THE BELL CURVE -- joseph n. bell

Hey, hey, our very own cold warriors, Chris and Dana, have fired up the

commie-busting business again.

Things have been pretty quiet on that front since the Russkies and the

Berlin Wall went belly-up. Dana has been busying himself with a kind of

half-hearted effort to demonize art in America as a subversive gallery of

dirty pictures and take away the lunch money the government provides in

its support. This got him some public attention for awhile but never

really filled the cavernous gap left by the demise of the commies.

Then something quite wonderful happened. In discharging his congressional

duties, Chris found the commies again. Honest. Real commies that had been

under our noses all along. So, armed with Chris’s discovery, the boys

came back to Newport Beach and separately told their Republican friends

and supporters what they were on to: that if we weren’t careful and

didn’t listen to Chris and Dana, we would one day -- sooner than any of

us expect -- be fighting for our way of life against ... hold on, now,

it’s coming ... THE CHINESE.

Dana was here just a few weeks ago, taking pro forma shots at government

funding of the arts and, of all things, alleged global warming. But his

heart was clearly on commie-busting.

According to a Pilot reporter, he said, with a fine flair for history,

that America’s current threat is Communist China, which “is what the

Japanese were in the 1920s and 1930s.” He then compared his vision to

that of Winston Churchill. No matter how you feel about his logic, you’ve

got to admire his chutzpah.

Chris brought us a similar message several months earlier, shortly after

the release of a report on Chinese espionage from a congressional

committee he chaired. Back home to applause for his new celebrity, Chris

told the Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce, again according to a Pilot

reporter, that “the Clinton administration has forsworn a policy of

anti-communism” in order to coddle a “police state” whom we should

“engage fully in ways designed to change that.”

I’m not sure what that means, although it is a clarion call if ever I’ve

heard one. But there have been some unfortunate challenges that the boys

have so far simply brushed aside as that old devil liberalism trying to

mute the urgency of their vision.

Take the Cox committee report, for example. After the first reaction of

praise for pointing out some clear deficiencies in our security

apparatus, it became more and more apparent that the committee report

went far beyond the conclusions supported by the evidence it turned up.

For example, Robert S. Norris, military analyst with the Natural

Resources Defense Council, wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times’ Sunday

opinion section: “To suggest, as the Cox report does, that Chinese

weapons are mere copies (‘on a par with our own’) of U.S. weapons is

absurd ... The lurid headlines about China as a dangerous nuclear threat

are ammunition for some initial salvos of the 2000 campaign.” At the same

time, the New York Times, originally favorable, offered second thoughts

that the Cox report “went beyond the evidence” to support its claims.

Dana does the committee one better. He ignores the evidence. He clearly

is not going to let facts get in the way of his Churchillian vision. Such

facts -- detailed in the Norris article and available in the public

domain -- as the U.S. has 10,000 nuclear weapons, of which 7,000 are of

intercontinental range; the Chinese have about two dozen ICBMs similar to

the Titan II, which was retired 20 years ago. The U.S. has 18

ballistic-missile submarines; the Chinese have one that is reportedly too

unsafe to venture beyond its regional waters. There are no comparable

Chinese MX missiles, B-2 bombers or Trident submarines.

It would be interesting to hear Dana’s evidence that the Chinese have any

programs underway to remedy the disparities noted above.

All of this reminds me of Orange County’s glory days when my congressman,

Jimmy Utt, was constantly on the alert for signs that the commies were on

the march. His newsletters always had the urgency of a dispatch from the

front, and -- like Dana and Chris -- he kept a constant wary eye on the

Chinese.

Once he reported that the Chinese communists were assembling an army in

Mexico that would join with a “large contingent of barefoot Africans”

engaged in a United Nations military exercise in Georgia to take over the

United States. Tom Kuchel, then a Republican senator from California,

reported that his office alone received thousands of letters from people

frightened by Utt’s nonsense.

Perhaps we’re a little more sophisticated now. I’m not sure. But I guess

the thing that disturbs me most about this new fighting front Chris and

Dana have opened up is that I’m actually looking forward to the

possibility that Bob Dornan will take on Dana in the Republican primary

next spring.

I didn’t think there was anything that could move me to welcome Dornan

back to public life. But now I’ve found a reason. They might eliminate

each other and we would miraculously be represented in Washington by

someone who has moved into the new millennium instead of trying to warm

up the old millennium’s Cold War.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a Santa Ana Heights resident. His column runs

Thursdays.