GOP Crack-Up? Pardon My Guffaw (Mark Steyn: Republicans "Did the Right Thing" re: Schiavo)

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | 4/03/05 | Mark Steyn

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

Anyone would think it was the Republicans who'd lost the 2004 elections, and the 2002 elections, and the 2000 elections. From every corner, concerned "friends" of the party rise to offer "friendly" advice. Norman Lear, who produced all those critically acclaimed issue-confronting heroine-gets-an-abortion '70s sitcoms that seem a lot more dated than ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' these days, has now produced a People For the American Way ad in which a man who identifies himself as a "common sense Republican" objects to any attempt to end the Democratic filibuster of Bush's judicial nominees. As things turn out, the "common sense Republican" has so much common sense he's an official with a union that endorsed John Kerry.

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:

"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.

The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.

The notion, for example, that poor Terri Schiavo will cost Republicans votes in a year and a half's time is ludicrous. The best distillation of the pro-Schiavo case was made by James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, responding to the provocateur Christopher Hitchens' dismissal of her as a "non-human entity." "It is not wise," wrote Lileks, "to call people dead before they are actually, well, dead. You can be 'as good as dead' or 'brain dead' or 'close to death,' but if the heart beats and the chest rises, I think we should balk at saying this constitutes dead, period."

Just so. Once you get used to designating living, breathing bodies as "non-human entities," it's easy to bandy them ever more carelessly -- as they do in the eminently progressive Netherlands, where their relaxed attitude to pot and prostitution led to a relaxed attitude to euthanasia which looks like relaxing the Dutch people right out of business. It's all done quietly over there -- no fuss, no publicity; you go in to hospital with a heavy cold and you're carried out by the handles. (By "handles," I mean a coffin, not a ceremonial phalanx of Monteagles and Princetons.) But that's not the American way. This is a legalistic society, where grade schools can't have kids knocking a ball around without getting a gazillion dollars worth of liability insurance. I was in Price Chopper the other day and they had a little basket of Easter samples on display accompanied by a page of full print outlining the various sub-clauses of the company's "tasting policy." That's America. In Holland, you can taste a cookie without signing a legal waiver, and, if you get food poisoning from it, the doctor will discreetly euthanize you to avoid putting your family through the trauma of waiting six hours for the stomach pump to become available. That's not how the American cookie crumbles. Euthanasia here will be a 10-year court culminating in slow-motion public execution played out on the 24-hour cable channels.

The Republicans did the right thing here, and they won't be punished for it by the electors. As with abortion, this will be an issue where the public moves slowly but steadily toward the conservative position: Terri Schiavo's court-ordered death will not be without meaning. As to "crack-ups," that's only a neurotic way of saying that these days most of the intellectual debate is within the right. If, like the Democrats, all you've got are lockstep litmus tests on race and abortion and all the rest, what's to crack up over? You just lose elections every two years, but carry on insisting, as Ted Kennedy does, that you're still the majority party. Ted's quite a large majority just by himself these days, but it's still not enough.

[Diogenesis]

BELIEVE IT OR NOT

Clearwater Bar Association 'recognized 'Judge George Greer for his decision to
execute Terri Schindler. They presented the John U. Bird award to the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit judge on May 15, 2004.
This prestigious award, which is the Clearwater bar's highest honor for a judge,
was granted to Judge Greer for the way he has handled himself in the Nazi fashion
(adopted by the Scientologists) of executing by dehydration and starvation while
the victim screams, as in the Terri Schiavo case!


Source 1

Source 2

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[Miss Marple]

I absolutely love Mark Steyn. Thanks for posting this!

[Diogenesis]

"Thanks to Kerry in his Hanoi Jane period,
Vietnam was a disaster for America
that gave the establishment a wholly irrational fear
of almost every ramshackle Third World basket case on the planet."
Mark Steyn

---

"(John Kerry's) default position is the conventional wisdom of the Massachusetts Left:
on foreign policy, foreigners know best;
on trade, the labour unions know best;
on government, bureaucrats know best;
on defence, graying ponytailed nuclear-freeze reflex anti-militarists know best;
on the wine list, he knows best."
Mark Steyn

[jla]

The Republicans did the right thing here, and they won't be punished for it by the electors.

Absolutely true.
Now maybe the so-called conservatives who have been intent to malign Tom DeLay will finally stop.

[iopscusa]

I love the way Mark Steyners the stoopid Left and their buds the Lefty-Repubs...he slices and dices as well as anyone.

[Bahbah]

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.?

I initially thought Steyn was making up these names. Apparently not. Bwahahahaha.

[lainde]

bttt

[beyond the sea]

ping

Thought you and that vaunted 'WPPFF' might want to see this.

;-)

[SkyPilot]

Steyn is exactly correct, and his wit and satire cut to the heart of the matter again.

Look at this revolting cartoon by Rex Babin that appeared in the Sacramento Bee.

What the Democrats and hard core liberals really feared was that this very public moral debate would expose their own lack of morals. They also feared that any Judeo-Christian aspect of this case regarding God's value of all life would spill out into the next court appointment battle.

The courts obliged in the Schiavo by reinforcing the Conservative position--that liberal judges are out of control and must be stopped.

[Tom Bombadil]

59 panjandrums

Worse than a loose cannon.

A wonderful mental picture of a very defective weapons system.

[mewzilla]

The Republicans did the right thing here, and they won't be punished for it by the electors.

And not just electors from their own party, either. Mark my words, there will be even more Dems voting Republican the next time around. I know fewer and fewer Dems who want anything to do with the Deathocrats.

[goldstategop]

Uncle Ted and his Boys are the ones cracking up. The legacy media's tune that voters will punish the GOP for being pro-life sounds a lot like whistling past the graveyard. C'mon now; if abortion was such a winning issue in this country, the Democrats wouldn't be talking about recruiting pro-life candidates. Its the party of choice that's made a political brouhaha out of the Terri Schiavo case. So who's really being indecent? Uncle Ted rode to his career on the back of a dead woman and his party now wants to imitate his example. Whatta way to go!

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Once-Ler]

The Republicans did the right thing here

Yes we did. We faught for justice but we did not win. That should be worth some distinction for those who really care and have a brain

[finnigan2]

panjandrum
n : an important or influential (and often overbearing) person [syn: very important person, VIP, high-up, dignitary, high muckamuck]

[InABunkerUnderSF]

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador.

Condi Rice should appoint one of these clowns as head of the visa section at our new consulate in Sagastyr, in the Lena River Delta country of the Sakha Republic of the Russian Federation.

He could serve as an example for the others. Then again, Siberia is a vast land and her people have long been without consular representation from the US State Department. If a citizen of Siberia wants to take a winter vacation in, say Florida, he has to travel thousands of miles just to apply for a tourist visa.

Maybe we need a string of consulates across northern Siberia. This could be a win-win, Siberians get easier access to warm American tourist destinations and the US gets a means of rewarding State Department officials with postings worthy of their talents and the degree of loyalty they have demonstrated to the United States.

[jla]

that vaunted 'WPPFF'

Aren't those the folks always roaring about how Republicans 'eat their own', yet they have no qualms in vilifying Tom DeLay and other Republicans who spoke up for Terri Schiavo?

[GeekDejure]

That cartoon would be equally correct if it showed "Lucifer's Left" feeding the "Democrats" !!! ;-))

[alicewonders]

that vaunted 'WPPFF'

Aren't those the folks always roaring about how Republicans 'eat their own', yet they have no qualms in vilifying Tom DeLay and other Republicans who spoke up for Terri Schiavo?

Yes, they are. The level of viciousness got so high at times, I had to look up at my URL address bar to make sure I wasn't on the Democrat Underground site. Intolerance to other's opinions,......a cold, scientific intelligensia elitism.......WE know better than you do.....

[Diogenesis]