Following up on the Tuesday post, “Witty Remarks By Stan Evans, RIP, at the MRC’s 2006 ‘DisHonors Awards,’” video of the late M. Stanton Evans serving as Master of Ceremonies a few years earlier for the Media Research Center’s very first “DisHonors Awards” in 1999.
Evans, who sadly passed away on Tuesday at age 80, delivered humorous reflections and quips about the politics of the time as host of the MRC event held on Thursday, December 9, 1999 which also featured Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Cal Thomas and Michael Reagan.
He assured the audience, at the Monarch Hotel in Washington, D.C., that “no liberals were actually injured in the production of this program” and relayed how “this evening has confirmed something that I like to call ‘Evans’ Law of Inadequate Paranoia.’”
Watch the nine minute highlight video for his explanation of those and other observations. (Thanks to the MRC’s Kristine Lawrence for extracting the video from a VHS tape.)
>> MRC’s Brent Bozell Mourns Loss of M. Stanton Evans <<
The post with video of his entertaining remarks at the MRC’s 2006 gala (“Witty Remarks By Stan Evans, RIP, at the MRC’s 2006 ‘DisHonors Awards’”) also had links to some online tributes to Evans. In a new post on National Review Online, John Fund noted: “Stan also became sort of a cult figure among conservatives for his mordant wit, which he often displayed as a master of ceremonies at conservative gatherings.”
An excerpt from Fund’s post:
I heard about the death at age 80 of Stan Evans — a founder of the modern conservative movement, an editor at National Review for 13 years, and the man who gave my own career a kick-start — at a media conference in Korea. At my breakfast table was Adam Clymer, the former chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times. By coincidence, he wrote the Times obituary of Stan that was published today.
Clymer is no conservative, but he said that in writing his book on the Panama Canal treaty fight, he discovered how important a figure Stan had been. “He was key to making the Panama Canal handover a rallying cry for conservatives,” he recalled. “The issue kept Reagan alive in the 1976 primaries against Ford, it helped Reagan win the presidency, and defeated so many Democratic senators in 1980 that the GOP won the Senate — and Democratic senators gave Reagan more deference in foreign policy because they saw what opposing him could mean.”
But that was only the beginning of Stan’s impact. As a founder of the Young Americans for Freedom, he was the author of its 1960 manifesto, the “Sharon Statement,” to this day one of the most concise and stirring statements of conservative principle ever written. It declared the Constitution “the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power.”
He was the author of ten books, and many of them had a major impact. Revolt on the Campus prefigured the campus unrest of the 1960s and outlined conservatism’s response to it. His biography of Joseph McCarthy made clear that, despite his many excesses, the senator had identified serious national-security weaknesses. And Stan’s 2012 book with Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, detailed those security breaches with solid, documentary evidence drawn from Soviet archives and other sources.
Stan also became sort of a cult figure among conservatives for his mordant wit, which he often displayed as a master of ceremonies at conservative gatherings. “The trouble with conservatives,” he once observed, “is that too many of them come to Washington thinking they are going to drain the swamp, only to discover that Washington makes a great hot tub.”...
