The Truth, Mainly - 09/13/1993

I don't want to alarm Wall Street—folks there toy with my retirement—but has anyone else noted the fiendishly clever plot to make conservatives look foolish and venal?

I finally caught on to it last week when I read a Washington Post story about conservative opposition to an endowed chair honoring University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill—the woman, you remember, whose picturesque testimony nearly did in the Clarence Thomas nomination.

The conservative opposition is led by someone calling himself "E.Z. Million"—a name I swear the Post reports with a straight face—who says he's president of something called the Oklahoma Conservative Committee, and by a Republican state representative named Leonard Sullivan. His name is more plausible than E.Z. Million's, but listen to his reasoning:

"All I want is to see Anita Hill in prison. . . .The left wing drafted Anita Hill, wrote the story and promised her a chair in return. If she can prove otherwise, let her prove it."

A solon, a wise and skillful law-giver, putting the burden of proof on the accused? Teamed up with somebody named E.Z. Million?

That's when I remembered Dick Tuck.

Hang on. This will all fall into place in a minute.

Dick Tuck was a political prankster back in the sixties who liked to infiltrate Republican ranks and play tricks on the The Trickster himself, Richard Nixon. The most famous came in 1960 when he passed himself off as part of Nixon's entourage on a whistle-stop campaign. He put on a train crewman's hat and signalled the engineer to pull out of the station—just as Nixon began his speech from the caboose platform.

Tuck was the Democratic forerunner of Nixon's 1972 Dirty Tricks Squad who played even nastier jokes on the opposition. In both cases, though, the strategy was the same: pretend to be one of those you want to discredit.

And that, I've decided, must be what's going on in the Anita Hill case. E.Z. Million, I imagine, is someone dreamed up by a gang of aging radicals from the sixties, their collective consciousness forever altered by reefer madness, who've been writing whacked-out scripts for their invented "conservatives" to follow. Sullivan, too, is a left-wing invention. Even in Oklahoma, real state legislators don't make accusations, then tell the accused to prove them false or go to jail.

Once I caught on to the game, I began seeing it everywhere.

For example, someone calling himself "Cal Thomas" pretends to be a conservative columnist and writes, "If we will not be constrained from within by the presence and power of God, we must be restrained from without by the power of the state, acting as God's agent, in order to conform people to a standard of righteousness. . . ."

So much for separation of church and state.

But if you buy my theory, you'll see that "Cal Thomas" is a fabrication created by the radical left to discredit traditional conservatives like Barry Goldwater. He argues "there is no place in this country for practicing religion in politics," and keeps insisting that the purpose of the state is not to act as God's agent, but to "stay out of people's private lives. . . to stay out of the impossible task of legislating morality."

Or take the case of the ex-president's two sons, Neil and Marvin Bush, his Secretary of State, James Baker, and his White House Chief of Staff, John Sununu. They went with George Bush to Kuwait in April, watched him be showered with medals, honorary degrees, and expensive gifts, then stayed on to try to swing big-buck deals with Kuwaitis still grateful for the liberation of their oilfields.

In his story in the Sep. 6 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh contrasts those four with Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, another hero to the Kuwaitis, and someone who, like Goldwater, might be seen as a real conservative.

"American men and women were willing to die in Kuwait," Schwartzkopf said in explaining why he turned down offers to make millions dealing with Kuwaitis. "Why should I profit from their sacrifice?"

Although Baker, Sununu, and the Bush boys broke no laws, Hersh says, they "may have damaged established notions of propriety and common sense" by their efforts to cash in on Kuwaiti gratitude.

But of course they weren't the real Baker, Sununu, and Bush boys. They were impersonators clumsily trying make conservatives look bad.

So the next time you hear a self-described "conservative" sounding a little too flaky—Ollie North, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh come to mind—see if you can hear Dick Tuck and his left-wing crazies giggling in the background.

I know conspiracy theories like this are a little scary, but I'm just trying to put these sham conservatives in the best light. What's really scary is the remote possibility they're genuine.

Satterfield is a college professor and writes as a means of discovery.