Letters to the Editor

In praise of intellectual humility, not Republican hypocrisy

For someone supposedly obsessed enough with the purity of academia to hole himself away in the Grad College for half of a decade, Michael Frazer GS seems to get quite a hoot out of spouting off liberal buzzwords and mantras without doing any original thinking for himself. He does such a good job I can almost hear someone like Sen. Edward Kennedy (D- Mass.) talking in the background. Or is it the Rev. Al Sharpton? Who knows.

Mr. Frazer's topic is Republican hypocrisy, though beyond that it is hard to find any coherent thesis or really any substantive, objective evidence to support any point at all amidst his thick fog of condescension. I never thought it could be done, but Mr. Frazer has managed to one-up even Sen. Kennedy by editorially "Borking" — a term that was drummed up to describe the ruthless character assassination of Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork by the Senator and his henchmen — not just one Bush nominee but every single instance of Republican support for or even association with a minority. But enough of these politics of personal destruction (one particularly trendy phrase I'm surprised Mr. Frazer didn't use). Let's get down to the issues.

Apparently for Mr. Frazer and other liberals, any black, Hispanic or female who holds conservative views is automatically disqualified from his or her minority status. This was true for Clarence Thomas who despite his impeccable resume was disparaged by many blacks as "not really black." Now liberals like Mr. Frazer have lashed out against the likes of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and until her recent bow out amidst the Democrats' trash-talking, Linda Chavez, who is labeled by Hispanics as "completely out of the mainstream" and by Mr. Frazer as a ruthless slave-owner. Not even Ricky Martin is immune to the rhetoric of Mr. Frazer, liberals and the co-writer of "Livin' La Vida Loca" himself, who criticized the Latin pop singer's decision to play at Bush's inauguration as "a betrayal of everything that every Puerto Rican should stand for."

In Mr. Frazer's world, Mr. Powell, Ms. Rice and Ms. Chavez are the most contemptible figures in Bush's cabinet of "crypto-fascists of every race, color, creed and gender." Without delving into the personal and professional histories of these three individuals, most newspaper-reading, news-watching Americans agree that Powell, Rice and Chavez aren't quite the Nazis that Frazer paints them as.

Actually, if he had wanted to write a good piece about hypocrisy, racism and plain old criminal behavior, Mr. Frazer could have saved himself a great deal of trouble by just telling us about the political left's staunchly partisan defense of four indicted black public officials.

For one, when head of the National Baptist Convention Rev. Henry Lyons was found guilty of stealing money that was donated to rebuild black churches, not one civil rights group made but a peep. Then there was former Chicago Democratic Rep. Gus Savage, who was found guilty by the House Ethics Committee of sexual misconduct with a female Peace Corps worker while on an official visit to Africa, yet after charging that his accusers were racist, he garnered vocal support from the Congressional Black Caucus and won reelection in 1990. Next there was former D.C. Del. Mel Reynolds who despite having been convicted of having sex with a 16-year-old campaign worker, won sympathy from liberals when he claimed himself the victim of a racist white prosecutor. And finally there is the poor Rev. Jesse Jackson, who just last month disclosed that he had fathered an illegitimate child with a woman who worked in the Washington office of Mr. Jackson's civil rights group, the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition. The very next day Rev. Al Sharpton himself — who else? — called a news conference to vigorously defend Jackson.

From the looks of things, if you're a minority in Washington, whether or not you pass Mr. Frazer's and the liberals' litmus test for political legitimacy goes something like this: subscribe to the liberal agenda and you're entitled to a team of supporters and Republican-haters no matter what crime you commit. But take a conservative stance on any issue at all, and no matter how politically accomplished and morally upstanding you are, you're branded as a traitor to your ethnicity.

Maybe, like Mr. Frazer, I've been a bit heavy on the rhetoric and light on the facts. Truth is, I'm no politics major; I read the paper every morning and sometimes watch the news. But unlike Mr. Frazer, I pick my fights, and I know when to admit that I haven't the faintest clue of what is going on. Instead, Mr. Frazer really lays it on thick with his charges of Republican hypocrisy. Scott Dias '02