The Enemies List
Page 8
Doug Rivers of Warner Robins, Georgia, takes aim at:
Jeff Smith, public television’s prattling peacenik Frugal Gourmet. Anybody for Native American pudding?
All sportscasters who persist in explaining to us what great human beings those arrogant, coke-tooting, coed-slugging, 7-Eleven-robbing, stereo-stealing college athletes really are
Col.David Hackworth, a media darling you would never have heard of if not for his rambling, paranoid criticisms of the U.S. military and Marxist critique of U.S. foreign policy
Celebrity ex-drug addicts who are given free airtime and publicity to deliver ostensibly anti-drug commercials which wind up conveying that big-time stars use drugs and get away with it
Anybody associated with any movie that has been described as the “best movie ever made about Vietnam”
All congresspersons named Barbara
“The only problem with the New Enemies List,” says Urs B. Furrer of Elmsford, New York, “is that ... we should remember that more than 40 percent of the people voted for ‘Little Duke’ in 1988. So while I would like to add a few specifics, I would also like to round up the rest of those commie lefties out there”:
Judge Sand of New York, for having the nerve to write an opinion that says begging is a form of constitutionally protected free speech
The Peace Dividend
No-growth economists
People who drive slow in the fast lane
Those ungrateful Greeks, who cursed our military presence and now curse us for wanting to leave
Any group that uses “Defense Fund,” “Council,” or “League” in its name [With, we presume, the exception of the National Security Council, the American League, and Messrs. Osen and Propson’s Robert Bork Legal Defense Fund.]
Anyone who thinks Bernhard Goetz should be in jail
Anyone who thinks Michael Milken should be in jail
Anyone who thinks Oliver North should be in jail
Anyone who thinks he has ended an argument by blaming a problem on Ronald Reagan
Paul Kirchner of Hamden, Connecticut, tells us “trying to list the left-wingers in showbiz is like trying to conduct a cockroach census in my old Lower East Side apartment. ... Wouldn’t it be easier to make a special case of Hollywood and list everyone who isn’t a Commie?” OK, we’ll give it a try:
Hollywood Anti-Blacklist Roster of Conservative Heroes and Pals
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Robert Stack
Chuck Norris
Tom Selleck
Charlton Heston
Ricardo Montalban
Jan Michael Vincent
John Milius
Marilyn Chambers: She cruises the annual Soldier of Fortune convention, so I guess she’s OK.
Sean Connery
Clint Eastwood, though he showed squishy tendencies over there in Cannes
Stallone and George Hamilton: they liked the Marcoses, but does that make them right-wingers?
Anyone who appears in a Bob Hope special
“I haven’t investigated Sam Kinison,” says Mr. Kirchner, “but he’s my hero for saying ‘America doesn’t have the guts to admit that Whoopi Goldberg isn’t funny.’”
Now, back to condemning people to perdition. John D. Kelley of Portland, Maine, gives the bum’s rush to:
Anyone who actually believes there is a law, either written or implied, stating that society must support the struggling artist
Ben Vowels and Randy Brandt of Davis and Ramona, California, respectively, send us a “New Enemies Primer.” Herewith some samples therefrom:
D is for Dukakis, the political joke
Kitty’s in rehab and Massachusetts is broke
N is for Nunn; though not as liberal as Ted
When his interest’s at heart, he’ll jump right into bed
O is for Ortega, cheered on by Winger
So let’s sendDebra there, attached to a Stinger
T is for Tutu, spouting ANC baloney
Falwell was right when he called him a phony
X is for Malcolm, a bad dude of old
Now joined byAbbie where it never gets cold
Donald Whidder, who leaves us to speculate about his address, would give the gate to:
All the Palestinian punks who throw rocks in the infantilah (sic)
Oscar Arias Sanchez, appeaser
The City of Miami, except for the Latin Quarter
All codgers who want free medical care but want younger people to pay for it
Ed Green of Charleston, New York, says,
It would be too bad if Dr. Alan Chartock couldn’t be included on your list. He is executive director/producer/fund raiser of our local NPR affiliate WAMC; professor of political science at SUNY New Paltz; professor of communications at SUNY Albany; and political commentator for the local CBS-TV affiliate. On Chartock’s weekly half-hour show on WAMC he usually interviews Governor Cuomo and fawns like a court jester. Much of the time the show is a giggle-fest between the two. I think that Chartock is bucking for press secretary in a Cuomo administration.
It seems to us that between the giggle-fests and the press secretary ambition, life has already punished Dr. Chartock enough.
Mike Avery of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is strongly opposed to:
acid cut with strychnine
urine tests
Hand Gun Control, Inc.
and—no offense, Mike, but this comes as frankly no surprise—
the Eau Claire Police Department
Mark S. Chmura of Michigan State University wants us to know that Michigan State “is filled with misguided liberal fanatics whose so-called ‘minds’ are so open that you could fly the Space Shuttle through them.”
Robert McWilliams of Phoenix, Arizona, expressing an apposite sentiment in these Husseinish times, shakes bell, book, and candle at:
Anyone who talks about the “Three Great Faiths of the World, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism”: Those who talk like this about Islam sound strangely like those who once gushed about communism. Has the left found a new idol to adore?
Lieutenant Mark G. Martin of San Diego, California, showing an officer’s proper concern for his men, damns:
Government officials who give Nicaragua millions but won’t pay enlisted U.S. military personnel a living wage
Theodore A. Bundesen of San Jose, California, says, “The following flap-doodlers, featherbrains, and freeloaders are alarmingly absent from your list”:
The San Mateo Lincoln Club, known locally as the “Kennedy Klub,” which promotes Republican candidates so liberal they would run as Democrats if the Democratic party didn’t insist they wear sandals
The U.S. Justice Department: Now that RICO laws have voided the Constitution, this leftist lawyer-employment agency is targeting people for “eco-crimes.” Thought crimes can’t be far off.
The northern spotted owl: hardly worth the barbecue sauce
George Bush (reluctantly): Hey, George, do you remember the oath of office? It charges you with protecting the Constitution. That’s what the veto is for. It’s pretty simple: if Congress passes it, you veto it.
We note here the third George Bush excommunication in this Enemies List and suggest that, if this keeps up, the president may want to do his future fund-raising over at People for the American Way.
Larry A. Wilke of St. Louis, Missouri, gives a back of the hand from the heartland to:
Anyone who uses the “misery index”
Anyone who thought it important to put girls in the Boy Scouts
Believers in the “invisible poor”
Believers in the “feminization of poverty”
Believers in “Iranian moderates”
Animal psychologists
The Twenty-Second Amendment
Charles E. Krakoff, who’s been living in Africa for the past couple of years, sends us a sub-Saharan edition of the E-List:
Julius Nyerere, Africa’s top Stalinist, at least until Mengistu came along. He has probably killed more
people than Idi Amin or Bokassa, even if he didn’t eat them.
Kenneth Kaunda: Just imagine that you were put in charge of the richest country in Africa at the time, and instructed to ruin it as completely and quickly as possible; you couldn’t do better than KK has in twenty-five short years.
Mobutu Sese Seko: Okay, he’s supposed to be one of our friends, but he has stolen enough from his country to make Marcos look like a petty thief.
Paul A. Pangallo of Indianapolis, Indiana, returns us to more familiar territory, throwing cold water upon:
The people who held hands and stood on a hillside and sang the Coca-Cola song
Our penultimate correspondent, R. S. Bearse of Arlington, Virginia, where many of our best informants—and we ourselves—seem to come from, calls down the lightning upon:
Those who didn’t get goosebumps every time President Reagan said,
“God bless you and God bless America”
And, last of all, we have an Enemies List entry I’ll bet none of you included: Nathan A. Forney of Rockwood, Illinois, explains that the “For Women Only” column in the Fall 1988 issue of Spinal Cord Injury Life announced to the world the founding of a newsletter called—and he’s not pulling our prosthetic device, he sent the clipping to prove it—
Dykes, Disability and Stuff
With that we bid you adieu. Semper fi. And don’t forget, the Commie you clobber may be—whoops—your own dim-bulb, teenage, Grateful Dead-fan kid.
V
Insult the Injured
The American Spectator, November 1991
This installment of the Enemies List is about a quart low on yellow bile. Which is nothing to be ashamed of. Conservatism is not a vulgar mass movement that needs to foster hatred as a “unifying agent.” Nor are we, like the jejune progressives, angry because established things are established and we are not. We rule the world. Ha ha. And cheerfully. Yes, we can afford to be indulgent toward the left-outs and the left-overs and their ever more pathetic fantasies of influence and power. But that’s not why this list is relatively short. We can afford to be indulgent, but we aren’t. The bullying communard palaver spewed by fascist Levelers is as repulsive now as it was when it had a Soviet army attached to it. We loathe these intellectual gulagmongers as much as we ever did. We still want them marched north onto the pack ice of Hudson’s Bay and there, clad only in Birkenstock sandals, set to the task of teaching polar bears vegetarianism. We’re conservatives. We know evil exists. And we’re able and willing to identify it in that long police lineup which is modern politics. But there’s the problem. This is the fifth Enemies List. Evildoers with any kind of public name, we’ve publicly named them. We’re beginning to repeat ourselves or belabor the obvious: the Kennedy family and their never-ending zipper problems, Winnie Mandela with her Leon Spinks approach to political indoctrination of the young, Molly Yard, Senator Paul Wellstone, Saddam Hussein, Ann Richards, Kitty Kelley, David Dinkins, Linda Ellerbee, Linda Ellerbee, Linda Ellerbee.
There’s some value, of course, to reiterated denunciations. It would be hard to put Sinead O’Connor on an enemies list too many times. She is the entire left-wing thought process: “The world faces difficult and horrendous problems—war, famine, disease, poverty, and injustice. We could ask scientists and scholars what to do about these problems or pray to God for guidance, or we could study the problems ourselves and try to discern solutions, but fortunately, we don’t have to do any of that because there’s a bald girl in Dublin who has all the answers.” Worthy though such duplication is, however, it’s boring. And to be boring violates the first rule of retribution: “If it’s boring it isn’t really revenge.”
Speaking of revenge, we still have not, even after years of trying, invented a suitable means of blackening the fates of our blacklistees. I have two more suggestions:
Smoke. Smoke cigarettes, smoke pipes, but especially smoke cigars, the great big capitalist-pig chair-leg-sized stogies that smell like barbecuing snow tires. Smoking probably isn’t very good for us, but it drives liberals mad, propels them into frenzies of indignation and sanctimoniousness. They flop around in paroxysms or worry about the effects of passive smoke inhalation. It’s a well-known fact that every year thousands of liberals die from having fits about staying healthy.
Shoot cats. Why lefties have such a pronounced affinity for these dislikable, useless, and eminently unendangered knaves of the animal kingdom is no mystery. Cats are disloyal, self-regarding layabouts with nothing but contempt for those who feed and protect them. Left-wingers acknowledge this likeness by giving cats names such as “Che,” “Chairman Meow,” and “Linda Ellerbee.” Owning a cat is as close as most pinkos come to having a normal personal relationship. (I had no more penned these words than, opening the September 9 International Herald Tribune, I was confronted by a five-column review of a New Age self-awareness book titled Know Yourself Through Your Cat. The obviously insane author, Vivienne Angus, said: “I’m a great believer that in everybody is every animal and every animal is in everybody.” Shoot cats, Q.E.D.)
Another reason why this Enemies List is a tad brief is that other people have taken up the idea and even improved upon it. Thank you, Boris Yeltsin. We’ve got a call in to Boris, and we hope soon to have all U.S. “Soviet experts”—Stephen F. Cohen first among them—indicted with the rest of the coup conspirators. Also, now that the KGB is on our side, expect Lawrence Walsh to have a mysterious accident in the bath. Another fine job is being done by L. Brent Bozell III. We may have named Cranston, Biden, and Kennedy here first, but it was Brent who ponied up for the TV ads. However, the best post- American Spectator proscription is Don Kowet’s “Desert Storm Hall of Shame,” which ran daily in the Washington Times’s Life section for three weeks last March and named and quoted more than two dozen Persian Gulf peace creeps. Herewith, a Hall of Shame sampler:
Dreadful New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen: “Can we live as a country with the knowledge that once again the children of the poor and of people of color will be killed for the convictions of well-to-do white men?”
Appalling Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy: “The reason for not supporting U.S. troops was the same for not supporting Iraqi troops, or any troops anywhere for any reason. They are anti-life.”
Pantsless pot-walloper Ted Kennedy: “We’re talking about the likelihood of at least 3,000 American casualties a week, with 700 dead, for as long as the war goes on.”
Actual socialist—live and in captivity—Bernie Sanders: “Is [a ground war] worth 30,000 or 40,000 casualties? The figures that I have stated come from the Center for Defense [Dis]Information, Admiral La Rocque’s group. I think they have a fairly good reputation.”
Congressional bucket-mouth James Traficant, Jr.: “Why did the Pentagon recently order 16,000 human remains pouches?”
Overrated novelist E. L. Doctorow: “There is a rumor going about that ... the Quartermaster Corps of the Army has ordered 80,000 body bags.”
World’s wettest former Secretary of the Navy James Webb: “Does anybody really believe that we can launch an attack in January, then secure, occupy, and stabilize Kuwait and withdraw from Saudi Arabia by March?”
Noted troglodyte Pat Buchanan: “What could the United States do, should Iraq overrun Kuwait? With a battle-hardened army larger than our own, Iraq could not be stopped on the ground.”
Stupid Senator Bob Kerrey: “We should tell [Saddam Hussein] we are not going to declare war and will not initiate attack under the current circumstances.”
Stupid and vile Senator John Kerry: “Are we ready for the changes this war will bring—changes in sons and daughters who return from combat never the same, some not knowing their families and their families not even recognizing them?”
And a special combination partial plate and wing-tip oxford to the chief dim-bulb at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Edward N. Luttwak: “I don’t think there will be a land war.... If war does break out, there is the possibility of an ignomini
ous [U.S.] debacle.... If there is a U.S. ground offensive of any size, the resulting casualties could easily destroy the Bush presidency, regardless of whatever victories are won. ... The Iraqis are too combat-experienced to run away under fire. ... The [U.S.] Army’s armored and mechanized forces can play no offensive role against the vast defensive strength of the Iraqi army.”
Now for our own list. Donald Rizzi of Alameda, California, kicks off with boot toe put to:
Any college or university that gives up its Indian nickname and then wonders why many alumni stop sending wampum
W. Austerman of San Antonio, Texas, lets fly with a roundhouse right at:
The lamebrained CBS newscaster of October 7, 1990, who blamed “capitalism and greed” for another abysmal harvest in the USSR
President George Bush who forgot (if he ever knew) Napoleon Bonaparte’s eminently sensible dictum, “If you decide to take Vienna, THEN TAKE VIENNA!”
Michael Wright of Redondo Beach, California, gives a Dutch rub and a noogie to:
Republicans who campaign as bulwarks against liberal fabulism and who, upon election, double over and do 95 percent of what their opponents would do. For example,
George Bush, for betting the farm on Gorbachev, the Rostenkowski tax hike, and conditional acceptance of gun control as appended to the Bush crime bill
Pete Wilson, for appointing Sierra Clubbers to high state posts, for appointing John Seymour to the U.S. Senate, and for generally keeping the flame of Lowell Weicker alive
John Seymour, for voting for the Democrats’ pet gun-ban bill as a California state senator, and supporting more of the same in Washington
Bill Glenn of Kamiah, Idaho, sends along, as wrapping on a brickbat, a painstakingly fair newspaper profile of a young man who calls himself KRS-One. Mr. One is, it seems, a respected professional in the rap song industry, and it is his considered belief that the American flag is worse than a swastika, that the American government has been trying to control population growth through AIDS and crack cocaine, and that Abraham Lincoln introduced capitalism to America. Mr. One delivered himself of these philosophical insights at the University of Idaho, where the audience gave him a standing ovation.