On CNN's The Capital Gang, June 6, 1998, Robert Novak, discussing President Clinton's upcoming trip to China and referring to the Chinese government's brutal crackdown on student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, said, "It happened a long time ago; it's over now." He is presumably mystified that anybody might still be perturbed by the Holocaust which is now more that fifty years in the past. It might be possible to credit Novak with an admirable capacity for letting bygones be bygones and moving on from tragedy if only it weren't crystal clear that his pronouncements simply exhibit a remarkable tolerance for thuggery. He has, for example, consistently defended the unconscionable actions of the sadistic Central American allies of the United States in the '80's and recently expressed outrage at criticism and lack of appreciation in American media for Chile's murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet.

President Clinton's trip to China is justified within the context of his overall China policy; the policy itself, however, is highly questionable, and would be recognized as such by candidate Clinton of 1992 who opportunistically slammed George Bush for pursuing essentially the same agenda. As Mark Shields and Al Hunt pointed out, this policy is unidimensional, being driven entirely by market considerations. The absence of historical and moral perspective on this issue, demonstrated across a broad spectrum of American pols and pundits, is astounding.

Bob Novak is right to assert that Clinton should go to Tiananmen Square when he visits China but not because the attack on the rebellion "happened a long time ago" and his statement that "it's over now" is moronic. Some critics , mostly on the partisan right, have declared that Clinton should refuse to go to Tiananmen Square because it is a symbol of Chinese governmental repression and have compared his willingness to appear there to Ronald Reagan's trip to Bitburg, Germany; their objections are unworthy of serious consideration. First of all, this stop, unlike Reagan's visit to Bitburg, is simply unavoidable; Tiananmen Square is, for good or ill, a center of Chinese life. Also, it should be emphasized that before it became a symbol of repression, this site was, for a brief but exhilarating time, a symbol of hope and resistance to tyranny; the crackdown happened there because the uprising happened there.

On NBC's Meet the Press, April 5, 1998, J. C. Watts was asked by host Tim Russert to comment on the precipitous drop in minority student enrollment following the elimination of affirmative action as a factor in state university admissions in California, e.g. drops in black enrollment of 43% at U.C.L.A. and 66% at U.C. Berkeley. -This exchange occurred in the midst of a discussion of the legacy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the weekend of the 30th anniversary of King's assassination.- Watts, a black Republican congressman, responded, "If you're looking at an entry exam and the question is what two plus two is, if the white kid can answer that or the black kid can't, or whatever the entry level exam determines, if the white kid can do it and the black kid can't, I think we need to look at the preparatory process."

Regardless of the merits of the the congressman's recommendation that "we need to look at the preparatory process," not a particularly bold suggestion, the use of the "two plus two" example (which Watts floated twice in the course of his total reply to Russert) was remarkably infelicitous-. In response to criticism by other guests, Watts half-heartedly acknowledged that he might have found a better analogy suggesting "some trigonometry articulation" as a possible point of differentiation between black and white performance. It is difficult to quarrel with Jesse Jackson's characterization of the congressman's original formulation as "an insulting, almost racist description of the situation." -Almost?- His constituents back in Oklahoma must have felt they were really getting their money's worth out of Mr. Watts.

On The McLaughlin Group, March 27, 1998, David Gergen, having just returned from Germany, opined that "I don't think Helmut Kohl is going to make it. And that will mean we'll have left-of-center governments in Germany, France, England, and the United States."

Gergen's prediction may well be correct, but the characterization "left of center" applied to the governments of Britain and the United Staes is inane in any context in which the term "left" has significant meaning. Unfortunately, such a context is absent in contemporary Anglo-American political culture. With the Left in dire straits in England and America, the center has slud (as Dizzy Dean might put it) violently rightward, leaving any politically viable position which might technically invite the description "left of center" unworthy of association with any significant Leftist tradition. Therefore, while it is possible to parse the technical meaning of Gergen's terminology, it signifies nothing and carries only the illusion of sound and fury.