August 10, 2001 10:10 a.m.

have a little dream. It came to me as I was reading Li Shaomin’s account of being held in China over long months. (Li was one of those U.S. scholars the PRC has been rounding on.) Li recounted how the Communist security thugs taunted him and tried to break him. Taking his passport, they said, “This will do you no good. You may have an American passport, but you’re not a real American, and never will be. You were born in China, and you will always be Chinese.”

Okay, here’s my dream: President Bush goes before the cameras and says, “Li Shaomin and everyone like him are real Americans — as American as anybody — and they always will be, so keep your hands off them, you Communist SOB’s.”

A guy has to dream, and I have.

When I saw and read about Al Gore’s beard, I thought of one thing: Bob Bork. How so? Bork, of course, was disadvantaged by his beard during those awful confirmation hearings of 1987. Why? You sort of had to be there. Democrats and their supporters in the press liked to say that Bork’s beard was “scary,” adding to the general “scariness” of this nominee, who was a judicial conservative (or a constitutionalist, if you like). This got so bad that one of the senators was moved to ask, “Judge, how did you get that beard? People have been talking about it.” Bork, a little amused, a little perplexed, answered that he’d gone on vacation one summer — I believe it was a riverboat in France — and let it grow, to avoid the hassle of shaving. And he sort of liked it, or maybe his family did, so he kept it.

What a stupid country this is: Bork’s beard.

Anyway, Al Gore, too, went on a European vacation and decided to let his beard grow — but no one is saying, as far as I know, that this indicates he’s some nut-job who should be kept from power. (He is a nut-job who should be kept from power, but not for this reason.) Furthermore, aren’t we suppose to oppose something sometimes called “lookism”?

Yes, I realize the Bork nomination was 14 years ago and that it is time — “past time,” as political speechwriters like to say, obnoxiously — to “move on.” But I’m not. So sue me.

Okay, speaking of suits: I have recently been learning quite a bit about our national characteristic, litigiousness, and its effect on our health-care system. Nursing homes are pulling out of Florida and Texas, leaving the aged and sick with no place to go, or with many fewer places to go. For this and other reasons, I believe — for the first time — that tort reform has a chance of succeeding. Not because people, including politicians, will listen to our impeccably reasoned arguments, but because people — “real people” — are being hurt by the effects of tort claims, when they can’t do things like see a doctor or park their parents in a home. They, those aggrieved citizens, will squawk, and their pols will listen.

This has already started to happen in West Virginia, whose particular situation I wrote about the other week. The incumbent governor, Democrat Bob Wise, ran last November with the heavy backing of the trial bar. But he is now rather open to tort reform. How come? Because it’s not just doctors and insurers who are griping; they could gripe all day, and no one would care; there are too few of them, and they’re easy to demonize as rich and greedy. No, Wise is starting to wise up because plain folks — the patients of doctors, and the constituents of governors — are starting to yell. Which is good, needless to say.

Did you see the item — I caught it on Drudge — about how J.C. Penney had to pull a shirt that read, “Home Skooled”? The shirt also depicted a broken-down mobile home. The message these people wanted to send — who are they, anyway? — was that home schooling leaves children ignorant, and is probably practiced by the poor, uncaring, and degenerate.

There are several odd things about this item, one of which is: That shirt was so very far from the truth (as long as we’re going to stereotype). Home-schooled kids, in my experience, are smart as whips, or certainly very well educated, outpacing those who are schooled in other ways. They’re always winning local spelling bees and other academic contests. A more accurate, more defensible T-shirt — though one equally mean — would have read, “Public Skooled” (and would have pictured a tattered, embattled school building). Ya know?

When the Democrats made a little noise over those Mexican trucks, some Republicans thought they’d make a little hay by suggesting, or outright charging, that the Democrats were “anti-Mexican.” This, of course, was foul play, as everyone said, but you couldn’t help feeling just a little frisson of satisfaction, in that the Republicans had given the Democrats a taste of their own awful medicine — for the first time, as far as I can recall. Ya know (again)?

Please tell me that you’ve noticed this: that Democratic pundits are always laughing at Trent Lott for having been a college cheerleader. They love to insert this fact, to fondle this part of the Republican leader’s past. I think it’s a bit out of character for them: ridiculing a man for having been a cheerleader instead of, say, a middle linebacker. It is almost — just almost — homophobic, with its insinuation of prissiness. “Ha, ha, Trent was a cheerleader, the big girlie!”

I once took a vow never, ever to mention Maureen Dowd, either in print or private conversation. (This is related, just bear with me.) But I’d like to comment on a recent column of hers. (I had sworn off reading her column, but I have broken that rule, too.)

(By the way, a friend of mine, ten years ago, declared a personal moratorium on reading or watching anything having to do with race in America. He did it for his blood pressure, and his mental well-being. And he has never looked back — best move he ever made, he says.)

Anyway, in this recent column Dowd did her usual thing of taking off hysterically on Republicans. Sample: “As W. and Uncle Dick went about strip-mining the nation, allowing arsenic in the water and turning Alaska into a gas station, Democrats assumed Mr. Gore would lead the opposition.” Strip-mining the nation. Allowing arsenic in the water. Turning Alaska into a gas station. Does James Carville talk this way? Does Paul Begala? “[Gore] was the champion of Kyoto and author of a chicken-little polemic warning of an ‘ecological Kristallnacht’ and ‘wasteland’ that looks mild compared to the toxic dreams of the Houston Oilers. But he was too busy licking his wounds and calculating his comeback to respond when the Earth really was In the Balance.” Does James Carville talk this way? Does Paul Begala? Oh, I already asked that.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to mention any of this. What I wanted to say was that Dowd wrote that Tom Daschle, the new majority leader, had “de-pom-pommed Mississippi cheerleader Trent Lott.” Ha, ha, ha — for the 4 millionth time. Quick editorial point: No conservative could do this to a liberal politician and get away with it. If a right-winger — Rush, G. Gordon Liddy, Tom DeLay — tried to do it to a figure on the left, especially one whose sneakers may not exactly be like anvils, he would be denounced as a McCarthyite, a homophobe, a troglodyte, a sexist, a racist . . . why a racist? Oh, just because.

The other day, I was checking out the op-ed page of the Washington Post — an excellent page — and saw a column by Jackson Diehl headed, “What About Latin America?” “Ah,” I thought. “Maybe he’ll point out that Senate Democrats are holding up Otto Reich’s nomination to be the relevant assistant secretary of state, and the nomination of John Negroponte, a veteran Latin America hand, to be U.N. ambassador.” Well, he did point this out: like this: “Bush’s insistence on sticking with Otto Reich, favorite son of the Florida Cuban community, as his choice for State Department assistant secretary despite stiff Senate resistance probably ensures that that key position will remain vacant for months.”

This was predictable as the sunrise, I guess: the impasse as Bush’s fault for “insisting on sticking with Otto Reich,” not the Democrats’ fault for sticking it to Otto Reich, who is superbly qualified, not to mention the president’s choice for the job. Note, too, how the columnist described Reich: “favorite son of the Florida Cuban community.” First, what’s wrong with that? The “Florida Cuban community” is an immensely admirable one, having suffered under Communism, risked their lives, and then gone on to thrive in America, as a model immigrant group (which they are hated for, of course).

Second, Reich is a lot more than this community’s “favorite son”: He served in the Army (in Panama); he received a masters degree in Latin American studies, with a concentration in economic development, from Georgetown; he was head of the Latin America division of the Agency for International Development; he was ambassador to Venezuela; he was a U.S. representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva — unpaid; he has been a private consultant for Latin America business, and so on.

Reich’s understanding of the issues of the world is very keen. His father was a Jewish refugee from Austria, who found haven in Cuba. The father’s parents were murdered in the Holocaust. Otto’s family, in Cuba, welcomed Castro’s victory with open arms — but then, when it was clear that Castro was a totalitarian, Otto’s father figured he would have to flee again, this time to the United States. Otto Reich is an immigrant American with political evil in his background who simply hates tyranny. Hates it. Doesn’t care where it comes from: the left or the right. The boot on the human throat is the same, whether red or black.

Back to Jackson Diehl: He goes on to write, “Reich is just one of five veterans of the Nicaraguan contra wars whom Bush now has appointed to senior positions at State, Defense, the National Security Council, the Organization of American States and the United Nations. As these cold warriors refight the ideological battles of the 1980s with congressional Democrats and NGOs, the serious but quite different Latin American problems of 2001 are dissed — or ignored.” It is astonishing — or rather, it isn’t — that Diehl could think it is the Republicans who insist on “refighting the ideological battles of the 1980s.” Actually, it is their Democratic opponents who insist on this refighting, probably because they are bruised and haunted by how wrong they were in opposing Reagan’s policies. The Republicans, on the contrary, are ready to “move on,” to handle the business of today. They are interested neither in refighting nor in gloating — although I, personally, wish they’d do a little more gloating.

If the Bushies don’t get on the stick, they’re going to lose this nomination, a nomination they should be enormously proud of, and protective of, and zealous about. You know who’s going to have to holler a little? Secretary of State Colin Powell. Everybody loves him, and he should spend a little bit of his political-love capital for this nominee. “Get in the pulpit,” as ex-secretary of state George Shultz said to me about what Powell should do. At this point, I fear, this may be the only way.

A reader sent me a marvelous quote that comes from the actor Harrison Ford: “The greatest threat to human rights is economic opportunity.” If only all American leftists talked this openly!

Finally, consider an item that struck me as both hilarious and sad. Back in the ’80s — or was it the ’90s? — there were two Coreys in Hollywood, known, of course, as The Two Coreys: Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. They were co-stars in The Lost Boys, among other movies. One day recently, the New York Post reported that Corey Feldman had checked into rehab. But no, they had the wrong Corey: It was Haim. Corey Feldman’s manager called in to say, “Corey Feldman has been sober for the past nine years.”

Isn’t that hilarious? As well as sad? Am I wrong?

No, one other quickie, though I’m back with more Impromptus on Monday: A newspaper in Charleston, W.V., the Daily Mail, reprinted my article in the current National Review, on the West Virginia “doctors’ crisis.” Initially, on their website, they printed my name — my byline — as “Jay Nordingler” (not “Nordlinger”). I don’t know if this mistake made it into the actual newspaper, but it was quickly corrected on the website.

Anyway, that’s not important. It’s just that, you know the old cliché, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right”? Well, it’s true. All of my life, it had been a rather empty statement for me. But now I grasp the stark truth of it. Never have I had more respect for a cliché — especially because “Nordlinger,” however it is misspelled, is always ridiculous. I mean, just straight, correct “Nordlinger” is bad enough.

No, no, one more: about clichés. I think the dumbest, least true of all time are 1) “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (Golfers know what I’m talking about. If you want me to explain, I will, later.) And 2) “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” (You almost always can, but every now and then you can’t, which is why we mustn’t do it at all, I guess. But still: You almost always can, and “Don’t give me any bullsh**, you know it’s true,” as I once heard Rodney Dangerfield say. Ah, Rodney: What a magnificent man.)