Samuel Francis sounds like a Clintonoid in his column “Will Europe Survive?” (Principalities & Powers, August).  He chides the few Republicans who sought the truth about the serious crimes allegedly committed by the Clintons as “conspiracy mongers,” while avoiding such major policy issues as immigration and affirmative action.

While Dr. Francis is correct to criticize Republican leaders for abandoning conservative policies and platforms, he falls into a trap that our power establishment loves: Debate and win on the issues, while forgetting about any criminality or wrongdoing; or, as George W. Bush has said repeatedly, “Let’s move on.”

Dr. Francis is dangerously wrong to trivialize felonies committed by members of our federal government.  If there is credible, corroborative, and substantial evidence that our rulers have committed high crimes, they must be investigated and, if need be, prosecuted and punished.

As damage control, the Clintonoids yelled “conspiracy mongers!” virtually every time an allegation was made against them, epitomized by the former First Lady’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.”  How ironic that Dr. Francis seems to echo that propaganda.

The centrist-liberal Economist said this regarding the Clinton camorra: “It is true . . . that a peculiar pattern of suicides and violence surrounds people connected to the Clintons or their associates.  It may be no more than coincidence, but it prompts questions” (“America Needs Your Verdict,” July 19, 1994).

Does Samuel Francis believe the Economist is mad with “labyrinthine” conspiracy theories that normally come from Dan Burton and Chris Ruddy?

        —Kenneth Reynolds
The Bronx, NY

Allow me to note my profound agreement with the perceptive as well as the understandably sarcastic interpretation of European events offered by Samuel Francis in his August commentary.  Dr. Francis is right to underscore the utterly outrageous misrepresentation of European politics that has emanated from the American press.  The fevered attempts to identify the violence committed by Muslim immigrants against synagogues and Jewish businesses in Europe with European critics of immigration involve a lie of staggering proportions, one repeatedly encountered in news reporting in the United States and in Europe.  It is a lie worthy of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda.  Equally odious has been the practice, engaged in by Jewish organizational leaders (particularly Abe Foxman in the United States and Daniel Luzzatti in Italy), of linking what is clearly Islamic antisemitism to an increasingly vague medieval Christian or New Testament legacy.  Dr. Francis states his justified opinion that European nationalists such as Jean-Marie Le Pen stand for “exactly the opposite” of the politics pursued by Islamicists and their leftist multicultural enablers.  In this case, pointing out the obvious may be like spitting into the wind.  The Islamicization of Europe and multicultural politics go hand in hand; both require intricate but palpable falsehoods to blame antisemitism on European civilization.

        —Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown, PA

Dr. Francis Replies:

By all means, as Mr. Reynolds writes, “If there is credible, corroborative, and substantial evidence that our rulers have committed high crimes, they must be investigated and, if need be, prosecuted and punished.”  I do not disagree in the slightest.  But it speaks volumes that, out of my two-page column discussing mainly the current European politics of immigration, Mr. Reynolds managed to tease out and concentrate on a single sentence criticizing conservatives for their obsession with the crimes, sex lives, and moral turpitude of the Clintons.  The two points that Mr. Reynolds seems to miss are that, one, the preoccupation of the right with discrediting the Clintons morally and legally effectively drove out most of the more serious political issues with which the Clintons could have been challenged, leaving the right with virtually no substantive issues to talk about at all, and, two, this was probably a deliberate tactic of the conservative and GOP leadership, so they could avoid taking firm positions on the issues I mentioned and allow conservative support for immigration control, economic nationalism, anti-interventionism, etc., to wither.  Because of his own apparent preoccupation with the Clintons, in other words, Mr. Reynolds still doesn’t get it.  We can survive the odd crook and sex fiend in high office; we cannot survive an equally corrupt right that refuses to define and engage its political rivals on substantive public issues.