Ideology

IFIND IT amazing how deeply ideological a few Daily News letter writers are. Ideologues look at the world in a certain way and try to shape everything to fit that view. When it pertains to politics and politicians they view the issues and candidates through partisan lenses without looking at the facts. Donna DiGiacomo: What are your thoughts on President Clinton pardoning that unrepentant tax cheat Marc Rich? This guy was indicted for evading $48 million in federal taxes.

Secretary of Education William Bennett likes a good fight. He doesn't flinch at telling schools how to teach, parents how to raise their children and Democratic presidential hopefuls how to run their campaigns. He even dabbles in foreign policy by announcing how wonderful the Contras are. But Bennett's current battle with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is a dangerous exercise in right-wing ideology that may wind up hurting millions of young people. Koop has been the federal government's only straight talker on acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Acel Moore will continue to be perplexed by President Reagan's enormous popularity and dismayed by the growing number of black conservatives (Op-ed Page, July 31). There is a basic flaw in his ideology that keeps his thinking mired in the injustices of the past and prevents him from understanding the realities of the present. At the core of his misconception is the notion that civil rights legislation was intended to ensure not only equal opportunity, but economic parity as well.

The evasive reaction of many British Muslims to the July 7 bombings in London will strike Americans as depressingly familiar. In past decades, explosions of criminal violence in the United States were rationalized as the inevitable products of racism and poverty. The solution, Americans were told by their leaders, was more understanding and more government money. Such therapies didn't work here, and they won't work there. The London-based Financial Times provided this bit of clucking context for the four men who killed more than 50 people: "immigrant families . . . often carry with them difficult memories of a colonial past that hampers integration.

IDEOLOGY An Introduction By Terry Eagleton Verso. 242 pp. $59.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper In a society that considers Dick Tracy a major cultural figure, Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) naturally remains obscure. Yet his legacy arguably overshadows that of the two-way wrist radio. Back in 1796, this aristocratic French philosophe coined the word ideology to describe what he called the general science of ideas. Agreeing with Enlightenment rationalists that all knowledge meant knowledge of ideas, Tracy sought to be a "Newton of the science of thought.

Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak, the party's nominee for Senate, Monday called for a new era of pragmatism in government to help restore public trust in American leadership. In remarks prepared for delivery to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, Sestak said that it is time for reason, and clear "benchmarks," in formulating policy rather than ideology. "We owe the public what any private investor could expect: concrete proposals, clear expectations, an honest accounting of costs, and straightforward assessment of the risks," Sestak said in the prepared remarks.

The corpse of the Dukakis campaign is not yet cold, and the spin doctors are already writing elaborate postmortems. For the next few weeks, you will hear the Dukakis swoon attributed to one aspect or another of what Democratic Sen. Terry Sanford has already called "the worst-managed campaign of this century" - the fuzzy ads, the shifting themes, the fatal passivity in the face of Republican demagoguery. "They blew a sure thing," a Democratic national committeeman groused to the Baltimore Sun. There is something to these explanations - they may have padded Bush's lead - but they miss the point.

I must strenuously object to the June 18 editorial on U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Antonin Scalia, "Merit plus conservatism mark nominees to court. " The Inquirer states "excellence is the Senate's proper focus, not ideology. " Unfortunately, ideology, thrust into the spotlight by this nomination to the Supreme Court, must enter into the equation. Under the Reagan administration, an unprecedented attempt has been undertaken to convert the court into a political arm of an extremist agenda, which will, if permitted, damage the very fabric of our constitutional policy.

Two misconceptions are deployed every time a nomination is made for the Supreme Court: 1. The "advice and consent" of the Senate is limited to the professional qualifications of the nominee, not to his views. 2. The President is free to appoint people congenial to his views, so long as the nominees are competent professionally. We have here a double standard, with the President able to consider ideology, and the Senate unable to. The Constitution says nothing of the standards by which either party is to act - which means, at the least, that it does not propose different standards.

At about 7 a.m. Monday, the bulletin went out over the Associated Press wire service: Vice President Gore wanted Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman to be his running mate on the Democratic ticket. Within hours, Republican opposition researchers pounced. In their exegesis of Lieberman's record, Gore's new partner was ideologically closer to Texas Gov. George W. Bush than to the boss. After all, said the GOP spinners, Lieberman had supported taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools, backed limitations on lawsuits against corporations, and was once open to the idea of partially privatizing the Social Security system - all positions at odds with Gore's.

While listening to an NPR report out of Moore, Okla., last week, I was genuinely shocked. Not by the scale of the devastation or the tenacity of people who have grown stoically accustomed to the damage tornados can do, but by a political sentiment that, in almost any other era, would not have been surprising at all. Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican who lives in the very neighborhood that was overwhelmed, was talking about a call he received from President Obama....

By Gregory J. Sullivan The March 11 issue of the New Yorker contains a long profile of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by staff writer Jeffrey Toobin. The article is in many respects an embarrassing love letter from Toobin to the jurist. Nevertheless, in its muddled discussion of constitutional matters, the article ("Heavyweight: How Ruth Bader Ginsburg has moved the Supreme Court") shows how ideology in our basic law rots what federal appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III has identified as "the most basic and honorable of all judicial traditions, that republican virtue of judicial restraint.

OK, so now what happens? We'll soon learn whether President Obama's resounding Electoral College victory buys him some good will on Capitol Hill - or whether he's destined to endure more gridlock, thanks to an election that once again revealed an ideologically fractured nation. On the one hand, Republicans should be suitably humbled by what occurred on Tuesday night. Obama became only the second Democrat in history (joining Franklin D. Roosevelt) to win two presidential races with more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

There are two ways to run against President Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas. The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth - all achieved at a price of another $5 trillion of accumulated debt. The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama's Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: "You didn't build that.

From the day in 2010 that President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a legal fever gripped much of the country. Was the "individual mandate" — the requirement to buy insurance if you weren't already covered, a key pillar of the law — constitutional? Would a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees toss it out, no matter what? You know how that fever finally broke. In a 5-4 decision that surprised both sides, Chief Justice John Roberts ditched his fellow conservatives to conclude that Congress and the President acted within their authority, not under the Commerce Clause, but because the penalty for violating the mandate was permissible as a tax. Within hours, the body politic was gripped again, this time with a fever bound to last till Election Day — or well beyond — over a role Roberts disowned: weighing the law's "wisdom or fairness.

CAIRO - The Muslim Brotherhood is trying to maneuver its way between its fierce anti-Israel ideology and the realities of governing as it ascends to leadership in Egypt for the first time in its history, while facing the key question of how to deal with the country's peace treaty with the Jewish state. The fundamentalist group's stance on the accord - opposition but not renunciation - is a telling sign of its broader style of politics. It can play down its hard-line doctrine in favor of short-term pragmatism as it looks to the long term, leaves its options open and engages in a degree of double-talk to pave the way. The stance could also reflect the group's own evolution as its new political party, whose members will be the ones actually involved in governing, gradually has to distinguish itself from the hard line of the Brotherhood itself, an 83-year-old organization whose leadership worked for decades in a hive-like secrecy because of state repression.

Sometimes rules are a good thing Gov. Corbett is right in wanting to privatize liquor stores, but wrong to say "History has shown - as it always will - that the people, not government bureaucrats, know best how to live their lives" ("$1.6B expected if liquor stores sold," Wednesday). Did the people who resisted requiring seat belts in cars know best? Is the government wrong to restrict where people can smoke? On the other hand, government prohibition of alcohol clearly was a big mistake.

EARLIER THIS WEEK, Mayor Nutter announced that he would be adding nationally recognized author Lorene Cary to the city's School Reform Commission. As expected, many found the move to be curious. After all, such commissions typically comprise university administrators, political connects, and private-sector power brokers. Although the mayor's choice may have been unorthodox, he couldn't have picked a better person for the slot. Lorene Cary is one of the most principled leaders in the city.

On Friday, I delivered the keynote address at a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters in Chicago, the people who own, run, and program the nation's talk-radio stations. And unlike the spontaneity required to work in the business daily, this invitation afforded me plenty of time to plan what I wanted to say. I started by tracing my career path back to the old WWDB-FM (96.5), where the lineup of talkers then included Irv Homer, Frank Ford, Dominic Quinn, and Bernie Herman.

OSLO, Norway - Norway casts it as the isolated act of a lone-wolf terrorist whose boasts of a far-flung network of anti-Muslim warriors were the fantasies of a deranged mind. European officials at an emergency counterterror meeting see a continent-wide threat from right-wing extremists amid mounting Islamophobia and warn of possible copycats. Two visions of the Norway atrocity emerged Thursday as Europe gropes for answers following the massacre that claimed 78 lives. The twin attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik have stirred questions in Europe about whether authorities have neglected the threat of right-wing extremists in their push to crack down on Islamist terror groups after 9/11.