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Neoconservatives' moral purity leads them to adulterate the truth

Date published: 12/29/2002

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child.

FALLS CHURCH--Lear's reflection upon ingratitude comes to mind as one reads of the squabble among neoconservatives over who among them was first to stick his nail file in the back of Trent Lott.

Charles Krauthammer enters a claim for the Kristol-Bennett crowd, while Jonah Goldberg of National Review and cashiered Bush speechwriter David Frum insist they, too, played supporting roles.

Whether Lott may have been innocent of any hate crime, or whether they might have had a moral duty to step in to stop a lynching of one of their own--even had Lott blundered--seem to be thoughts that never once intruded upon these tiny minds. Yet their collusion in ruining Lott, and their relish in the pats on the head they are receiving from the Left, confirm the suspicion. Neoconservatives are the useful idiots of the liberal establishment.

With Lott gone, Bill Kristol is now collaborating with The New York Times in its rewrite of the history of the 1960s, a decade of liberal debacles, to credit racism for the Republicans' success.

"Lott is really virtually the last of the products of Richard Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' to be in major positions of power in the Congress," Kristol assures the Times. "With his leaving you will have cleared out people whohave a somewhat compromised image to the country as a whole."

Now, as a co-architect of the Nixon strategy that gave the GOP a lock on the White House for a quarter-century, let me say that Kristol's opportunism is matched only by his ignorance.

Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South (by this writer) that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states' rights, human rights, small government, and a strong national defense, and leave it to the "party of Maddox, Mahoney, and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice."

In that '66 campaign, Nixon--who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957--endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society.

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Date published: 12/29/2002