Chinese strongman Jiang Zemin’s Victory over America Tour produced a level of self-abasing moral-equivalence mongering not seen since the Jimmy Carter era. Some of the highlights:
THE DIANNE FEINSTEIN LAUREATE
As Confucius — or was it some forgotten Massachusetts politician? — said, the fish rots from the head. President Clinton is therefore this week’s Dianne Feinstein Moral Equivalence prizewinner (so named for the California senator whose craven apologias for the Chinese government have set the standard for appeasement in our time).
During a joint press conference with Jiang, the president did utter some pidgin Hegel about how China would remain on the “wrong side of history” so long as its repressive practices were maintained. Then Clinton treated us to a remarkable disquisition on what democracy means: “I think it would amaze many of our Chinese guests to see some of the things that have been written and said about me, my family, our government. . . . And yet after all this time, I’m still standing here” (and that damn Michael Kelly walks the streets a free man, you could almost hear the president muttering).
But the president’s most Feinsteinian moment came in a speech at the Voice of America where he reminded his listeners that Americans in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at Communist dictators. “Our crime rate is too high, too many of our children are still killed with guns, too many of our streets are still riddled with drugs,” the president said. “We have things to learn from other societies as well. And if we expect other people to listen to us about the problems they have, we must be prepared to listen to them about the problems we have.”
THE SCRAPBOOK counts at least three offenses against sound moral reasoning here. One is the insulting analogy Clinton draws between American street crime and Chinese political torture. Second is Clinton’s suggestion that Chinese dictators have any standing to comment on a Western democracy — and that Americans have an obligation to listen. The president’s third error is his biggest. He goes out of his way to second the Chinese critique of America’s “social fabric.” But he neglects to mention that President Jiang obstinately refuses to countenance any corresponding American complaints about the fabrique Chinoise.
HONORABLE MENTION
Sen. Feinstein herself, it should be noted, had a very busy week squiring around her favorite foreign leader. She hosted a friendly reception for Jiang that only a third of her fellow senators showed up for; she attended the state dinner thrown by our president; and she met privately with Jiang. “I always felt he was underestimated,” she told the New York Times. “This is really the first Chinese leader with a higher education.” Good thing he didn’t go to a French university, like Pol Pot.
SPECIAL FEINSTEIN MEDIA PRIZES
This was a hotly contested category, as a number of press organs competed in portraying Jiang as the greatest closet connoisseur of American pop culture since Yuri Andropov curled up with a bottle of Chivas to listen to his jazz records. It therefore took distinctiveness to score a mention here. Time earns special honors with this clever explanation of why Jiang is stiff in public and prefers to read from a script when talking to reporters: ” On those occasions when he allowed himself a little spontaneity, it tended to backfire. In a 1990 interview with Barbara Waiters, he described the Tiananmen killings as ‘much ado about nothing,’ prompting outrage.” With spontaneity like that, who needs a firing squad?
Not to be missed in the press category is American Spectator Washington correspondent Tom Bethell, henceforth to be known as the Walter Duranty of the Right. In an astonishing celebration of Jiang’s regime in the magazine’s November issue, Bethell sarcastically suggests that China’s critics, when they talk about human rights, are really just resentful that it is a country ” where intellectuals have been deprived of their rightful powers of agitation.” (Bethell is apparently unaware that Jiang is the first Chinese leader with a higher education.) Bethell’s joy contemplating the great economic leap forward he is sure China will soon take is dimmed only by the possibility he foresees that someday China may become democratic. Then, says Bethell, ” intellectuals will have been restored to power. But until that happens, let us rejoice that there is at least one country in the world where they are not in charge.” Bethell is not kidding.
Finally, THE SCRAPBOOK noticed this headline in the Washington Post: ” Septuagenarian Displays Vigorous Health.” The story was about how Jiang, 71, had splashed in the surf in Hawaii. He really enjoyed it. When THE SCRAPBOOK wants to read about the vigorous health of septuagenarians (which is not often), we expect the reporter to have found, at the very least, a 79-year- old Iron Man Triathlete. Taking delight in the vigorous health of the maximum leader is what they do in dictatorships.
