From: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Subject: The Vicar of Bray
Reply-To: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 16:48:24 GMT


Reprinted w/o permission from the NYT, 8/17/92, p.A19 (Op-Ed)
[typos are mine]

THE VICAR OF BRAY
by Anthony Lewis

Would George Bush really provoke a confrontation with Iraq so Americna
bombs fall on Baghdad in the week of the Republican convention?

The story, reported by Patrick E. Tyler in the New York Times,
suggests a use of Presidential power so cynical that it makes one
gasp.  But Georege Bush is the man who said he would "do what I have
to do to be reelected."  And he is the man who in a lifetime of
politics has traded every value he may ever have had for the sake of
office.

The perception that there is no bottom line in this President is what
I believe explains his decline.  In the hollowness is the collapse.

His abandonment of principle in order to get ahead is commonly traced
to his nomination for Vice President in 1980.  In 1970, campaigning
for the Senate, he had said that "women should have the freedom to
choose or not to choose an abortion."  On the Reagan ticket in 1980,
he became a fervent opponent of abortion.

But the process of shedding pricniple had begun much earlier.  Garry
Wills traced the history brilliantly in The New York Review of Books
dated Aug. 13, in a piece entitled "The Hostage."

Mr. Bush began in politics in the Texas Republican Party of the 1960's
-- a party, Mr. Wills points out, that was dominated by the extreme
right.  So when Mr. Bush first ran for the Senate, in 1964, he opposed
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and refused to repudiate the crazies of
the John Birch Society.

Afterward he said he was ashamed of "not speaking out."  He told his
minister, John Stevens, "You know, John, I took some of the far-right
positons to get elected.  I hope I never do it again."

But he did.  To get on the Reagan ticket he swallowed what he had
called "voodoo economics," and he embraced the social agenda of the
religious right.  He told Jerry Falwell that he had been born again.

As President he has continued his ardent courtship of the right.  He
even vetoed a bill to set up a desperately needed fetal-tissue bank
for research on such grave illnesses as Parkinson's disease.  He said
the bill would encourage abortions, though its terms forbade abortions
to provide research material.

All politicians have to compromise.  Most engage in a degree of
hypocrisy from time to time.  But Mr. Bush has made cynicism a way of
life.

When he nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supremem Court, he siad that
of all possible candidate in the country Judge Thomas was "the best
qualified."  No one even thought of believing that absurdity.
Conservatives were told that Judge Thomas would be a sure vote against
abortion, as he has proved to be.

The television advertising he has used in the run-up to the convention
is an example of cynicism so unembarrassed that it could be called
debonair.

"We must strengthen the American family," Mr. Bush told voters in one
of the spot ads.  That form the President who vetoed the most
important pro-family legislation of our age, the bill that would
require large companies to give employees unpaid family and medical
leave.

"We must increase respect for the law," he said.  That from a man who
for 12 years has been part of two of the most lawless Administrations
in American history.

For all his currying of the right, conservatives have never trusted
him.  And so he seeks evermore pathetically to prove that he is one of
them.

Perhaps, somewhere deep inside, there still is a real George Bush with
humane values.  We are invited to believe so when his wife opposed the
Republican platform's call for a total, constitutional ban on
abortion.  But by all signs a lifetime of political cynicism has made
him like the subject of the satirical English verse "The Vicar of
Bray," a minister who adjusts his faith to political demands.

The verse is said to be based on a real vicar of the village of Bray,
Symon Symonds, who served under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Bloody Mary and
Elizabeth.  He was twice a Catholic, twice a Protestant.  Tasked with
his switches, he said: "If I changed my religion, I am sure I kept
true to my principle, which is to live and die the Vicar of Bray."
--
But this is.



--
But this is.

Xref: sparky alt.politics.clinton:2574 alt.politics.bush:2492 talk.politics.misc:41244 soc.culture.usa:6775 talk.politics.guns:19863