A
MORALITY TALE
I
mean, here is a man who clearly foresaw the horrific consequences
of the Kosovo war, and could still bring himself to goonishly
proclaim it "a victory for morality." In a speech
to the fighting feminists of "Emily's List," what is in effect
the Woman's Division of the DNC, the Gore admitted that
"our
celebration and sense of victory is tempered only by the sober
awareness that there will also be difficult days ahead because
this is an area that has a lot of conflict and fresh emotional
as well as physical wounds."
AL
GORE'S MORAL BLINDNESS
That
those wounds were inflicted by NATO's warplanes, and now by
our noble allies in the KLA, is not something that the robotic
Gore is capable of admitting: he simply is not programmed
for it. As KLA cadre launch rocket and grenade attacks against
disarmed Serbian civilians, and NATO presides over the vicious
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by fanatical Albanian nationalists,
it is clear that the Kosovo war was a cynical powerplay, a
war crime masquerading as a noble crusade. The rationale for
the war turned out to be a gigantic lie manufactured out of
whole cloth by an administration that has developed the art
of lying into a fine art. A "victory for morality"? Only by
the depraved standards of the Clintonians, for whom no inversion
is too boldly obscene. If Gore is elected President, the moral
corruption that infuses and perverts even the language will
spread and blossom in spectacularly ugly ways. The infection
will manifest itself in a particularly virulent (and dangerous)
form in US foreign policy.
A
THEORY OF RELATIVITY
In
researching this column, I am just now beginning to understand
the appeal of John McCain's posturing plasticity, to see why
and how he recruited so many enablers to his shameless orgy
of self-deification. I am getting a glimpse of how normally
intelligent people would be willing to discount McCain's utterly
ersatz and essentially empty faux-"populism," and surrender
themselves to the mindless joys of a cult of personality.
For only by looking very closely at such politicians as Gore
can one can fully understand how and why the McCain myth acquired
such fervent believers. At least with McCain, it is clear
what you are you getting: a dangerously unpredictable and
even volatile personality, who could explode at any moment
– and, as President, quite possibly take the rest of
us with him. But with Gore the danger is less obvious –
and, in a sense, more ominous.
SHOPPING
AROUND
It
is all too easy to believe the
contention of Senator Alan Simpson, made recently on CNBC"s
"Hardball," that during the Senate debate over the Gulf War,
Gore "shopped" his vote around on the basis of which side
would give him a speaking slot closest to prime time. In the
culture of celebrity, it isn't what you say but how many people
hear you say it. The politics of celebrity aren't much better.
According to Simpson, the conversation went like this:
Gore:
'How much time will you give me?''
Dole:
''How much time did you get from the other side?''
Gore:
''Seven minutes."
Dole:
''I'll give you 15 minutes."
Simpson:
"And I tellya what, Senator – I'll throw in five minutes of
my time for good measure. Howsa 'bout it?"
Gore:
''Let me think about it."
ANGLING
FOR PRIME TIME
Speaking
of it afterward, Simpson, a man of the old school, could hardly
contain his disgust: '"If you are talking about who people
are, and about their character,'' he said, ''I never saw such
a thing happen with anybody else." Yes, Senator, but you knew
enough to throw your five minutes into the pot, now didn't
you? At any rate, none of this is hard to imagine: what is
hard to imagine is how Simpson and Dole could have cooked
up such an elaborate story all on their own; and certainly
it has the ring of truth to it. Can't you just see old Al
Gore sidling up to Bob Dole and Simpson in the Senate cloakroom,
angling for a little prime time?
FLOWERS
OF EVIL
To
have an opportunist as slimy and unprincipled as Gore coiled
in the Oval Office means a calculated use of American power
to enrich his corporate allies and serve the interests of
every foreign lobbyist in Washington. With foreign money pouring
into the coffers of the Democratic National Committee, and
not only from the mysterious Orient, this administration has
been in hock to its overseas patrons ever since. Whether in
return for cold hard cash, or the political support of hyphenated
Americans who lobby for the interests of the old country,
this administration has shamelessly pursued a foreign policy
of America Last, if Ever, utterly without shame. With Gore,
we can expect more of the same – times two-hundred.
THE
COLOMBIAN CONNECTION
Just
look at the example of Colombia, where the US is being slowly
dragged into a three-way civil war between leftist guerrillas,
paramilitary "death squads," and the Colombian government
– with all players, including the government,
benefiting from the traffic in cocaine, the country's number
one export. Gore, and a number of the Clintonians, including
corporate oligarch Steve Case of AOL-Time-Warner, who has
a big
investment in Colombia, and who is one of the biggest
friends of Andres Pastrana's regime among corporate executives,
have taken a major interest in the Colombian crisis. Gore
has long been a key link in the Colombian connection.
MY
FRIEND, ERNESTO
Back
in 1995, he appeared at a conference of the Western hemisphere's
political leaders, and declared
that "the drug traffickers shall not prevail. They will be
defeated. We can applaud the work of those like President
[Ernesto] Samper and Defense Minister [Fernando] Botero of
Colombia, who are standing up to traffickers, often at tremendous
personal risk, demonstrating personal courage." Less than
a year later, Botero had squealed on Samper, and revealed
that this paragon of Clintonian virtue had been on the take
all along. His entire campaign had been planned and financed
by the Cali drug cartel from the very beginning – and,
what's more, US government officials were fully cognizant
of this fact early on. According
to PBS's Charles Krause, they suspected Samper was a front
for the drug lords in 1994, when he was inaugurated: yet there
was Gore, a year later, holding up Samper as a model to Latin
America. A few months after Gore publicly embraced his friend
Ernesto, Botero gave his damning testimony – corroborated
by Samper's campaign manager as well as the campaign treasurer.
With DEA agents swarming all over that country, in addition
to America's other intelligence capabilities, it is difficult
to believe that the Vice President was not at least aware
of – if not fully briefed – on the investigation
into a man he held up as paragon before the assembled leaders
of the New World.
OCCIDENTAL,
THE RAINFOREST, AND AL
As
the
epitome of post-millennial vulgarity and hypocrisy, Al
Gore has no equal. Here is a man who constantly prates about
the inviolability of the rain-forests, dresses in earthtones
and invokes the pious bromides of the new Earth religion.
Yet he sits on the board of a company that has seized the
land of the U'wa Indians, in the rain-forests of northern
Colombia, and profits from their expropriation and the polluting
of their tribal lands. With a half a million dollar stake
in Occidental Petroleum, Gore personally profits from the
dirty deal handed to Colombia's indigenous peoples, who have
long suffered at the hands of Bogota. The chief complaint
of the locals, aside from the outright theft of U'wa lands,
seems to be that the pipeline has attracted the guerrillas
and greatly increased the level of violence in a region that
had been relatively free of it. Since Occidental took over
the neighborhood there have been well over 600 guerrilla attacks,
with the U'wa caught in the crossfire. Pushed onto a reservation,
and stripped of most of their ancestral lands by government
fiat, the U'wa caught the attention of the world when they
threatened to protest this aspect of "globalization" in the
only way they could: by threatening to commit collective suicide.
WOULD
AN ALPHA MALE HIDE BEHIND MOMMA'S SKIRTS
The
U'wa – who lead a pastoral existence of just the sort
that the rad-libs of today hold up as a moral ideal –
caught the imagination of a whole cadre of crunch-granola
sympathizers in this country, and they have been dogging
the Gore campaign at every turn, loudly protesting Gore's
complicity with the destruction of a people in order to fatten
his own bank account. More importantly, they are calling attention
to the fact that Ray Irani, the Occidental chief executive,
made a donation of $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee
in the early 90s following a stay in the Lincoln Room of the
White House. The Gore camp claims that the income from the
Occidental assets goes to his mother, but this hardly makes
it morally palatable: does he want to make his own mother
morally responsible for the death of a people? Furthermore,
if the financial interests of the Gore family are so inextricably
intertwined with maintaining "stability" in Colombia, how
can he separate these interests from the national interest
when it comes to deciding if and when to directly intervene
in Colombia? The day of decision is coming, and quickly. The
question is: do we want Al Gore making it?
IS
HE READY FOR PRIME TIME? ARE WE?
While
the danger from McCain is that he would have gotten us into
a war in the name of "honor," albeit misguided and distorted
beyond all recognition, President Gore will get us into a
war out of sheer greed and vainglory – or even in pursuit
of prime time. This is typically Clintonian, but no doubt
as we get to know Al Gore he will reveal his own peculiar
style of moral nihilism, his own sense of how to embody the
very worst aspects of our rotten culture. Let's hope, however,
that we don't have to get to know him too well.
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