Clinton & Me

by Michael Graham

  20. How many indoor toilets do you have? (If your answer is “Why, I’d never do that in my house!” please see previous note about obtaining special Alabama census form.) ___

  21. State prisoners in Minnesota are currently being paid to fill out their census forms. How much would we have to pay you to get your full cooperation? ___

  22. You are aware that if you refuse to answer voluntarily, you could be one of those prisoners? ___

  23. And finally, an essay question: Why do you have such a low opinion of your government? Why do you continue to distrust our motives and competence? What could we have possibly done to make you feel that way? ___

  24. Wait. On second thought, don’t answer that.

  School Choice

  * * *

  March 2000

  What does it take to get an NEA member to support school choice? Why, just give the choice to the NEA!

  That’s the message coming from Hoke High School in Raeford, North Carolina, where the Associated Press is reporting that three English teachers are “choosing” not to educate one of the school’s students. And the state of North Carolina says it’s A-OK.

  The ninth-grade student, Russell Almanza, was suspended for ten days after writing an essay about a shooting at the high school. In the essay, Almanza portrayed himself as an FBI agent investigating the shooting. Like many novice writers, he used the names of people he knew, including his English teacher, Erica Johnson.

  According to wire reports, Almanza said he didn’t want to scare anyone. He claims that he wrote the story with himself as the main character who stops the violence and becomes the hero. “If they really read the story, they could see I’m the good guy,” he said. “I never threatened anyone.”

  That may be why, upon appeal, the length of Almanza’s suspension was cut in half. But it doesn’t explain why, when Almanza showed back up at school, none of the ninth-grade English teachers would allow him in their classrooms.

  As a result, this fifteen-year-old kid spends his English-class period sitting alone in the school library. In fact, his teachers won’t even send over his class assignments. His work is assigned and monitored by a teacher from another grade.

  His mom says that Almanza comes home each day crying, complaining of being ostracized by the entire school over a single essay. And it does seem odd that a taxpayer-funded teacher in a taxpayer-funded school has the ability to simply refuse to teach the child of a taxpaying family. Even those violent thugs up in Illinois that Jesse Jackson tried to help out were allowed to return to class eventually.

  Nevertheless, young Almanza’s banishment to the lonely library has the support of the Hoke High principal, the district superintendent and even the attorney general of North Carolina, who has ruled that teachers have no legal obligation to educate children, thereby decriminalizing the behavior of hundreds of thousands of incompetent public school employees across America!

  The attorney general’s ruling is particularly fascinating for those of us who support school choice. Currently, it is a crime not to send your child to school. It is also a crime in most jurisdictions to sneak your child into a better public school by pretending he lives somewhere he really doesn’t. Therefore, if little Almanza had tried to choose a different teacher by going to a different public school, he and his family would have been criminals.

  But when he goes to the crummy school he’s sentenced to by the school district and the teachers who are being paid to teach him refuse to do their job, they aren’t guilty of anything. Anything criminal, anyway.

  What they are guilty of is hypocrisy. From the classroom to the attorney general’s office, everyone involved in the case believes that this boy should not be in the school or the classroom he’s been assigned to. But they also oppose giving the kid’s parents the right to pick out a different school or classroom, one where they believe he might get a better education. And so young Almanza sits rotting away in the library every day, just the most blatant victim of the NEA’s fear of freedom in education.

  Why not let him leave? Where is the cry “Free at last, free at last!” rising from the library?

  Because, as this and every other school district knows so well, there are millions of other students who, if they could choose, would take the $7,000 or so we blow on each public school student and go buy a decent education from outside the bureaucratic bog. Teachers know this better than most people; that’s why so many public school teachers have their own kids in private school.

  The point of the story of Russell Almanza is that while opponents of school choice are quick to discuss the “cost” of school choice in dollars, they are loath to admit the cost of the current corrupt system in lives. One life is being frittered away one untaught hour at a time in a school library.

  There is another life, another story, that comes to mind: A six-year-old girl killed by gunfire in a Michigan classroom—a classroom the girl sat in because she and her family were given no choice. She was shot by a classmate, a lost little boy living in tragic squalor.

  My question to the administrators of Hoke High School, and every other opponent of choice, is this: If the teacher of the six-year-old shooter had wanted to keep that violent boy out of her classroom, should she have been given that choice?

  If your good liberal answer is no, then why is Almanza sitting alone in a library right now? If your other good liberal answer is yes, then why do you deny that poor little girl’s parents the same choice not to send her to that classroom to begin with?

  Perhaps that would be a good term paper topic for Russell Almanza. He’s certainly got plenty of time to work on it.

  Somebody’s Gonna Get Hurt

  * * *

  March 2000

  It was an excellent concept, a great first step—I know that it will save the lives of many children in this nation.

  —New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial on the agreement by Smith and Wesson to make all new handguns “child-safe”

  Two quick facts from the FBI about kids and guns:

  Number of children under nineteen killed by gun accidents in 1999: 420.

  Number of children under nineteen killed by guns on purpose in 1999: 2,216.

  Consider this paradox: The more time we spend watching people shoot each other on TV and in movies for our entertainment, the less able we are to bear the violence that is an inevitable part of defending our freedom. Could it be that America is losing its bloodlust just when we need it most?

  I began asking myself this question while watching two news stories break across each other on the great sea of CNN: Taiwan standing up to Communist China by electing a pro-independence party’s candidate for president, and Smith and Wesson backing down from the soccer moms and their litigious allies in the Clinton administration.

  Before you lapse into a coma at the mention of American foreign policy in Asia, please allow me just two quick sentences that may be relevant to you:

  a. China could very well launch a military attack against Taiwan in the near future, an attack we have pledged to answer with American troops.

  b. America probably won’t, because our mommies won’t let us.

  As a loudmouthed advocate of individual liberty, I am chest-thumpingly proud of our policy defending the democratic island-state of Taiwan from the Clinton/Gore Finance Committee (aka the Red Army). During the Taiwanese elections, the more Chinese premier Zhu Rongji rattled his saber about how the “Chinese people will use all their blood and even sacrifice their lives to defend the unity of the motherland” (sheesh, who writes this guy’s stuff, Pat Buchanan?), the more I hoped Taiwan’s voters would stick it in his eye.

  But when Taiwan did just that, I gulped. “Hey, wait a minute,” I thought. “This isn’t some Tom Clancy novel. China really could decide to start World War III! And the last war with that many W’s in its name involved drafting people my age!”

  It’s one thing to lie on my sofa and cheer the forces of freedom. It would be quite another to find myself climbing
ropes at Fort Jackson and learning to say “I surrender!” in Mandarin Chinese.

  More significantly, it would be a tough question for my nation. We’ve made a pledge to defend twenty-two million free people on an island twelve thousand miles away. But if it came time for serious shooting, for Americans to kill and be killed in large numbers fulfilling that pledge, would we actually be willing as a nation to pay that price?

  I doubt it. The last major test on that count was Vietnam, and even then we walked away from millions of citizens seeking democratic self-determination when the price got too high. What about Iraq? you ask. What about Grenada, Bosnia, Kosovo?

  Exactly. As long as those wars were short, bloodless, G-rated affairs suitable for viewing on TV, we hung in. But the America that absorbed hundreds of thousands of casualties to defeat fascism in 1945 was not willing to bear even a dozen to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans just fifty years later.

  Part of the problem is President William Jefferson Weasel, who lacks the moral authority to send a group of ROTC students into the girls’ locker room, much less convince us as a nation that the blood of our sons must be spilled for an abstract principle. A guy who can’t even keep his pants zipped for a good cause is inherently unable to talk me into getting shot for one.

  But there is a more fundamental source of America’s squeamishness over blood shed in the name of principle, and it’s found in the other story I mentioned—the Smith and Wesson gun deal.

  The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has nothing to do with hunting Bambi or stuffing a Ladysmith in your handbag before heading to the parking garage. It has everything to do with the abstract principle that in a free society, no one entity—particularly the government—should have all the guns. The need to balance power between the federal government on one side and the states and their citizens on the other is the sole reason why the second most important right expressed in our national creed is the right to keep and bear arms.

  Like defending Taiwan, defending that right has a price, one that is all too often paid in real blood. One group paying that price are children killed in accidents involving guns. Their stories are always tragic, even more so for me since the day seven years ago when I became a father.

  But let’s put the tragedy into perspective. There are 280 million Americans, and a statistically insignificant 420 children died due to gun accidents last year. Reasonable gun safety measures make sense, as do reasonable controls on the production and distribution of guns.

  But the reaction among soccer moms to this handful of deaths is to seize all guns, to put a slug right between the eyes of the Second Amendment. They don’t want to hear about theoretical threats to our national security in an unforeseen future. They want to know that little Johnny is absolutely safe today, whatever the price.

  Are these same women going to watch their husbands and sons die for the principle of democracy in a faraway land? Or are they going to, as some moms did during Bosnia, hold press conferences announcing, “My son only joined the army to get a scholarship! I want Bill Clinton to tell him to put that gun down and come home!”

  We live in a world in which democracy and freedom are always under threat and always will be. Defending these principles almost always involves real sacrifice today in hopes of a theoretical good tomorrow.

  Rosie O’Donnell and Hillary Rodham are testing that resolve today. China and Taiwan may test it tomorrow.

  When Bad Things Happen to Good People

  * * *

  April 2000

  When did my fellow conservatives forget the core premise of conservatism, namely, that life sucks?

  When it comes to the case of Elián González, this obvious truth seems to have slipped away from once-solid conservatives such as Brit Hume, of Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh, who of late sounds as though Hillary slipped something into his Snapple.

  In the old days, Rush was the first to seize liberal Pollyannas by the scruff of the neck and fling them onto the cold streets of reality. Now this formerly coldhearted conservative is suddenly enamored of the idea that one little boy’s happiness is both achievable and important to the future of our nation.

  As l’affaire Elián unfolds, right-thinking conservatives are succumbing to the wrongheaded notion that principles should be abandoned when they become painful. This is absolutely contrary to the “no pain, no gain” philosophy that brought me to the conservative movement.

  At the risk of committing a gargantuan simplification, the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want to be nice, while conservatives want to be right. A bum wanders up to a liberal, and he gets a dollar because giving a bum a dollar seems like a nice thing to do, even if it buys said bum that one can of Sterno too many and he ends up in the county morgue.

  Conservatives, on the other hand, reject the temptation (however weak) to hand over their hard-earned cash because doing what is nice encourages behavior that is self-destructive and wrong.

  We know the bum might end up going hungry if we don’t help. We further acknowledge that this might be the one guy in the world who would take that dollar, get himself a meal, get cleaned up and turn his life around. To which we reply, “So?”

  The principles of individual responsibility and social justice (i.e., getting what one deserves) are more important than the misery of any one person. Indeed, we conservatives ask, what principle worth having isn’t?

  Defending the Second Amendment means some innocent people are going to be shot, you say? Fine, we answer.

  Protecting free speech means some people will say hurtful, racist and stupid things? No problem, we reply.

  And allowing parents to raise their children as they see fit means some will grow up in horrible homes exposed to bizarre, even dangerous attitudes such as Christian Science, Pentecostalism and even Rotarianism?

  Hey, that’s life in the land of conservative principles. Or it used to be.

  Conservatives used to believe in doing what is right and accepting the consequences. Now we believe in Elián.

  I’m getting ideological whiplash watching President William Jefferson “Perjury” Clinton announce that “we must defend the rule of law,” while his conservative opponents plead for us to look beyond the law and consider “the best interests” of the child.

  What? Since when have we conservatives cared about the best interests of a specific child? Parading hard-case kids on TV to persuade America to throw the Constitution overboard is a tactic I expect from Hillary Rodham, not Henry Hyde.

  And let me be clear: Unlike deluded lefties and well-paid Commie stooges (such as Greg Craig), I am perfectly willing to admit that if Elián goes home with his dad, his life is going to suck. Period.

  And I have no doubt that life in Communist Cuba is a series of daily tragedies for the millions who live there. Bad food, ugly clothes, long speeches and good cigars: That’s life under a Cuban dictator.

  But I don’t care if Fidel Castro locks little Elián in a hotel meeting room with Tony Robbins and forces him into a lifetime of multilevel marketing. I’m not going to abandon the principle that parents should be able to raise their own children as they see fit, with or without the permission of the federal government.

  Whether or not Elián lives in free-market prosperity or totalitarian squalor is not nearly as important as ensuring that all children from every country and every political system who are here in America are under the rule of law.

  When Rush Limbaugh types accuse me of not caring about Elián, I quickly concur. In the final analysis, I don’t. Instead, I care about keeping an America where people raise their children with beliefs, behaviors and values their neighbors find objectionable, and nobody can do a damn thing about it.

  I care about the ability of an American parent in Iran and an Iranian parent in America to know that their children belong with them and that the American government will protect, not diminish, those rights.

  Since the Elián case came up, I have been repeatedly
asked, “Would you have handed a child back over the Berlin Wall to a parent in Eastern Europe if the escaping parent had died?” My answer: Yes. And I know the child’s life would suck because of it. But by doing so, we would be protecting the values that make our nation a place people are willing to risk their lives to reach.

  Protecting our principles, even when it hurts, is the right—and the right-wing—thing to do.

  Mothers

  * * *

  May 2000

  License and register all firearms. Ban handguns totally. They are made for one reason . . . to kill people!

  —Rosie O’Donnell

  Watching chunky suburban moms hoofing their way along Pennsylvania Avenue in their comfortable shoes at last weekend’s Gunstock festival, I realized why it took the Swiss so long to give women the vote. Motherhood does not make for good democracy.

  That’s because mothers are always right. This was literally the primary argument made by the attendees of the media-friendly, Democrat-friendly, Gore-for-president-friendly Million Mom March in Washington. While many special-interest groups seem to think they know it all, this was the first group to openly declare so, waving placards reading A MILLION MOMS CAN’T BE WRONG. Others said GUNS. BAD. NOW GO TO YOUR ROOM, and (I kid you not) BECAUSE I SAID SO.

  How’s that for a debating point, Senator?

  There was plenty of attitude at the marching Momfest, as evidenced by the number of women using the phrase “pissed off.” (Uh-oh, Mom’s really mad now!) The mother of a Columbine shooting victim reminded us that “the hands that rock the cradle rule the world. . . . You never, never tick off a mother.” Then Rosie O’Donnell, the Sally Struthers of a new generation, glared through her insistently hip sunglasses. “The NRA buys votes with blood money,” she said. “They are scary.”