Lewis A. Fein

Libs arrest the police

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- BY NOW, Hillary Clinton has applied (or plans to administer) the political antiseptic of liberalism upon her wounds, received last Saturday before a crowd of angry New York City police officers and firemen. These protests are not about Bill or Hillary Clinton per se, as if one evening of uproarious outrage sufficiently captures America's fury at Mrs. Clinton.

Rather, this spontaneous disapproval involves Mrs. Clinton's latent attitudes concerning, and similarly liberal thoughts about, the alleged racism and illegitimacy of the police. For, notwithstanding the horror and murderous violence of last September, the police rightly suspect Mrs. Clinton (and others like her) would maintain her general philosophy about law enforcement: that it is a lowly profession - certainly one beneath the gifted genius of Yale alumni, excluding George W. Bush - reserved for society's racist beasts.

Yet why do the police dislike Mrs. Clinton, especially during a time when the entire country presumably stands united against evil? The answer is simple but controversial: we are militarily united abroad and culturally divided, between the eponymous blue and red states, at home. Or, to frame things more visually, Americans may wave Old Glory, but its colors assume many permutations - from the pastel patriotism of the soft left (where red, white and blue contrast too sharply off the orange sunsets of the Malibu coast) to the pink communism of extreme liberalism, neatly headquartered in Berkeley, California.

And, just as war against Hitler did not transform bigots into saints, last September's events do not acquit liberalism of its hatred toward law enforcement. The people that hate police officers - the kind of individuals permanently sequestered within the protective walls of Beverly Hills, California or Chappaqua, New York - enjoy the convenience of politics without consequences. That is, celebrities or affluent liberals can oppose school choice (though their own children attend private school) or trumpet gun control (provided armed personnel protect Rosie O'Donnell) without reprisal. Taken together, this philosophy represents the madness of money - like the rescue of Felix the cat by Officer Joe of the Beverly Hills Police Department, case number 553417.

Still, the broader issue concerning liberalism's hostility toward law enforcement remains. This cultural war (a conflict between two mutually incompatible groups, intellectuals and ordinary citizens) is about the potential supremacy of America's meritocracy. The liberal beneficiaries of America's meritocracy, including Mrs. Clinton and her Wellesley sisters, believe law enforcement is a brainless and brutal profession. By this standard, true power accrues only to those individuals with good grades and high SAT scores. Yet what police officers allegedly lack in intelligence, which itself is a terrible economic stereotype, they compensate for with something more exclusive and important: duty.

Every survivor of last September's terrorist attacks - especially every police officer privileged to have returned alive - enjoys the power of individual honor. Individual honor is liberalism's final and impossibly unsolvable theorem. For honor or the exercise of personal duty requires a form of selflessness, divorced from discussions of political viability or right-wing conspiracies, liberals cannot fathom. Think of honor as the captain of a great political Titanic, where liberals have consigned police officers, firemen and assembly workers to steerage - and final destruction.

The entombment of countless police officers and firemen, beneath a smoldering pile of rock, steel and glass, is the price of freedom . . . and liberalism's lunacy. Beneath the debris of the World Trade Center, there is another kind of metal: the police shields of the dead. Each badge contains a number and a name - these are the civilian dog tags of combat.

And then there is the pile of law enforcement's dead, brave officers with Irish-Catholic roots. These are the men that protect religion's very freedom, from the Latin recitations of their parish priest to the Hebraic chants of the neighborhood rabbi - even the Arabic calls of a peaceful imam. These are the soldiers of last September, for whom last rites were delivered and received from a distance and in every person's heart.

These are the soldiers liberalism hates.

-- Anonymous, October 25, 2001

Answers

Sianews

Why They Booed Hillary! and Gere

By Bruce Walker October 24, 2001

“Pacificist” Richard Gere and Hillary! appear before a gathering of truly brave, truly noble, and truly good men and women ...and get booed. Why? Was it because these honored thousands love violence, as Gere probably consoled himself? No. These good people had seen exactly what violence had done, and they hate senseless murder and mayhem all the more because of that.

Firefighters, after all, fight fires and not their fellow man. The same is true for emergency response personnel, who mend broken and burned bodies. Gere did not have any moral superiority at all over these people, regardless of one’s opinion on pacifism. True pacifists are not cowards, like Gere.

Does anyone imagine for a moment that firefighters, police officers, and medical workers would have booed Rev. Martin Luther King? He was a pacifist, but a pacifist who practiced what he preached and paid the price for pacifism. Can any serious person imagine that these New Yorkers would have booed Mother Teresa, who also rejected violence? Or Albert Schweitzer? Or Mohandas Gandhi?

No. Although police officers might shake their heads in disagreement with the message, they would have had great respect for the messenger. Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, and Mohandas Gandhi had courage and strength of convictions. The crowds would have cheered and wept and sought to touch their hands and hear their words.

Gere is a Hollywood movie star, whose life is pampered, safe, and heaped with undeserved honors. His words are just words. Perhaps if he went to Bagdad to preach peace, that might mean something. Perhaps if he traveled incognito to Timor and asked the gangs of sadistic murderers to be kind, that might carry some weight. Maybe if he walked the streets of Karachi and Islamabad, carrying the message of the Buddha (recalling that the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist mountainside shrines.

Hillary! is just as phony as Gere. Her reputation for looking down with regal scorn on those “little people” around her is legendary. Her cowardice at facing hostile questions or difficult interviews is also well known. She lives as puffy and fluffy a life as Gere, and Hillary!’s condescending attitude towards people much better is something that police and firefighters can do without.

Perhaps these noble thousands who gathered for a good purpose also recall her yawning boredom while her Commander-in-Chief gave his inspiring address to the nation. If she cannot be polite to a real leader like President Bush, then why should these men and women care about a fop like her who received New York more of less as a Grand Duchy from the national media and Hollywood elites.

Or maybe they remember have she twisted the knife in Mayor Giuliani last year, and now compare a great leader with a plastic phony like her. Does anyone doubt today which of the those two would have won the Senate seat that Daniel Patrick Moynihan once held?

What Gere, Hillary! and their ilk seem to have missed is that things are real today. Events are serious. The time for photo opportunities is gone, perhaps forever. America is in a fight for its life, with no clear assurance it will win. When the Taliban come looking for Gere, his pacifism will meet a true test. When Hillary! is forced to wear the suffocating dress of an Afghan woman, then maybe she will understand. Obviously, though, these two graying self-important celebrities have learned nothing at all yet. Except how much all of us who live in the real world dislike them.

-- Anonymous, October 25, 2001

Evening everyone!

OG - Nice catch! I truly hope that last paragraph is true - and that many Americans who voted the Dem. ticket last time have woken up. News is that Gore is going to try to run again in '04...

http://www.nypost.com/gossip/cindy.htm

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2001

Deb's Link

That's a scary idea, Gore running for president again. Now, Gore running, that isn't scary.

-- Anonymous, October 27, 2001