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HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.

September 07, 2000

Lieberman's Sermonizing

The God Squad

by Alexander Cockburn And Jeffrey St. Clair

of our citizens, including atheistic Americans, should be made to feel outside of the electoral or political process." B’nai B’rith, the parent group of the ADL, hastily dissociated itself from Berkowitz and Foxman.

Gore, himself Born Again some years ago along with Tipper, found no reason to chide Lieberman. Indeed the Democratic presidential candidate has a unappetizing streak of sermonizing religiosity in his own character. Gore strenuously supported Tipper’s repellent campaign in the mid-Eighties to censor music and to persuade the recording industry to blacklist certain groups. Once again liberal groups have remained mute on Gore’s record.

In Detroit this week Lieberman said to workers "If you see men and women as created in the image of God, then you will not treat them as extensions of machines, as pure things to take advantage of, and that is what the labor movement is about, justice to people, fairness to people."

Note the senator’s vagueness. Why not a few words about labor and the WTO? Labor and the flight of jobs overseas? Politicians to talk about God and morality as a way to avoid confronting truly unmentionable topics in this election, like trade or who’s getting richer and who isn’t. To get details on these topics you have to listen to Ralph Nader, not only the first Arab American to run for the presidency but the first in many years to spare us sermons about morality and God.

Bush Campaign Finally Gets Serious

In a move likely to boost his sagging status in the polls George W. Bush gave a major policy address earlier this week on the communications industry. Just before a campaign speech in Illinois, Mr Bush whispered to his running mate Dick Cheney: "There’s Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times." Mr Cheney responded, "Oh yeah, he is, big time." Bush and Cheney supposedly were ignorant that the microphone in front of them was "open", though some suspect that Bush knew perfectly well what he was doing.

Hopefully this is only the keynote for more extended criticisms of the Fourth Estate by the Texas governor. Clymer is a political correspondent for the New York Times, whose commentaries down the years have been unrelentingly drab and mediocre. The last Republican candidate to lay into the press at the national level was Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s running mate. However, his labored formulations ("Nattering nabobs of negativism") lacked Bush’s pithy precision. CP

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