Jim, article..
FRIDAY
FEBRUARY 19
1999
Alan Keyes
Cheer up, Paul!
In the aftermath of the Senate's corrupt acquittal of President Clinton, the temptation for conservatives to be discouraged is great. We owe it to ourselves, and to our still-great country, to resist this temptation.
Signs of the temptation include an A.P. report that conservative leader Paul Weyrich is "questioning whether conservatives should drop out of American culture, and essentially declare decades of moral struggle unwinnable." The story says that the result of the trial has brought Weyrich "to the point of wondering whether conservatives should continue trying to influence politics." Weyrich goes so far as to say that "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority," and "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values."
I have great, deep and sincere respect for Paul Weyrich. I think he has done wonderful things for God and country. But he is totally, absolutely, wrong.
There was an old saw in intellectual life about being careful not to identify the truth with the point of exhaustion in thinking about something. And I think that we ought to be careful not to identify the truth about our current political situation with the point of exhaustion for Paul Weyrich or anybody else.
There are certain things that we have to remember no matter how tired we may be of the fight. We are put on this earth for a certain period of time. In the course of our time here, some of us rumble right through life and are at full strength the whole way. But some of us aren't that way, and as we get older, we get tired. This is natural enough, and just means that the torch has to be passed to new generations, so that they can continue the struggle. We shouldn't confuse our own fatigue with the actual state of the struggle. Because by God's mercy it is the case in human life that the stream is always replenishing itself.
I was reminded of that replenishment this week when I went to Fairmont College in West Virginia to give a talk to students, faculty and community people there. It was an audience of different backgrounds and persuasions, all different ages, including many students. And I want to tell you something: the folks in that room -- including particularly the young people -- were not the sort of folks that Paul Weyrich is talking about here. As I talked about the moral requirements of liberty, the moral implications of the Clinton crisis, and the need to return to self-government and discipline, they applauded and then came up afterward to thank me.
Experiences like this can be an antidote to discouragement. In my opinion, Paul Weyrich needs to get out and do what I do. He needs to go around the country, talk to people everywhere, and see both the grief and the fire in the American heart. I see it all the time. I've seen it in the hundreds who have been turning out in Iowa to hear what I have to say, and I saw it this week in the couple hundred who turned out in a little college in West Virginia -- people who were asking the right questions, and who were glad and gratified to hear some truth about the abominable decision that was taken by the Senate last week.
This is reality in America. We must not allow our hearts or our opinions to be guided by the fabrications of the phony media polls, of the gutless leadership in Washington, and of the corrupt political elite in this country. If our friends are tempted to lose heart when they see those fabrications temporarily triumphing, then we must speak out strongly against despair. We must not give in, and we must not give up. Because I think that much of the corruption that is going on is actually the calm before the cleansing storm of political change that is going to turn things around in this country.
And I see that cleansing storm preparing itself. It is preparing itself below the radar screen -- for now. And that includes the kinds of things that I am doing around the country -- which you don't read about in the newspapers. When Elizabeth "Liberal" Dole goes up to New Hampshire and a hundred political hacksters turn out and give her polite applause, they put it on the front page. When I go into Iowa and hundreds of people turn out at every stop -- which, for a little state like Iowa is very significant -- do you read about it anywhere in the lying, degenerate, propaganda media?
These liars are trying to hide the American people from themselves. Paul Weyrich and everybody else in the conservative movement who is tempted by this delusion needs to spend more time on the road. All of us must refuse to acknowledge the distortions of the papers and the TV, and go talk to the real people of this country. We need to take the time, get on the planes, and travel around the country. Conservative political leaders must seek rejuvenation from the grass roots if they doubt that the American people still have the character necessary to be free. Don't give up on them before you let them bathe you in their indignation, their grief, their common sense, and their decency. Because then you won't give up.
I won't give up because I won't abandon all the decent people I am seeing and hearing from every day. I won't abandon the lady who called my show the other day and talked about how -- senior citizen though she is and limited income though she has -- she spent hundreds of dollars calling the folks in the Senate and the Congress to tell them to do what was best for this country and our future.
I won't give up on people like that. And Paul Weyrich needs to take his cue not from the corrupt minions of Washington, but from the decent people of America -- who are still out there, even though every aspect of this nation's elite is betraying them and lying about them every day.
Because I have faith in the Lord my God, I have faith in those people. I think that He has writ with His finger on the human heart, and I think that there are many Americans who are still attuned to what He has to say. And even though so much of what we hear about ourselves is now filtered through left wing media propagandists in the entertainment and "news" industries, who lie to us about ourselves, about our convictions and our supposedly pervasive vices, the decent people of America do not yet believe these lies.
Millions of Americans do not believe the lie that we are accurately represented by a depraved little man in the White House who is unable to control an iota of his passion even for the sake of all his family and responsibilities. Millions of Americans understand that he does not represent the true potential of the American people -- not when there are eighteen and nineteen year-olds sleeping in their graves all over the world right now who had more control over their fear on the battlefield than Bill Clinton had over his lust in the Oval Office.
One of the things that Paul Weyrich said is the following: "If there really were a moral majority out there, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago." But this is not true. There could be a moral majority in this country every day of the week, and it wouldn't tell us a word about what is going on among the corrupt political elites in Washington, DC.
Right now I believe deeply that we have elites in this country -- in politics, in the entertainment industry, in the news media -- who are deeply and thoroughly corrupted, and whose whole agenda is to make Americans believe that the corruption that characterizes their hearts, their cultural priorities and their commercial enterprises is, indeed, a reflection of the national heart.
It may become so, if we allow them to continue their dirty work unopposed, but it is not true yet. Bill Clinton was acquitted because of the corruption of our elites, not of our people. Average Americans didn't have that much control over the process. They didn't have control over the phony propaganda polls that were manipulatively deployed to convince them that everybody approved of the depraved louse in the White House. They did not have the opportunity to take their own thorough look at the full evidence. They expected their representatives in the Senate to do that, and the Senators didn't -- especially on the Democrat side.
The American people were not able to control the corruption, and the gutlessness, of the Democrat leadership. We couldn't control how many "leaders" were blackmailed and intimidated behind the scenes by the Clinton thugs into going along with this betrayal of everything decent in America. For all of the phone calls and letters that we sent, there are commanding powers in this society right now, particularly in the media and politics, that no longer respond to the people, but instead seek to control them, and by spreading lies to distort even our sense of who we are as a people.
To lead the American people's fight back against this elite is, I believe, the vocation of the true conservative today. It is a fight that must be conducted with faith and courage, and without slavish attention to the supposed odds of success. Otherwise, nothing will be accomplished. If Ronald Reagan had taken the view in the 70's that what was going on in the media reflected the truth, he would never have been elected president. He would have become discouraged, and believed that he had no chance to lead our people.
There is only one way that we will ever know our strength, and that is faithfully to cast our vote and lend our fidelity to those people who stand unequivocally for what we know to be right and good for this country. Then we will see how strong we really are.
But if we give in to the counsels of exhaustion or expediency, and to the propaganda that pushes us toward despair and surrender, then we will throw away what I believe to be the real power of America's decent heart and purpose. I am not prepared to surrender my hope in that power, because it is a hope I mean to pass on to my children, so help me God. I know that the decent heart of America still beats strong out there, and that the job of conservative leadership is to act out of faith in that fact.
Paul Weyrich is discouraged right now, and after his long years of noble labor it is not surprising that he is. Let's see if we can cheer him up a bit. |
