The racists recoil

The lynching of Jim Watt marks a turning point in the way the media rule the country: he was not accused falsely; he was not accused at all. Not one of the lynch mob's shrill voices denied that Watt's coal commission included a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple; his crime was saying so.

Thomas Sewell's skin color does not show in his writings; what the liberal racists have done for him is imply that he sits in Stanford to fill the quota (to "accomplish the goals" in Newspeak). Not all women consider themselves so inferior that they cannot find fulfillment without coercive legislation; but Maureen Reagan, hired to "close the gender gap" by boasting of women on coal commissions and one of the first to condemn Watt, feels the need to aid all those poor women who do not have a daddy in the White House.

There are Jews, though evidently not in the New York Times, who do not consider their Jewishness an embarrassing affliction. As for cripple, it is an Oldspeak word from the days when underdeveloped was backward, the underprivileged were poor, and PLO fighters were terrorists; in those days cripples were less handicapped because they were supported by genuine sympathy and effective help, not exploited by operators building departments of "human resources."

Watt's unpardonable sin was breaking the fundamental law of the individual-rights abolishers: Racism must be practiced, but not mentioned. Note well, and remember, the self-hating racists who recoiled from their own work.

The lynching of Jim Watt, the Interior Secretary who set aside more wilderness area than any of his predecessors, is a setback for the environment. His successor's hands will be tied even tighter by futile efforts to placate the media, while his critical post has been abandoned: not to Jean Kirkpatrick, but to another State Department creature smelling of Kissingerish compromise.

The now famous coal commission may be further "broadened" by bringing in a left-handed Hispanic; it is less likely that it will at long last undo the Carter administration's virtual prohibition of mining coal on billions of idle acres in the West.