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Wladyslaw Pleszczynski and William McGurn

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from: William McGurn

Editorials Against Proselytizing and Other Oxymorons

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001, at 3:33 PM ET

Dear Wlad,

Read your missive right after our editorial meeting here. It's not kosher to report what colleagues are saying at a private meeting, but someone there did make the same note you did about the Cuomo announcement: The original venue for the party was the home of Denise Rich, ex to America's most famous pardonee.

Think of what a Cuomo victory would mean for the Democrats--and New York. You'd have a Clinton in the Senate and a Cuomo in the governor's mansion. Reminds me of the lament of Kim Beazley Sr.: "When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle class perverts stop using the Labor Party as a cultural spittoon?" He was speaking of the Australian Labor Party but you can easily imagine some Democrat saying that about his party.

Don't know how Lieberman will vote. But if he's serious about running for the nomination in 2004, that means a "no" to Ashcroft. I wonder if Lieberman read the piece in the New Republic by Tevi Troy, a former Ashcroft staffer who's also an Orthodox Jew. By the way, the anti-Ashcroft ad blitz announced by the People for the American Way is priceless. The press release posits this question in big bold letters: "Should a man who misrepresents the facts under oath be our attorney general?" Seems to me that if you accept the argument that this kind of test doesn't apply to the president, it's hard to make the case why it ought to apply to the attorney general.

The flap over Bush's faith-based institutions initiative is instructive. The argument nay, as I understand it (and hear it articulated on almost every cable talk show), is that any government effort that does not view organized religion, especially Christianity, as a Threat to Our American Way of Life risks breaching the hallowed Wall Of Separation that puts us, of course, on the verge of becoming Another Iran.

Naturally SmarterTimes.com skewered the Times' editorial on the debate. But it missed the most delicious part, where the editorial itself inveighed against "proselytizing and other abuses." Again seems hard to square the very idea of an editorial with a stand against proselytizing. Reminds me, though, of all the people who find Ashcroft unbalanced because he believes in Revelation but subscribe to the Times because it is Authoritative.

If I were advising Dubya, I'd tell him to keep some of this stuff in his own handwriting. That way, 20 years from now--after he's privatized social security, reformed welfare, cut taxes, reined in the trial lawyers--we'll have a column from You Know Who saying, "Gee, he wasn't as dumb as we thought."

Cheers,
Bill

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: William McGurn

Editorials Against Proselytizing and Other Oxymorons

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001, at 3:33 PM ET
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Wladyslaw Pleszczynski is executive editor of the American Spectator. William McGurn is the Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer. (Read the Journal's editorial page here.)
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