What's the difference between socialists and socialites? [FIFTH Edition]
ROBERT SCHEER. San Francisco Examiner. San Francisco, Calif.: Mar 19, 1995. pg. A.21
Copyright San Francisco Examiner Mar 19, 1995
I KNOW IT'S not news when Newt Gingrich goes off the deep end, but now he's really losing it.
Railing that the editorial boards of America's newspapers are rife with "socialists" reveals a cognitive disconnect that rivals the late Sen. Joe McCarthy's assertion that Communists had infiltrated the Pentagon.
Editorial boards serve at the whim of publishers, a group so alienated from the politics of the left that more than a few of them must have thought that Gingrich meant socialites.
On the other hand, the House speaker's definition of socialist (any government program with a social purpose) is so broad that it is possible that most socialites would be included. For example, those who favored extending the freeway system to Newport Beach would qualify.
American presidents from FDR on would certainly fit under Gingrich's socialist rubric.
Did one of them ever denounce public education as a liberal Democratic plot? Gingrich did this month, saying that liberal Democrats should be condemned for "the monstrosities they have created, their public housing projects that are death traps for the poor, their public schools that are literacy traps for the poor."
In a devilish bit of socialist disinformation, Washington Post reporter Kenneth J. Cooper pointed out, "It was Whigs who pushed universal public education in Northern states before the Civil War and Republicans who opened schools throughout the South afterward."
Gingrich also acknowledged that most massive public housing projects, like Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, were a creation of the Eisenhower administration. Then again, Eisenhower, although a Republican, was probably, as McCarthy suggested, a closet socialist.
Actually, Republicans have a thing for public housing. Just look at how many of them are serving time for milking the Housing and Urban Development Department during the Reagan years.
James Watt, former Interior secretary and once a major conservative thinker, is the latest indicted, on 25 counts of lying to Congress about his lobbying HUD on behalf of private developers.
Independent counsel Arlin Adams reported that the investigation of Watt had already enabled the federal government to recover $10 million intended for low-income housing in the Virgin Islands that ended up in some already stuffed wallets. Sounds pretty socialist, even Brezhnevian.
Silly me. What I seem to have trouble grasping is that federal funding of the wealthy has nothing to do with socialism....
Several months later, the Republicans, under Newt's leadership, shut down the federal government, because President Clinton vetoed their wanton budget-slashing attempt. 'Everyone hates the government', they apparently reasons, 'it will be a wildly popular political move on our part.'
Turned out, millions of Americans are socialists, too. In fact, a solid majority of them.
Him and Abe Lincoln, who was a Whig before he was a Republican.
