The lessons of the Sixties are lost on Clinton

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 4, 1995 | by Adam Dubitsky

What America has seen from the Democrat Party in the wake of the hearings on Waco goes beyond political posturing and well into the realm of wholesale ideological dishonesty. Led by New York Rep. Charles Schumer's bitterness, Democrats attacked Republican outrage over how and why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and FBI military-style assault on the Branch Davidian compound resulted in the deaths of 80 men, women and children. Or, how Randy Weaver missing a court date -- many contend he was deliberately informed of the wrong date -- led to hundreds of federal officers surrounding his remote cabin and killing his wife and son with high-powered sniper rifles.

These are legitimate questions not because of who happened to be in the White House or Justice Department at the time, or who the subjects of the raids were -- a sex offender with a God complex and an unrepentant survivalist -- but because this country was founded on the concept that no government agency or official is above the law.

It is, therefore, in no way inconsistent for any politician or citizen to question the government and its officials when it believes the government may have overstepped its authority to arrest, indict and prosecute.

However, it was doubly inconsistent for the Democrat Party, which has long prided itself on its support of civil liberties, to narrow the scope and otherwise undermine the Waco hearings by questioning the Republican commitment to tough but fair law enforcement. You would think that liberal experiences with Fascist-like abridgments of the rule of law would deter them from betraying their own ideology for political gain.

Some of the most disturbing news footage ever aired in America was of police dogs and fire hoses being turned on peaceful civilrights demonstrators in the fifties and sixties. Just a few years later, police responding roughly to antiwar rioters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was broadcast live and made the cause of endless liberal polemics against police brutality. This kind of thing never plays well in America's living rooms. Nor should it. Conservatives nonetheless have usually been defenders of local police. Their slogan was "Support your local police and keep them independent." It was and is a vast federal police force that upsets conservatives and which liberals have tended to encourage, all the while criticizing local cops.

The Clintons once took even the wildest accusations of police brutality by local officers to absurd lengths. Long assumed to be the guiding ideological force in the White House, the former Hillary Rodham once sat on the board of editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action when it published drawings of police officers as pigs in uniforms being slaughtered and uttering racist epithets. One cartoon depicts a wounded pig and reads: "What is a pig? A low-natured beast that has no regard for law, justice or the rights of people ... a foul depraved traducer." Another proclaims "Seize the time!" and shows a suffering pig with bullets tearing it apart. These illustrations and others accompanied dozens of pages in defense of Black Panther Party membes on trial for murder.

Youthful indiscretion? Those in charge were apparently the brightest and most capable leaders of their generation -- the editors of an Ivy League university's law review. By the White House's own logic, the first lady was guilty of the very things of which they accuse conservatives today -- creating an atmosphere of hate that leads to violence against police.

The president in his youth also loathed the instruments of state power -- in his case, the Army. He loathed it just enough to let his more patriotic contemporaries fight and die, while he ducked and covered. But, millions of Americans of either party would be more than happy to forgive the Clintons for much of their sixties silliness and write it off as youthful folly. They would, that is, if the Clintons would acknowledge the failed agenda that took root in the counterculture of the sixties.

After all, people make mistakes. Texas Republican Sen. Phil Gramm began his political life as a Democrat but had the foresight to abandon his party and the grace to let his constituents vote on his decision. Robert Bork, not having inhaled anything more than cigarettes, lacked an excuse for his detour into Marxism but ran like the wind from it a few years later. And former President Reagan himself played the role of a liberal Democrat for years before exiting stage right.

However, it is painfully clear by the actions and inactions of the current administration that the ideology of the sixties permeates their every policy. The game plan continues to be fake right, cut left.

Federal authority is granted by the people contingent on the government operating within moral guidelines. By continuing to mislead the American people as to its ideological identity, the administration further erodes its own moral authority as the executor of our laws.