I ’m Fed Up — April 1999

I’m fed up with the liberals telling me that I can’t be judgmental about crimes and sins, even when committed by the President. We have every right to be judgmental, and the liberals have their nerve trying to dictate a “Thou shalt not be judgmental” commandment.

I’m fed up with the liberals telling me I must be nonpartisan. Do we have political freedom in America or don’t we? The liberals have their nerve trying to enforce a nonpartisan rule on Republicans, while at the same time winking at Democratic Senators who goosestepped to a unanimous partisan vote to save Bill Clinton from the fate he deserved.

Maybe it depends on what the meaning of partisan is. I guess, if you behave like a Republican, you are partisan, but if you behave like a Democrat you are nonpartisan.

The Democratic Senators knew that Clinton, like O.J., was guilty. The Democrats called his behavior “outrageous,” “disgraceful,” “dishonorable,” “reckless,” “contemptible,” “shameful,” “inexcusable,” “sordid,” “deplorable,” “immoral,” “debased,” and “reprehensible.” But all the Democratic Senators closed ranks to impose their values on the country by defeating what Alan Dershowitz called “the forces of evil” (i.e., Republicans and the so-called religious right).

I’m fed up with the liberals imposing the label “mean-spirited” on Republicans. Is it mean-spirited to criticize Clinton but not mean-spirited to criticize Ken Starr or Newt Gingrich (even though he was fully exonerated by the IRS investigation)?

I’m fed up with the liberals imposing their values on us about perjury, along with their absurd caveat that “everybody lies about sex.” If it’s just “he says, she says” and everybody lies, we should toss out all the sexual harassment cases, enjoy sex in the workplace, and then lie about it.

I’m fed up with the liberals blaming the Republicans for Clinton’s impeachment and trial. The Independent Counsel law, which required Starr to investigate Clinton, and the law that allowed Paula Jones to have discovery rights against Clinton to prove a pattern of sexual harassment, were both Democratic laws signed by President Clinton.

I’m fed up with the liberals dictating their new moral imperative that we must “move on” and “become moderate,” or else they will label us “extremist.” Who gave them the right to enforce a new law of moderation and extremism and to brand people with their judgments? I thought we were supposed to be nonjudgmental, or does that rule depend on who is making the judgment? Or, maybe it depends on what the meaning of extremism is.

Let’s try to understand the new moral code that the liberals are trying to impose. Is it “moderate” for a CEO (hypocritically posing for photo-ops carrying a Bible) to use an entry-level employee as his office sex toy, but it’s “extremist” for observers to say he doesn’t observe the Biblical moral code?

I’m fed up with the Clinton Administration telling us we have a moral obligation to spend American blood and money in ethnic wars all around the world. Where did the interventionist liberals get any authority to impose their foreign-policy morality on us? The fact is, the Clinton Administration doesn’t have any moral authority to impose any “obligation” on us at all.

How dare the liberals impose their values on us by pretending that the way they spend our money is morally superior to the way individual Americans spend it! Bill Clinton says he won’t refund the surplus tax revenues to the taxpayers because we might not “spend it right.”

I’m fed up with the liberals saying it is our moral duty to spend our money for their pet projects (it’s called taxes) in order to provide benefits to special constituencies that are expected to vote liberal. This endless stream of constituencies seeking handouts runs the gamut from illegal aliens, to the welfare bureaucracy, to the con artists peddling pornography in the National Endowment for the Arts, to the big bankers demanding that we finance their risky overseas investments through bailouts, the IMF and the OPIC.

I’m fed up with the liberals and the teachers unions imposing their Whole Language, School-to-Work, “comprehensive” sex education, and diversity curricula on other people’s children. The educrats won’t even allow parents a choice for phonics, abstinence classes, or traditional academic basics.

I’m fed up with the liberals telling me I have to respect their gods: the Presidency and his “wag the dog” foreign policy, the Imperial Judiciary and its activist decisions, and the public schools with their failed methods. Who gave the liberals the authority to substitute those gods for God and His Ten Commandments?

I’m fed up with the liberals prescribing tolerance as the supreme moral value and imposing their notions of what is acceptable behavior. I’m fed up with the liberals telling us that we must show forgiveness about Clinton’s perjury, peculiar sex, and perversion of justice at the same time that he spells reconciliation R-E-V-E-N-G-E.

I’m fed up with the liberals falsely accusing Republicans and the so-called religious right of imposing their values on society, when the evidence proves that the liberals have been using the full powers of government, the media and academia to impose their values on us. Their values, like Clinton’s Presidency, are just as stained as the famous blue dress.

It’s Bribery, Not ‘Just Sex’

The new book called Year of the Rat is a political blockbuster. No, it doesn’t call Bill Clinton a “rat” — “year of the rat” is a Chinese expression to describe 1996. And 1996 was the year when Clinton solicited illegal funds from foreigners and took massive contributions from favor-seeking corporate interests, paid them off with preferential trade policies and wide access to U.S. intelligence, and then used the illegal money to steal the 1996 election.

Year of the Rat was written by two Republican Capitol Hill staffers, Edward Timperlake and William Triplett (Regnery Co.), with extensive investigative experience in the fields of China, national security, and international financial crimes. The book contains 275 pages of detailed evidence of how Clinton sold out America’s national security to Communist China in return for campaign cash. The facts about bribery, extortion and obstruction of justice are copiously documented with more than 600 footnotes from public information, recently declassified documents, and personal interviews.

Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE) and then-Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) must have been completely mystified as to how they could have been defeated for the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination by the Governor of a southern state who carried so much baggage of lifestyle and financial misbehavior. Now we know the reason. At a crucial point in the spring of 1992, Clinton’s faltering campaign received a multi-million dollar transfusion from an Arkansas bank controlled by the Riady family of Indonesia.

Clinton was elected President both in 1992 and in 1996 with large sums of illegal foreign cash. Nearly $5 million in political donations to the 1992 and 1996 Clinton campaigns came from the Riadys.

A Chinese banking family based in Indonesia, the Riadys have some $5 billion of business investments closely interlocked with the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese military intelligence. When the Riadys wanted property on Wangfujing Street, the most valuable commercial block in central Beijing, they were powerful enough to get Beijing to break China’s lease with McDonalds and move America’s profitable fast-food outlet to an inferior location.

Obstruction of justice explains the payment of hush money to Clinton crony Webb Hubbell. In June 1994, as Ken Starr was closing in on the then-broke Hubbell, he suddenly received $100,000 from the Riadys and possibly a similar amount from a Macau criminal syndicate figure.

Clinton paid off the Riadys by giving their man in America, John Huang, a key job in the Commerce Department with Top Secret clearance. This gave Huang access to extremely sensitive CIA information of great value to the Riadys and to their associates in Chinese intelligence.

After the Republicans captured Congress in 1994, a worried Clinton turned to Dick Morris for political advice. Morris laid out a plan to run a television blitz in key states, but that required lots of money. Clinton moved John Huang, with his security clearance intact, to the Democratic National Committee in order to strut his skills as a fundraiser. In nine months, Huang raised $2,660,000 for Clinton’s television campaign, most of which the DNC later had to return as illegal — after Clinton was reelected in 1996.

The illegal Chinese contributions to the Democratic Party and the Clinton-Gore campaign came mostly from illicit activities, including prostitution and drug trafficking. In return, Clinton used the White House as a visitor’s center for agents of the Chinese army, the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese criminal syndicates, and Chinese generals from the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Another Democratic fundraiser and friend of Clinton, Johnny Chung, was convicted of funneling political contributions from a Chinese military officer to the Democrats. A hundred potential witnesses of Chinagate have either taken the Fifth Amendment or fled the country.

Meanwhile, the number-one contributor to the 1995-1996 Clinton-Gore re-election cycle, Bernard Schwartz of Loral Space Systems, turned out to be interested in China, too. Schwartz went from a $12,500 contributor in the 1991-1992 cycle to a $2.2 million contributor. The Clinton Administration gave Loral the export licenses it wanted in order to have the Chinese launch its satellites.

The result is that China acquired U.S. technology that enabled China to target its missiles against us more accurately. Clinton should have been impeached based on the facts set forth in Year of the Rat.

China’s Espionage Proves Need for Missile Defense

We heard a lot of posturing this year about Senators fulfilling their obligation to obey the Constitution. The Senate has no more important obligation than to fulfill its constitutional duty to “provide for the common defense.”

Ever since the dawn of the nuclear missile age, the liberals and the Democrats have adamantly and peculiarly opposed building a system that would shoot down intercontinental missiles before they kill Americans. The Democrats consistently demand that U.S. citizens remain sitting ducks in the face of enemy threats under the policy known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Twice last year, a Democratic filibuster prevented a missile defense bill from coming to a vote in the Senate, and in February the Clinton Administration said it is “strongly opposed” to building a missile defense.

The China bribery scandal exposed in Year of the Rat, and the coverup of the Chinese Communist espionage at Los Alamos exposed by the New York Times on March 6, changed the political landscape. Clinton suddenly announced he won’t veto the National Missile Defense Act, which declares it to be U.S. policy “to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate).” The Senate passed this bill 97-3 on March 17 and the House passed a similar bill 317-105 on March 18. Anti-missile defense is what Ronald Reagan called SDI — Strategic Defense Initiative.

This marks a major setback for Bill Clinton, and the Republican Congress should take the ball and run with it. In the post-Cold War era, Republicans have been seeking a major issue to serve as a unifier and motivator, and there is no better goal than the protection of the lives and property of American citizens from attack by rogue dictators. This issue can rally the troops of all factions of the conservative movement: fiscal and social activists, free traders and protectionists, interventionists and America Firsters, libertarians and the religious right.

Despite Clinton’s announced change of heart, we know he will use every power of the bureaucracy to prevent an anti-missile defense from actually being built, so Congress should move aggressively to do its constitutional duty to provide for the common defense.

The New York Times exposé described how Communist China, using an espionage operation at our Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, stole the strategic know-how to miniaturize its nuclear bombs and launch them at multiple targets from a single missile. The espionage probably started in the mid-1980s, but U.S. intelligence didn’t discover it until 1995 when an analysis of Chinese tests revealed that China has miniature warheads like our most advanced warhead, the W-88.

Multiple nuclear warheads that can be launched from long-range missiles, mobile missiles, and submarines are the main elements of a modern nuclear force. They can be used on China’s 13 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are already targeted on U.S. cities.

As Yogi Berra would say, it sounds like déjà vu all over again because this espionage success story ranks with the Soviets’ theft of our atomic secrets by Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. It’s more damaging to U.S. security than the betrayal of our secrets by convicted spy Aldrich Ames.

Another parallel between the Chinese and the Soviet espionage of the 1940s is the coverup by the Administration. The Times‘ investigation shows that the Clinton Administration’s response to the 1995 discovery of this daring and dramatic theft of our most vital technology was “delays, inaction and skepticism,” plus shockingly lax security at Los Alamos.

Of course, the Clinton Administration didn’t want its China policy to be upset by messy revelations that our trading “partner” was stealing our technology and using it to target weapons of mass destruction on U.S. cities! The centerpiece of Clinton’s China policy was to allow a billion-dollar-a-week trade deficit with China, which provides the U.S. dollars China needs to build an up-to-date, aggressive war machine.

Clinton’s China policy also included okaying increased exports of satellites and other militarily useful items, looser controls over sales of supercomputers, and trying to work out a deal to allow U.S. companies to sell commercial nuclear reactors. After all, these sales were of major commercial importance to the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party’s campaign coffers.

It was in 1995 when the whistle-blower in the Energy Department, intelligence official Notra Trulock, first sounded the alarm about Chinese Communist penetration at Los Alamos. But making a fuss with the Chinese would have interfered with those millions of dollars still to be raised from the Chinese for Clinton’s 1996 reelection.

So, the Clinton White House and its National Security staff feigned “skepticism,” denied that China’s extraordinary and inexplicable leap forward in nuclear technology could have come from theft of American secrets, and downplayed the significance. It was just so much more important for Clinton to have a friendly meeting with China’s President Jiang Zemin and let photo-ops mislead the world with the illusion that China was moving toward “democracy” and “capitalism.”

The attitude of Clinton’s National Security staff was ominously reminiscent of the way the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations stonewalled evidence about (in Harry Truman’s words) “good old Joe” Stalin’s espionage, pretending to believe Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s famous words that “gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” But Joseph Stalin was no “gentleman,” and neither are the perpetrators of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Trulock encountered one roadblock after another in trying to present his evidence of China’s espionage to Clinton’s National Security staff, the FBI, the CIA, and his own boss, Energy Secretary Federico Pena. The FBI opened a criminal investigation in 1996 and identified five suspects, but no one was arrested. Trulock finally became a major witness before the Cox Committee last year, even though senior Administration officials had ordered him not to tell Congress about his findings, and demoted him after he testified.

The Cox Committee reached unanimous, bipartisan agreement in a 700-page report that China’s theft has severely hurt U.S. national security.

The Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, a distinguished bipartisan committee headed by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, released a unanimous and ominous report on July 15, 1998 that provides Congress with powerful arguments to build an anti-missile defense immediately.

The commission warns us that “hostile nations” such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq, are making “concerted efforts . . . to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads” that will be able “to inflict major destruction on the U.S. within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability.” And further, we are warned that “the U.S. might not be aware that such a decision has been made.”

Can’t we rely on the U.S. intelligence community to keep us posted on imminent military threats? The Rumsfeld Commission warns us that the threat from rogue countries is “evolving more rapidly” than U.S. intelligence has told us, and that our ability to detect the threat is “eroding” because “nations are increasingly able to conceal important elements” of their missile programs.

We also continue to be threatened by the existing ballistic missile arsenals of Russia and China, and the fact that both are exporters of ballistic missile technologies to countries hostile to the United States. Russia has accelerated Iran’s missile program, and China has carried out extensive transfers to Iran and Pakistan. Any nation that wants to develop ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction can easily get assistance from outside sources.

The Rumsfeld Commission notes that North Korea has a “well developed” ballistic missile infrastructure, and it is unlikely that the U.S. would know of a decision to deploy its missiles. House National Security Committee Chairman Floyd Spence (R-SC) concluded that “the missile threat is not 15 years away, it is here and now.”

The CIA reported this year that 13 of China’s 18 long-range nuclear missiles are now targeted at U.S. cities. Four of these missiles were produced in the first four months of 1998. China’s new missile capability gives that regime a tremendous opportunity for blackmail to achieve its goals, such as taking over Taiwan. The Rumsfeld report noted that Gen. Xiong Guangkai is already on record as threatening the United States by boasting that we would not be willing to “trade Los Angeles for Taipei.”

Bill Clinton is trying to block the building of a U.S. missile defense by resuscitating the moribund 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty. This effort is so untenable as to be downright ridiculous. Under international law, our 1972 ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union expired when that country went out of existence in 1991. This is admitted by legal scholars and even by the author of the 1972 treaty, Henry Kissinger.

The Clinton Administration is trying to resurrect the old ABM Treaty by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with four of the 15 states born out of the former Soviet Union: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia. This would allow those four to outvote the U.S. on interpretation and implementation. The remaining 11 countries would be free to develop, test and deploy ABM systems, along with all the other outlaw countries identified by the Rumsfeld Commission, while the United States would be forbidden to do so. The MOU is actually a new treaty, also known as the ABM Expansion Treaty, and ratification should require a two-thirds vote in the Senate.

This MOU/ABM Expansion Treaty would perpetuate the asinine Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) policy, which means promising to keep Americans undefended against incoming missiles. Since the liberals have no sensible argument against this, they just recite their Ted Kennedy mantra “Star Wars, Star Wars” and have their allies in Congress secretly block all appropriations to build any system to shoot down incoming missiles.

We live in a dangerous world, which has a lot of powerful men who are evil or irrational (or both), unpredictable, and hate Americans. Even with unlimited access to highly classified information, Rumsfeld said, “There is a lot we don’t know, can’t know and won’t know . . . there will be surprises.”

The 106th Congress has no greater duty than to act now to protect American lives against incoming nuclear missiles.

Phyllis Schlafly is the author of five books on defense and foreign policy: The Gravediggers (1964), Strike From Space (1965), and The Betrayers (1968) covering the McNamara years, and Kissinger on the Couch (1975) and Ambush at Vladivostok (1976) covering the Kissinger years.