clinton to avoid signing it, which he did after vetoing it twice. We must again define the debate about winning the future and not let the elite media or our opponents derail us into an argument about defending the past.”

Whatever his shortcomings as a politician, the man can talk — and (first) think.

This week in The Spectator, we find Paul Johnson at his most cheerful: “I foresee a sorrowful procession of events in which the triumph of the Darwinians may ultimately lead to the extinction of the human race. Evolution to destruction, or self-destruction, is part of the Darwinian concept, but if the theory itself should bring it about, that indeed would be a singularity. Not inconceivable, though.”