From: "LadyNada" 
Subject: Pruden on Powell
Message-ID: <199511031710.JAA29335@ix5.ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 12:11:21 +0000

From: "Carol A. Valentine" 
Originally to: news@aen.org
Original Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 23:47:40 -0500

Forewarded from "The Shadow Nose"

"Getting there any ol' way you can" by Wesley Pruden
Friday, October 20, 1995, Washington Times

The young (and not so young) kingmakers among the Republicans have got
Colin Powell all wrong. The labels "liberal" and "conservative" don't
apply.

Colon Powell is a suck-up artist, and a suck-up artist--the term is
descriptive, not pejorative--is a stranger to all ideology.

Anyone who has ever served in one of the military services understands
this. You don't make it to the top unless you learn how to please the
man in the rank just above you. You might not like doing it, but you
console yourself with the fact that everyone below you is sucking up,
too.

You learn, very quickly, that the way to make it in the military is to
have no discernible political views of your own, but to understand
what the views of the captain/major/colonel/general are, depending on
where you are in the food chain, and practice a smile and a nod that
the captain/major/colonel/general can read as slavish agreement.

When Mr. Powell, who made his mark as a Pentagon bureaucrat and not as
a bttlefield warrior, an Eisenhower, not a Patton or even a MacArthur,
was outed as a Rockefeller Republican, cheerfully identifying himself
as "probably more liberal than the mainstream of the Republican
Party," he probably had no idea that such sentiments could rankle
anyone.

When he called the "Contract With America," which is the blueprint of
the Republican revolution, "a little too hard, a little too harsh, a
little too unkind," he probably never imagined that nice people, of
the sort that a general expects to hang out with, would disagree with
him.

And when, as reported in The Washington Post, he turned to an aide
while watching a telecast of a session of the Conservative Political
Action Committee, he meant no offense by asking: "Can you imagine me
standing there and talking to THESE people?"

Rarely has a general been more affluent in meaningless Nicespeak than
Mr. Powell. A young woman in an upscale suburb of Cleveland, who said
she got up at 5 in the morning to be the first in line to get an
autograph on her copy of the general's book, summed up the prevailing
assessment for a reporter for the Associated Press: "I just think he's
a very nice man and I think he's got a lot of moral values."

This is the image that his handlers, who range from Rockefeller
Republicans all the way across the spectrum to Bush Republicans, are
desperate to preserve. But they understand that it's necessary to
appease the conservatives, of the sort who made the general feel faint
when he saw them on his television screen. So, with his suck-up
instincts still intact, he now supports "some" of the Contract he
scorned so emphatically only a fortnight ago, and, though still
gagging, finds that he is no longer as contemptuous of the evangelical
Christians as he was last month, and is now "generally in line with
the Christian right." (It's an Episcopalian thing, you wouldn't
understand.)

Mr. Powell is not touring America's bookstores in a turnip truck, and
in the wake of Louis Farrakhan's takeover of the leadership of the
moribund cvil-rights movement, he no doubt understands the source of
his appeal to the Cleveland Park Democrats and the Reston Republicans.

Charles Krauthammer expressed it clearly in his column in The Post.
He's tempted to give his heart to the general, who he understands
would probably stop the conservative revolution as if it had hit a
stone wall, because like many suburban Republicans he's frightened of
the blacks left behind in the cities: "Which is the most urgent threat
to the American future, the depredations of a highly destructive
welfare state or corrosive racial division?"

This is certainly not very flattering to the general, to be regarded
as "the great white hope," nor is it very flattering that some of the
Republicans pushing him hardest to run imagine that if he wins he'll
be a compliant front man for the revolution that he need not
understand, and they can play the Wizard of Oz, manipulating
everything from behind a curtain. (Some of them may be satisfied with
occasional invitations to dinner at the White House.) They might be
surprised when the general, whom they suppose to be in empty uniform,
turns out to have picked up a few ideas of his own along with all
those moral values.

Nicespeak can take you a long way, but rarely all the way. The Powell
boom, as orchestrated by a bizarre consortium of Rockefeller
Republicans and left-out conservatives, is based on the proposition
that The Washington Post was correct after all when it described the
evangelical Christians as uneducated and easy to command. They imagine
they can use polls and focus groups to identify the general's
convictions and fine-tune his beliefs to make them acceptable enough.
Isn't that the way Bill Clinton made it to the White House?

[Oliver North says Newsweek has recently revealed that Powell wrote
the "investigation finding" (i.e.: coverup) that kept the My Lai
massacre off the front pages for an extra 9 months. North also points
out the Powell served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under
the infamous Caspar Weinberger of ran-Contra fame, presumably privy to
a number of dirty little secrets he has never been asked to reveal.
Why is the Washington Post pushing Colon Powell?]


(And while the guardians protect us,
 who will protect us from the guardians?)


Carol A. Valentine

"The world needs a wake-up call.  We are going to phone it in!"

--From John Carpenter's THEY LIVE, Universal City Studios, 1988.


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