The two true faces of North American liberalism
By Michael Moriarty
web posted April 11, 2005
Every politician has two faces, as does every public figure -- whether artistic, athletic or ideological. For the most part, that is not the face of hypocrisy; it's simply an obligatory measure to assure these men and women some measure of privacy. I know whereof I speak, being a frequently remembered face on world television.
However, liberals and their recurring displays of public intemperateness and excessive fraternization with our still-avowed enemy, Communist China, place the two-party system of democracy in peril. We are now at ground zero, in the proving grounds of a battle, not between two domestic views of how to govern this continent, but an actual battleground between Democracy and Communism.
The Quicksand of Marxism
North American Liberals and European Social Democrats are trying to draw a line between Socialism and Communism in the quicksand of Marxism. How they expect to keep that line drawn is a fascinating thing to watch. Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) -- "progressive" always being an indication of a socialist bias -- has tried to adopt a tougher stance with Beijing since Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian took office in 2000. It is this ruling party's opposition that is now making nice-nice with the People's Republic of China. If liberals are only two-fifths Communist, then this other Taiwanese Party must be only three-fifths Communist. Oh, well, good luck to both of them.
Canada's former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a big admirer of Fidel Castro, tried getting tough with the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorist group during the infamous Black October of 1970. Trudeau instituted the War Measures Act in an overreaction to a miserable little Communist cabal in Montreal. The Government of Quebec had more than enough expertise and equipment to ferret out terrorist kidnappers Bernard Lortie, the brothers Paul and Jacques Rose, and Francis Simard, but, in typically liberal intemperateness, Trudeau, with his famous words, "Just watch me!," brought the federal fist down. That War Measures Act hung on for an excessively long time after the arrests were made. This threw Canada into a virtual, albeit benign, dictatorship.
The two faces of North American Liberalism are best displayed by Trudeau's successor as Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, and by my nemesis former U.S. President Bill Clinton. On one side, we have displays of childish temper tantrums by Chrétien and Clinton. In Chrétien's little drama, we have the inevitable exasperation of all Liberals, from the unending sense of self-entitlement within the Homeless Movement.
Chrétien is seen with his hands around the throat of one of the New Democratic Party's best agent provocateurs. The Prime Minister's sunglasses give him more of an Italian mobster flair than the French hauteur which Trudeau carried off with such panache. Nonetheless, both men were letting the world know who was the boss of all bosses. "Just watch me" was reenacted by the tough little guy from Shawinigan, who once adopted the persona of a subservient lapdog in the presence of the autocratic Trudeau, under whom he served in several ministerial portfolios.
Clinton was caught in a lie and instead of simply admitting the truth, became what his political genius advisor Dick Morris forbade him to become: angry. That grievous error, I'm sure, troubled Clinton more than the veiled perjury game he played before a federal grand jury.
Oh well, after America's sexual revolution, the heart of that nation is a bit more forgiving of sexual lifestyles in general.
These are photos of one side of the Liberal's face. That Chrétien literally talks out of one side of his mouth doesn't mean that his right side doesn't know what his left side is doing.
The deeply left side of both faces of Chrétien and Clinton was shown when the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Red China, Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, showed up in North America and were awarded, with the President and Prime Minister's permission, a three-cornered, New England Patriot's cap and the classic cowboy hat of the Calgary Stampede, respectively.
By the way, the Rose brothers and Simard are doing quite well these days, so if any of you quicksand Marxists are worried about the treatment of your Communist brethren in Canada, have no fear. Canada, which worships at the altar of a state-sanctioned religion called "multiculturalism," was recently taken to task by political gadfly P.J. O'Rourke for being a land of terrorist-huggers. One of these fellows, maybe an angry mullah from Montreal or a Tamil Tiger from a Toronto-area riding, might run for Prime Minister someday.
Meanwhile, not long ago Terri Schiavo died of starvation and dehydration. Mao Ze Dong starved 30 million Chinese during his Great Leap Forward. Not one ounce of the waters of mercy were involved in that. However, Mao might have been saying to the world, "Just watch me!" That such a mentality has invaded the U.S. and Florida Supreme Courts is a dehydration of the American soul.
North America is a continent of the heart and not of the mind and its rigid ideologies. Even our religions -- after the Civil War, Industrial Revolution, Civil Rights Movement, Sexual Liberation and the Digital Revolution -- reflect a response of the heart and not of ideology. Let's not lose sight of this fact. If we embrace a religion of the Mind, the United Nations will send its troops into our cities with the same cold indifference that Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno sent an M-16-packing kidnap squad to toss refugee Elian Gonzales back into the arms of Fidel Castro.
Now it's not "Just watch me!" It's "Just watch us!" 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who has appeared in the landmark television series Law and Order, the mini-series Taken, the TV-movie The 4400 and Hitler Meets Christ, a surreal tragicomedy based on the actor's controversial New York stage play.
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