Crockett and the patriots.

Crockett and the Patriots

SEVERAL DOZEN Democrats have now made thepoint that it's possible to love this country every bit as much as Ollie North does without supporting the Nicaraguan resistance. What we want to know is, Can you love this country as much as Ollie North does while supporting George Crockett?

In our July 31 issue, J. Michael Waller and JosephSobran took note of the Democrats' sharp leftward shift, the clearest sign of which is their choice of Crockett, for whom "fellow-traveler' would be too coy a term, to chair the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs. The post gives Crockett all sorts of influence over American foreign policy, along with access to sensitive classified information.

Others are noticing too. John Rees, writing in theJune issue of Conservative Digest, takes the Crockett case as a clear sign that the ideological Left has taken over the Democratic Party. So does David Brock in the August American Spectator. Both add plenty of confirming data to the Waller-Sobran piece; there is apparently an ocean of information still waiting to be reported.

Crockett's career warrants a book, not just an article.His ties with Communists and front groups defy cataloguing. In 1949, as a lawyer for Communist Party leaders charged with advocating the overthrow of the U.S. Government, he told the jury that "the Communist Party is in truth and in fact the conscience of America' (even as Crockett himself is now "the conscience of Congress,' according to Ann F. Lewis of Americans for Democratic Action).

During the Sixties he was reportedly a registered agent for Castro's Cuba. The Party newspaper hailed his landslide re-election last year as "particularly significant.' And he has used his chairmanship to advance the cause of Communism, especially in Nicaragua: He invited the parents of Benjamin Linder to testify before his subcommittee, and uncritically accepted the Sandinista account of how Linder had died.

"I don't think I'm any more liberal than the majorityof the full Foreign Affairs Committee,' Crockett has said. He may have a point there. It's notable that the chairman of the corresponding subcommittee in the Senate is Christopher Dodd, hailed by the Sandinistas as a "friend of our revolution.'

Crockett may also be no more liberal than CongressmenDavid Bonior, John Conyers, and Ted Weiss, D.C. Delegate Walter Fauntroy, and Senator Claiborne Pell, all of whom endorsed or marched in the National Mobilization demonstration in April, among whose sponsors was the Communist Party. True, Ollie North didn't join them, but we each express our love for this country in our own way.

One thing is clear, though: If George Crockett hadshown half as much sympathy for Reaganism as he's shown for Communism, the Democrats would never have given him that chairmanship.