THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Virgil Huston is the person who made this column possible. It was his idea for me to do it, and he is the one who puts these pages on the Net. Naturally, I want to use this column to give him some hell.

Each week Virgil sends an email letter to League members. Last week his letter came out the same day as the Clinton acquittal and Virgil was outraged that such blatant lying had not been punished.

Virgil wants us to send outraged letters to Senator Hollings.

I was jealous. I wish I could still get that upset about any extreme of dishonesty in American politics. But I have become accustomed to the fact that there is no honesty in American politics, right or left. In American politics, everybody not only says things that are untrue; everybody always says things BECAUSE they are not true.

"Spin" is everything today, on both the left and the right. Nobody tells the truth. There is no morality at all in our politics, and nobody expects any. There is open amorality on the part of Clinton defenders. But there is blasphemy on the part of our rightist psychopaths who say they speak for God.

For the past year, the American people have said they want a psychopath named Clinton running things for them. The right wants its own psychopaths in charge, the ones who shout "GOD!" a lot.

What is a psychopath? He is a person without a conscience. But he can sure act like he has one. In the course of living his life, the psychopath learns to fake a conscience. A good psychopath is much better at acting as if he feels guilty than anyone who has a real sense of guilt does.

Did you see Jimmy Swaggart's crying guilt act after HE got caught?

Marvelous!

We don't want any honest people in public life. We only want people who say the right thing at the right time. We also want people who do not have any secret prejudices.

A good psychopath tells you just what you want to hear, just when you want to hear it. A psychopath has no secret prejudices. He has NO genuine attachments. A psychopath is the perfect leader for our age, a man with no prejudices whatsoever.

He has none of the underlying beliefs that might be exposed. He has no feeling for his race. He is no provincial, and he will sign any plank you want in your platform without a quiver. The psychopath is exactly what you want him to be.

When dealing with Clinton, I was in exactly the same position I am in when I am dealing with drugs or abortion. Rightists are demanding that I take their position, all the way. They demand I BELIEVE, or at least act like I BELIEVE, that they represent morality.

The right believes it has morality because its leaders keep yelling God. Nobody outside the right thinks we have any morality. We sold out our morality with our prejudices and our personal beliefs. That's the right "spin." Having no prejudices buys you Respectability. We disavowed our prejudices so we could have leaders who claim to represent True Religion.

We have leaders who claim to speak for God, but the problem is that no one outside the right is going to listen to these blasphemous kookoos. They are not only dishonest like Clinton, they are DUMB, which he isn't.

Dumb Bob Livingston was a good example. He kept saying that his demands against Clinton had nothing to do with Clinton's sex life. So when they found some problems with Livingston's sex life, he resigned and said Clinton should resign, which meant that Livingston's demand for Clinton's resignation WAS based on Clinton's sexual doings. These kookoos simply have no idea what they are saying from day to day. Only the right takes them seriously, which is why the right will go under with them.

The psychopaths who rule the right are not only dumb, they have no interest whatever in long term strategy. We need people to go after the left, but the professional rightist's only interest is in keeping his respectability.

The biggest thing that happened in the Clinton debacle was the total discrediting of the so-called "Women's Movement," but no conservative anywhere - but me - is going to mention the hypocrisy of the women's movement in the near future. In a year or two, everybody will have forgotten it and "women's leaders' will be back on the talk shows, so respectable conservatives can go back to respectfully disagreeing with them.

What about some letters to newspapers reminding people of the hypocrisy of the women's movement?

Don't hold your breath.

When liberals get a right-wing group into the position that the "Women's Movement" has put itself into, the left goes ahead and DESTROYS it. And the first group that joins the liberals in damning those groups are the respectable conservatives. (Please see September 26 article, "Respectable Conservatives kill Their Wounded" and October 3, "Respectable Conservatives, They're Just Bureaucrats")

So we can yell about the unrighteousness of it all, or we can try to begin getting serious. We can cry and moan about dishonesty, or we can devote a little effort to BEING a little honest for a change. This is what I am trying to do here.

I disagree with Virgil.** He wants you to spend time protesting to our lame duck junior senator. I think there are about a thousand things that are more important than that to be done. And if we are ever going to get any morality in this country, we'd damned well better get our priorities straight.

I was asked to be specific here. To start with, if I were a betting man, I would bet that: 1) there will be a minimum of three thousand letters send to Hollings protesting his vote and 2) there has not been and will not be ONE SINGLE letter sent to the State paper protesting their total censorship policy on the antimiscegenation provision. (See January 2 article, "Censorship Pays")

The State's email address is [email protected]

The State's postal address is

The State Newspaper

PO Box 1333

Columbia, SC 29202

Another hundred letters to Hollings will mean nothing. A few letters to the State would mean a lot. Both the impeachment and the antimiscegenation provisions are done deals, but in the latter case protest would matter in the long run. So, like good right wingers, we join in the protest that doesn't matter.

Why? Because everybody's doing it, that's why.

There is nothing that is more a complete waste of time than trying to save the soul of a lame-duck liberal senator. What it does accomplish is this: It reassures respectable conservatives that we may talk about not supporting them blindly, but when push comes to shove, all our real efforts will go into standard conservative stuff.

I go on and on here about the failures of respectable conservatives. How many of us actually write respectable conservatives about these failures? I would hazard that no such letters are written.

Not surprisingly, my suggestions have to do with backing MY efforts.

Why?

Obviously it is because I take what I do seriously, or I wouldn't do it. I feel that Southern nationalists in general, and I in particular, are fighting a lonely battle here, and it makes me angry when one of us demands that we all get busy backing - ho, hum -- standard conservatism.

**One South Carolinian disagrees with another. How unusual!

Feburary 27, 1999 - No articles due to technical difficulties