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Friday, October 10, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
The Sunflower State
A blooming flower is captivating, but every gardener knows that its beauty is dependent on the plant's strength and the fertility of its environment. Without sustenance, the blossom withers, the plant dies.
Education is Kansas' blossom, depending on a healthy economy to keep it alive and growing. That seems such a simple principle, yet it has been ignored by democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Docking.
While campaigning last week, Docking reiterated that he was making education his number one priority in the campaign for governor. His proposed program would give tax breaks to parents who invest in their children's education, arrange for higher teachers' salaries and a 100 percent tuition waiver for graduate assistants. Docking has also outlined a plan to increase parental involvement in their children's schools.
Docking won't make many more recommendations until the Kansas Legislature and Board of Regents complete a comprehensive study of the issue.
What more can be said than: "We need more money." A comprehensive statement, not a lot of study was needed to make it, but it's true. The only
problem will be to find that money — the food to feed the flower.
This year, the Democrats proposed to raise an additional $15 million in school aid. They could not, however, muster support for a tax increase — which was the only way to finance the program.
C'mon Tom, the heart of the problem is our depressed economy. Healthy industries pay hefty taxes. A glutted public treasury will solve the problems of lean allotments for education. Concentrate on restoring the economy and the rest will fall into place.
Where does Docking expect the money to come from? The economically strapped oil, aviation and agriculture industries? Never-never land? Or perhaps from somewhere over the rainbow?
Feed the roots, the flower grows.
Here at KU there is a group trying to find the answers to Kansas' economic doldrums: The KU Institute of Public Policy and Business Research. It is calling for Kansas universities to link their research to Kansas businesses. It is moving towards a solution.
Docking should drop the slogans and promises about education; those can wait until he proposes a way to pay the bills.
Beyond the memory limit
"If we do this, we will be, in effect, signing the death warrants of 500 men, women and children a year." — Sen. William Proxmire. D-Wis.
The Senate is buckling on auto safety — and we're not talking about seat belts here.
Offering the states the option to raise speed limits to 65 mph on rural stretches of interstate highway is offering them the chance to — as Proxmire aptly put it — sign blank death warrants for hundreds.
It's a big mistake.
It reveals the failure to rely on hindsight that is standard in America today. Ten years ago people cried for a solution to an oil crisis that almost crippled America, sent fuel prices into
It sends the wrong message to the fast crowd. It ignores all the good things about the 55 mph speed limit — things like saving lives, conserving a finite fuel resource and reducing air pollution. It shows an irresponsible disregard for the health and safety of thousands of Americans.
orbit and revealed our vulnerability to the political whims of Middle East sheiks. The decrease in the speed limit was a part of that solution. No, it's not the only reason there is an oil glut today, and one can fill his gas tank without emptying his wallet.
But changing the speed limit, even if it is on rural highways, is the next in a series of steps taken by the Reagan administration that have backed us away from energy conservation.
First went the tax credits on research of alternative fuels. Then the personal tax credits for individual family home conservation methods were eliminated. Next the Environmental Protection Agency's minimum mileage requirement was stripped, and now it's a speed limit hike.
Let's remember America. Remember the lines at the gas stations; remember the outrageous prices; most of all, remember the dead.
The color yellow
In the routine chitchat between plays, a television football analyst was asked about his yellow tie. "Didn't you know," he replied, "that yellow is the new power color?"
socks.
And so it is. It was reported recently that yellow fever has swept Wall Street, that everywhere you look there are yellow ties and blazers and yellow slacks and yellow
Why? It was explained that yellow is an aggressive color, yet friendly. Yellow is supposed to make you feel good about yourself. Yellow is for gogetters, yellow is for winners. And it is, as the analyst said, the "power color." That means if you want advice on what the stock market is going to do, ask the guy wearing a yellow tie.
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National press hoodwinked on Libya
White House credibility has been hurt by the current spate of stories that President Reagan and his top advisers approved a disinformation campaign against Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.
The reports have put Reagan and
Helen Thomas
UPI Commentary
against Gadhafi, even if it involves using the press," Shultz said.
Secretary of State George Shultz in the embarrassing position of having to publicly attest that they do not lie.
But while denying that there has been deliberate attempt to disseminate false information to the U.S. media, they are not reluctant to say that if it takes some "deception" to keep Gadhafi awake at night, well, that's all right.
"I don't believe in telling lies myself, but I don't have any problem using a little psychological warfare
Furthermore, he said "If I were a private citizen and I read about my government trying to confuse Gadhadi, I'd say, 'Gosh, I hope that's true.'"
Would Americans prefer that approach when the truth may be equally effective? The openness with which the administration acknowledges that it distorts and deceives foreign policy indicates a naive, and a lack of knowledge on how quickly the world communicates today.
Deputy White House press secretary Larry Speakes denies that any misinformation was passed on to the U.S. press with the reports in August that the United States and Libya were on a collision course, but he says, "no comment" when asked about misleading the foreign press. The White House seems to forget that when it comes to news it is one world.
In fact, it is the opposite. Those who are being misled are really the American people who read these reports.
And credibility is not a chameleon.
The White House does not explain how it intends to separate fact from fiction if it persists in sacrificing its credibility for a political end. It cannot and will not work. It never has in a free society. Presidents have lost their jobs because of a credibility gap that caught up with them, namely Lyndon B. Johnson in the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.
So who to believe? The president approved a National Security Council recommendation for a disinformation campaign against Gadhafi in hopes that it would scare him and encourage dissidents in Libya to move against him.
But the administration paid a price for making deception a weapon against Gadhafi. If the evidence is there, then the truth should be enough; tough statements from a
superpower would put a potential terrorist-sponsor on warning.
During the Kennedy administration, Pentagon spokesman Arthur Sylvester said the government had the right to lie in crises threatening the country. The outcry of protest then was even louder than it is today.
The United States has had a proud record of keeping people informed even in wartime. There may have been some shadings, some omissions, and a lot left for future historians to seek out, but basically there has been a sense that the people can be trusted with the facts.
More than anything, it is essential that the government must be believed and it cannot make strong distinctions between deception and disinformation without creating suspicion and distrust.
Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time."
That still holds true.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
Editorials across the nation The 'aggrieved' parties respond...
Rocky Mountain News Denver
Disinformation is a dirty business.
It consists of a government spreading lies or forgeries to harm another country and to deceive people at home or abroad. Its foremost practitioner is the Soviet Union.
Thus it is deeply disappointing to learn that on Aug. 14, President Reagan presided over a meeting at which it was decided to frighten Ooammar Gadhafi into thinking Libya was about to be attacked by the United States again and that he was threatened by a coup.
This disinformation aimed to prevent Gadhafi from sponsoring any more anti-American terrorism and to encourage his overthrow. The effect was to mislead the U.S. people and diminish the administration's credibility both here and overseas.
Certainly no U.S. administration should lie to, trick or mislead the public. Trust between the people and their leaders is essential to the proper working of democracy.
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Accusations that top White House officials planted false stories in the press to unnerve Libya's hateful dictator have generated predictable and contradictory denials from the administration. Yes, it is admitted, a disinformation campaign against Moammar Gadhaf began in August. But, it is claimed, the U.S. press wasn't tied in connection with this campaign. Malarkey.
This isn't the first administration to use the press for its own ends. But the Reagan White House has gone a good deal further than its predecessors by combining a policy of selective leaks with threats to prosecute journalists who use secret information that the administration doesn't want leaked. This contemptible shell-game is bad enough without adding to it a campaign of deliberate lies.
A government that backs its sensible policies by spreading lies may soon be pushing its unreasonable ones the same way.
The Detroit News
A hullabalo was brewing this weekend when it was disclosed that the Reagan administration used some disinformation techniques to keep Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi off balance.
The leaks were reportedly designed to convince Gadhafi that he might be subject to renewed American attack, though the administration had no plans to do so. The idea was to make the mad colonel of Tripoli vulnerable to a coup.
Now our colleagues in the press are in high dudgeon, claiming they have been used.
And apparently they (and we) have been. But c'mon guys. What kind of game do you think the government is playing? It's a dangerous world out there, and the stakes are high.
Several big papers, it's worth noting, were wise enough to spike their stories when they couldn't find confirmation. There's plenty of blame to go around here, and the White House doesn't appear to deserve all of it.
The Orlando Sentinel
Remember stories in August about how Col. Moammar Gadhafi was up to new terrorism and how that might bring U.S. forces swooping back down upon the Libyan's. It turns out that not much really was happening in Tripoli; the press had reported a pholi crisis.
But who was spreading this bad information? Officials in the White House and the CIA, said The Washington Post.
The paper's revelations underscore why government should not use journalists in campaigns to destroy the United States' enemies with falsehoods. Sowing lies through background briefings or through publishing deceptive articles and books does more than erode people's faith in the press. It undermines commitment to objective truth — something that separates this free society from those whose governments routinely cast unfavorable facts down the memory hole.
The greatest verbal gymnasts since Ike
Efforts by President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz to explain the disinformation campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi probably are the stuff of which satire is made.
Dick West
Columnist
A good satirist also might have had a field day with their rationalization of why a convicted Soviet spy was released in New York shortly after a U.S. journalist was freed in Moscow. But be wary of such compositions.
Blurb-writers and certain book critics are fond of asserting that some modern author or another is "the greatest satirist since Swift."
The authors in question may simply be the greatest satisist since Swift.
I have no knowledge, incidentally, that Jonathan Swift, the great English satirist, ever played an Indian lute.
The sitar virtuosos am I referring to here was named Ringo Swift, as I recall. 'Came from Liverpool, as I recall, and used to have a funny haircut. Played with a British combo. As I recall.
Satire, however, requires certain knowledge on the part of both reader and writer. It won't do to rely on a perhaps faulty memory.
You've got to know quite a bit about a subject in order to saturate it, and it also takes an amount of perception on the part of the reader.
When some writer satirized one of
his news conferences, those of us in the know immediately recognized that there wasn't a word of truth in it.
You should know, for instance, that President Eisenhower used to answer some questions in a circuitous manner, as though commenting on the Daniiloff case.
When I was a lad, I was delighted by Jonathan Swift's story of how the Lilliputians, a race of little people, tied down Dr. Gulliver, a normal-sized person.
In those days, I knew little about
When I later read that Swift originally wrote "Gulliver's Travels" as a satire of the political situation in England at the time (circa 1726), I was badly flummoxed.
Gulliver's voyages as a ship's doctor also took him to the lands of the Brobdingnags, the Yahoo and the Houyhnhmms, but those were satric, too.
18th century English politics, a situation that has changed very little over the years. I'm still badly fummoxed when it comes to relating Swift's classic to satire.
That is one of the reasons my own writing rarely rises, or sinks, to the level of satire. When writing about American politics, I try to stick to slapstick, or burlesque, and let it go at that.
It is not, I might add, that I lack the knowledge to be satirical. But I fear that you, the reader, might not be similarly informed.
I mean, you don't have to be very knowledgeable to appreciate the Marx Brothers, do you?
But have a go at satire and as sure as you're born some kid will assume it is fiction.
Or, worse yet, someone at the White House will take it literally.