Barry Farber
Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2001

Remember that early scene from "Gone With the Wind" when a pre-Civil War ball at Tara Plantation featured military cadets, handsomely uniformed with combat swords swinging at their sides, arguing with each other in the library, each trying to one-up the others in his eagerness to fight the North.

"A Southerner can beat TWO Yankees," said one of the cadets.

"What do you MEAN," shouted another cadet. "Just TWO?

"A Southerner can beat FOUR Yankees," he hollered to the raucous applause of the crowd of cadets, whereupon another cadet raised his voice higher still and said, "A Southerner can beat EIGHT Yankees!"

At that point Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) sauntered into the library and said: "Shut up. All of you just shut up. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. (Dialogue and costumes remembered and paraphased from seeing the movie many, many years ago!)

"The North has a navy. We don't. They'll blockade our ports, starve us out, destroy our economy, and next thing you know we'll be eating our own cotton."

Clark wasn't popular at that party. But he was valuable. I'm reading and hearing a lot of conservative "cadets" these days, sounding handsomely uniformed with swords likewise dangling at their sides, all trying to one-up each other in disappointment with President Bush. You've heard them, too.

"President Bush, how DARE you allow research on a human embryo under ANY conditions. That's not compromise. That's surrender!"

"President Bush, your affirmative action program is nothing but a Xerox of Bill Clinton's. Why do you make John Ashcroft use the same script as Janet Reno? How dare you not drive a stake though the heart of racial quotas?"

"President Bush, why do you treat the sucker fish better than the failing farmers of Oregon? Sure, Al Gore and his phony environmentalists will ventriloquize whenever they can, but why are YOU such a willing dummy?"

Whether Bush's conservative base will go or not, we can be sure they won't go quietly.

Are YOU one of those "cadets" hurling rusty harpoons into all the real and perceived forfeitures of genuine conservative doctrine by President Bush? Are YOU one of those cadets rebelling against President Bush's supine acquiescence to liberal preference? Are you quitting, abandoning the Republican Party, going elsewhere, staying home, sulking in disgust?

If so, please try to pretend I am Clark Gable sauntering in handsomely from the ballroom and saying: "Shut up! All of you just shut up!

"You're disappointed in President Bush's failure to drive home all the conservative promises that inspired you to fight for his election and made you so excited with his victory. And now you're angry to the point of rebellion, abandonment, defection, desertion!

"Good for you. You're got the words. You've got the melody. You've got the ways and means to destroy W's chances of re-election. But have you got the intelligence to considered what comes next?

"The Democratic Party is not the Nazi Party. But if you cadets sabotage Bush, the Democrats will swagger into dominance like the Germans swaggered into France after the outflanking of the Maginot Line in 1940.

"You're smart enough to know major media is biased against you. Please try to be smart enough to realize what that leads to. The media treat a rift in the Democratic Party like a minor flaw in a decent man's zipper. A rift in the REPUBLICAN Party, however, will be emblazoned as a naked villain.

"Keep it up, cadets! Keep attacking Bush from the right and, with a little help from major media, the Democratic Party will course to easy victory in the House AND the Senate. The media will, of course, hail that as a return to 'normal.'

"You seem to be obeying an unwritten law that says: 'Bend my political principles and I may compromise. Bend my moral principles, however, and I must fight you.'

"Wrong!

"The president has bent my personal moral principles with, for instance, his compromise on human embryo stem cell research. However, if my rebellion were to contribute to his defeat, you can be sure a Democratic victory would result in far more - and far more major - affronts to my morality.

"Who do you want picking Supreme Court justices and federal judges?

"Who do you want picking Cabinet members and those who regulate the regulators?

"Do you really want to see bitterly divided Republicans reduced from leading the nation clear down to dropping blame bombs on each other?

"The late Henny Youngman was widely thought to be a comic. Wrong, again. Henny was a philosopher. Whenever anybody asked Henny Youngman, 'How's your wife?' Henny would reply, 'Compared to what?'

"Let's go all the way, for argument's sake, and call Bush a phony conservative. Okay? Who do you then prefer: a phony conservative or a genuine liberal?

"Give ME the phony conservative, who will occasionally, to disguise his phoniness, perform a conservative act, do a conservative deed, say a conservative thing, vote a conservative way.

"Who will do a better job of promoting abstinence, fighting drugs, shaping up the military, continuing to reform welfare, cutting taxes, standing up to the teachers' unions, foiling political correctness, kicking obscenity in the crotch; who - I ask you - a phony conservative or a genuine liberal?

"Admittedly the differences may be too minuscule at times to measure with the naked eye, BUT THEY'LL BE THERE!"

Therapy for conservatives right now must include the whisper that, although our beautiful recipes are Heaven-kissed and righteous, media has tear-gassed our minions and scattered them.

Despite my disappointment with the Bush performance so far, I will not ape the mood of that codger sitting around the pot-bellied stove in the North Carolina country store. He looked at his watch one evening and said, "It's 7 o'clock. I reckon I'll go home, and if dinner's not ready I'll raise hell, and if it is I ain't gonna eat it!"

President Bush, not surprisingly, wants to keep us conservatives behind him and gain a lot of people in the middle.

President Bush, not unsurprisingly, wants to steal second base without taking his foot off first.

WE shouldn't be the ones to call him OUT!

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